All in a name
Costa Mesa is working on the SoBECA district, Irvine has long had its IBC, which I wish people would pronounce Ibeca, but let me tell you, I would just about do anything to live in a neighborhood called the Nightie Drawer.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Adobe Gets Its Day In the Sun
By LISA CHAMBERLAIN; Published: September 11, 2005
THE Southwest is rich with history, from Spanish conquistadors to cowboys, Indians, pioneers and outlaws. This community, in the southern part of New Mexico, has been at the crossroads of this history as far back as the 1500’s, and people around here like to pepper their folklore with ”if these walls could talk ”
The walls that would have the most to say are undoubtedly made of adobe, which has been used to build houses in the Southwest for more than three centuries. Long dismissed as a peasant material, adobe homes are now experiencing a revival, with the epicenter in Mesilla (pronounced meh-SEE-uh), a charming village of 2,200 people where 416 adobe structures are on the National Register of Historic Places.
Adobe, an earthen material used in hot, dry climates, is an organic mixture of mud and straw shaped into bricks — which can weigh up to 60 pounds each — and then dried in the sun. The epitome of simple engineering at its best, this cheap and abundant material is known for its ability to regulate temperatures that can fluctuate wildly in the desert climate.
It’s also known for being high maintenance, and as synthetic building materials became widely available in the Southwest, the art of building and repairing adobe homes was almost lost. But with the hot real estate market, historic adobes that have been vacant for 50 years are selling fast and furiously, and new owners are rediscovering traditional methods of restoration.
”There’s so much ugly sprawl in the Southwest, people are desperate for a beautiful piece of the earth,” said Kate Mott, a real estate agent with Coss Real Estate, which specializes in historic districts in southern New Mexico.
”Older homes close to the center of Mesilla have taken off like a shot for a couple of reasons, mostly due to location, but also developers don’t build new homes out of adobe because they say its labor intensive,” she said. ”And that’s true, the same way an oil painting is labor intensive and a poster is not.”
Ms. Mott, who lives in Mesilla and has been fixing up her own historic adobe for two years, said she recently sold a small lot with a 1,000-square-foot historic adobe that has no running water or electricity — and that will require a lot of money for stabilization — for $170,000, a high price for this area. It was on the market less than 24 hours.
Just how rapidly the historic adobe market has accelerated in Mesilla is evidenced by the Fountain House, owned in the late 1800’s by Col. Albert Jennings Fountain, a lawyer who defended Billy the Kid in one of his murder trials. It is an atypical adobe in its grand scale — about 3,200 square feet — and two-foot-thick walls. Rescued from demolition in the 1980’s, it has been continuously upgraded ever since. Its current owners, Lori Miller and Leonard Gambrell, bought it in December 2003 for $300,000 and have put another $120,000 or so into it.
”It was the last good deal in Mesilla,” Ms. Miller said.
The modern era of adobe restoration in Mesilla can be traced back to J. Paul Taylor — a pillar of the community and former member of the State Legislature with deep family roots in Mesilla. For 50 years, he has been continuously restoring his family’s adobe home on the Plaza, Mesilla’s historic town center. The house has been through many iterations since the original structure was built in the 1850’s, with each new addition reflecting the era in which it was built.
”It’s like an archeological dig when you start fixing up these old adobes,” said Mr. Taylor, who is 85 and still lives in the house with his wife, Mary. ”It’s important to save the marks that every family has left on the house.” Mr. Taylor has not only preserved the marks but will leave the house to the state to be run as a museum.
And that may not even be his most valuable legacy when it comes to adobe restoration. His son Pat is a contractor and is regarded throughout the Southwest as the foremost expert on adobe restoration. He estimates having been involved in saving at least two dozen adobes in Mesilla, and many more outside of the area through a nonprofit organization called Cornerstones Community Partnerships ( www.cstones.org), which holds workshops from Texas to Colorado teaching people how to stabilize and restore historic adobe structures.
According to Pat Taylor, adobes have been crumbling for the last 70 years because of repairs using cement rather than organic plasters. Adobes are like living organisms that need to breathe to allow the moisture they absorb to escape. Cement plastering locks the moisture in and worsens ”capillary action,” by which the adobe walls wick moisture up from the ground. Without a way to escape, the moisture keeps climbing ever higher inside the walls, eventually weakening the entire structure. Teaching people how to use natural materials is crucial to saving old adobes.
Mr. Taylor said the work on his parents’ house had influenced and taught him. ”And as I learned traditional methods, over time, we kept finding people who had questions about how to save their crumbling adobes,” he said.
Despite having much experience restoring adobes, two people with a lot of questions are Gregg Henry and his business partner, Eric Liefeld. They recently bought two of the oldest structures in Mesilla just a block off the Plaza. One of the houses hasn’t been occupied since 1954 and has neither electricity nor running water. The other house was occupied more recently but has endured a number of damaging ”repairs.”
”A lot of people think we’ve bought a pig in a poke,” Mr. Liefeld said, ”but we expect to have made a good investment.”
As they gave a tour of the unreconstructed adobes and were asked questions about how they would approach problems, Mr. Henry responded more than once with a laugh and the comment: ”We’re going to ask Pat.”
The two business partners met when Mr. Henry, a contractor who has worked on the Fountain House off and on for more than 20 years, put a historic adobe that he lived in and worked on for more than five years up for sale. Mr. Liefeld and his wife, Trina Witter, neither of whom had ever worked on a historic adobe before, bought the house and have since built a two-room addition using old-fashioned adobe techniques.
The roof, for instance, was constructed from traditional materials that they rescued from demolished adobes: vigas (cottonwood tree trunks), latillas (smaller branches made of pine or cedar) and tules (sticks about the size of fireplace kindling). An adobe roof is built in layers, often in a herringbone pattern, and topped off with a thick layer of dirt (although Mr. Liefeld and Ms. Witter opted to top off their addition with a layer of adobe instead).
They estimate spending about $100 a square foot on the 1,200-square-foot addition, which would have cost closer to $200 had they not done much of the work themselves. ”We had my mom out there scrubbing old latillas,” Ms. Witter said.
”The attitude that adobes are for poor people is changing,” Ms. Witter continued. ”An increasing number of people are recognizing the unique beauty of this architecture.”
Correction: September 18, 2005, Sunday A National Perspectives article last Sunday about adobe houses in Mesilla, N.M., misstated the registration of 416 historic buildings there. They are registered with the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division, not the National Register of Historic Places. The article also misidentified the previous owner of the Fountain House, a large adobe there. It was owned by Albert Jennings Fountain, not his grandfather Col. Albert Jennings Fountain.
Correction: September 18, 2005, Sunday A National Perspectives article last Sunday about adobe houses in Mesilla, N.M., misstated the registration of 416 historic buildings there. They are registered with the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division, not the National Register of Historic Places. The article also misidentified the previous owner of the Fountain House, a large adobe there. It was owned by Albert Jennings Fountain, not his grandfather Col. Albert Jennings Fountain.
Sunday, September 4, 2005
Restoring the Legacy of a Historic Chicago Neighborhood
Chicago Historical Society
Exclusive in the 1890’s, Prairie Avenue is being revived with condo projects and renovated mansions.
By ROBERT SHAROFF; Published: September 4, 2005, CHICAGO
ABOUT 110 years ago, Prairie Avenue was one of the most storied and exclusive addresses in this city. Indeed, a guidebook published around the time of the 1893 World’s Fair described it as “the most expensive street in America west of Fifth Avenue.”
And not surprisingly, some parts of it were even more exclusive than others.
“On this point my mother was adamant,” wrote the popular novelist (and meatpacking scion) Arthur Meeker in a memoir published in 1955 about growing up in one of the dozens of palatial mansions that once lined the street. “Although it was one of the longest arteries in the city, she always maintained that only the first six blocks, from 16th to 22nd Street, comprised ‘the sunny street that held the sifted few.’ “
In Mr. Meeker’s day, the “sifted few” included legendary Chicago moguls like the department store baron Marshall Field; George Pullman, manufacturer of the Pullman sleeping car; and the meatpacking magnate Philip Armour.
Probably the most celebrated residence was Glessner House, a fortresslike mansion designed by the noted architect Henry Hobson Richardson for John J. Glessner, one of the founders of the International Harvester Company. The house, the object of a major preservationist battle in the 1960’s, is now a museum.
The street - which is about a quarter mile south of the Loop and two streets in from Lake Shore Drive - reached its apogee in the 1890’s and then began a century-long decline because of the noise and dirt from nearby railroad tracks and the simultaneous development of the Gold Coast on the city’s north side.
“It’s interesting how quickly it fell out of favor,” said Tim Samuelson, the city’s cultural historian. “The children of the older families didn’t want to live there, and neither did the new wealthy families. By 1910, many of the houses had been converted to rooming houses or factories.”
By the early 1970’s, most of the houses had been leveled and replaced by factories and parking lots.
Then, in the late-1990’s, in the midst of the downtown housing boom that has transformed many neighborhoods, the somnolent street revived. In the last decade, most of the factories have either been demolished or converted to loft condominiums.
In their place, half a dozen condo projects have been erected. In addition, the seven remaining mansions have been renovated or are in the process of being renovated into cultural, commercial and living spaces.
“The area’s really filling in nicely,” said James Kinney, president of Rubloff Residential Properties, a large downtown brokerage firm.
Prices are climbing. “This year, for the first time, there were more million-plus contracts south of the river than north of the river,” he said. (The Chicago River, which forms the northern boundary of the Loop, is the traditional dividing line between the city’s north and south sides.)
To a degree that is somewhat unusual, given how little of the original street survives, the area’s history as a premier silk stocking district continues to exert a strong pull on developers, architects and residents.
“The history was half of it for me,” said Joe Quiroz, a mortgage broker who recently bought a 6,000-square-foot row house in the Commonwealth, a new condominium project just south of 18th Street. “I have a lot of books on the history of Chicago and the people who used to live on Prairie Avenue,” he said.
The other half, he added, was financial. “To get the same square footage on the Gold Coast,” he said, “I would have to pay almost twice as much.”
Oscar Tatosian, an Oriental rug importer who recently bought the historic Reid mansion down the street, says the neighborhood has a lot going for it. “When I started looking to buy,” he said, “I made a list of priorities. I wanted something that was historic and architecturally interesting and also something that had reasonable parking, highway access and no or low assessments. I found all of that here.”
Two current projects - which are adjacent to each other on the block south of 18th Street - demonstrate this attraction in different but compelling ways.
The first is the renovation of the historic Marshall Field Jr. mansion into six luxury condominiums. The second is the Commonwealth, which consists of 17 row houses done in a variety of styles that emulate - right down to the mansard roofs and copper bay windows - what was there a century ago.
The Field mansion has a rather notorious past. In 1905, Marshall Field Jr., son of Marshall Field, died there from a mysterious gunshot wound. One widely believed story is that he was actually shot at the Everleigh Club, a noted brothel, and transported back to the house, where he subsequently expired.
The house became a sanitarium for alcoholics in the early 1900’s and was more or less empty for many years until it was bought three years ago by the developers Robert Burk and Robert Kuker.
Dating from the 1880’s and including a 24,000-square-foot Romanesque mansion plus a 6,000-square-foot coach house, the house was in ruins.
“Structurally, there wasn’t much left,” Mr. Burk said. “The roof had failed, the floor joists were all rotted out and a three-story bay had collapsed and fallen off the house. It was in a lot worse shape than I ever envisioned.”
Since then, the team has restored the exterior and reconfigured the interior to accommodate six condos ranging in size from 2,200 square feet to 4,700 square feet. Prices range from $870,000 to about $2 million.
The Commonwealth, which was developed by the Rezmar Development Group of Chicago, brings the street full circle. The project broke ground two and a half years ago, and the first residents moved in last spring. All the units, which range from $1 million to $2.5 million, have been spoken for.
“The buildings have a very proud quality as a result of the detailing,” said George Pappageorge, a principal with Pappageorge/Haymes, the architecture firm that designed the project.
Mr. Quiroz, the mortgage broker, is planning to move in with his family this fall. “I’m excited,” he said. “We put about $650,000 worth of upgrades into it. It’s really going to be a showplace.”
