On March 27, the internationally renowned Loray Mill in Gastonia was sold by Preservation North Carolina to Loray Mill Redevelopment, LLC, a development partnership, for historic renovation, the culmination of more than two decades of efforts to save the mill from demolition. Work will begin immediately on a $39 million certified historic rehabilitation of the mill, the site of a famous 1929 labor strike.

The preservation of the mill involved years of cooperation, negotiation and planning between Firestone Fibers and Textiles Company, LLC (the previous owner, donor and neighbor), Preservation North Carolina (the current owner), the development team, the City of Gastonia, Gaston County, and several extremely dedicated local preservationists. Firestone Fibers and Textiles, a subsidiary of Bridgestone Americas, Inc., donated the structure and surrounding property to Preservation North Carolina in 1998.

Once the world's largest textile mill under one roof, containing a staggering 600,000 square feet, Firestone bought the plant in the 1930s and ran it as a textile mill until closing it in 1993, when it relocated its cord manufacturing operations to a facility in Kings Mountain. Recognizing the mill's significance as a North Carolina landmark, Firestone donated the building and surrounding property to Preservation North Carolina in 1998, with the intent that it be redeveloped for beneficial use. This week, Firestone donated an additional 2.39 acres to the project to serve as a buffer zone.

The development of the massive, six-story mill has required a great deal of perseverance and vision. There were a series of false starts, but in 2003, the development partners expressed interest in the mill. In 2008, they had secured tentative financing when the economic crisis hit, and all plans came to a halt. The development team continued to seek financing for the project and last year obtained a commitment from HUD for an FHA loan guarantee. More than $20 million dollars in private equity will be leveraged by historic rehabilitation tax credits.

The rehabbed mill will contain market rate lofts, commercial office space, and amenities for tenants including a gym, pool and storage units. There are also plans for a restaurant and a permanent exhibit focusing on the history of the mill.

This project will be the catalyst for major revitalization for West Gastonia, an area that has seemed neglected to many locals since the mill closed twenty years ago. The Loray Mill National Register Historic District, which includes about 350 homes, will benefit from the development of the mill, as will other neighborhoods along the West Franklin Boulevard Corridor. Historic rehabilitation tax credits will be available for renovation in the Loray Mill Village.

The deal comes on the heels of nearly $13 million in two other historic preservation projects in Gastonia sold in 2012 by Preservation North Carolina: the 1920s Armstrong Apartments and the old Highland Memorial Hospital. Preservation North Carolina will hold a preservation celebration celebrating the three deals at the Conference Center in Gastonia on Sunday, April 28. To learn more about that event, or to purchase tickets or become a sponsor, please click here.  

Click here to read an article about the sale that appeared in The Gaston Gazette.

Raleigh, N.C. - A Senate committee on Thursday morning advanced legislation that would void Raleigh's lease of the Dorothea Dix site.

Under the terms of a 99-year lease signed in December by Raleigh Mayor Nancy McFarlane and former Gov. Beverly Perdue, the city would pay $500,000 a year - plus annual escalators - for the 325-acre site of a former mental hospital, allowing officials to convert into it into a major urban park.

Republican lawmakers criticized the deal, which they said didn't provide the state with a fair return. They also said it would end up costing taxpayers money because state Department of Health and Human Services offices at the site would have to be moved.

"This was a lame-duck deal done by a lame-duck governor," said Sen. Tommy Tucker, R-Union, one of the sponsors of Senate Bill 334.

The bill, and companion legislation in the House, called for the lease to be renegotiated at a fair-market price, with the proceeds designated for mental health programs. Also, DHHS would be allowed to maintain its offices on part of the site.

Co-sponsors Rep. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, and Rep. Louis Pate, R-Wayne, said the Dix land was given to the state in the mid-1800s for the benefit of the mentally ill, and the state needs to stick to that goal.

"We won't go into a lease that violates state law," Hise said. "The obligation for the state is to provide mental health benefits."

Sen. Dan Blue, D-Wake, said state officials decided several years ago when they built Central Regional Hospital in Butner to abandon the Dix site as far as mental health treatment was concerned.

Blue also noted that the state transferred part of the original Dix site to North Carolina State University almost 30 years ago for what has become its Centennial Campus. The success of that venture points to what Raleigh could do with the rest of the Dix land as it's developed into a "destination park," he said.

(WRAL, 3/21/13)

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RALEIGH - Republican legislators want to scrap a lease between the state and the City of Raleigh that would allow the city to build a major urban park on the coveted 325-acre property where the shuttered Dorothea Dix psychiatric hospital stands.

Identical House and Senate bills filed Thursday would tear up the agreement Raleigh officials and former Gov. Bev Perdue reached late last year. Under the bills, Raleigh would be able to lease a smaller portion of the land at "fair market value." The bills do not specify the acreage that would be leased.

Park supporters were quick to express disappointment, while Democrats said it's unfair for the state to break a contract.

But Republicans said they were seeking a better deal for taxpayers.

Senate leader Phil Berger, R-Eden, said the lease, which has the city paying as much as $68 million over 75 years, is a bad deal for state taxpayers and people with mental illnesses. The state's appraisal in 2011, which didn't assume that the land would be turned into a park, valued the property at somewhere between $58 million and $86 million.

GOP legislators failed last year to persuade Perdue and city leaders to put off the agreement until Republican Gov. Pat McCrory took office.

The bills call for the state to re-evaluate the use of the Dix land, allow the city to lease a portion of the property, and use the lease money for mental health purposes.

"The legacy of the Dix land was really so tied to services for the mentally ill, and that's something that was ignored - has been ignored - in the transaction that Gov. Perdue entered into with the City of Raleigh," Berger said.

The legislation would address three important issues, he said, by giving Raleigh the chance to lease some of the property, considering fair market value when pricing the land, and preserving the legacy of the property for care of the mentally ill.

(Raleigh News & Observer, 3/14/13)

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A 1950 modernist home that once drew praise from architect Frank Lloyd Wright was demolished Friday, following an eight-year effort to save it.

The Paschal House, located on a nearly three-acre lot off Glenwood Avenue, was on the National Register of Historic Places but has been vacant since 2007. The children of the original owner plan to divide the lot for five new homes - a move that has angered preservation groups that say the house still had a chance at restoration.

"It's really sad, because it really should not have been torn down," said Myrick Howard, president of Preservation North Carolina. "It was an act of vandalism."

Howard said his group wasn't told about the demolition; it had just met Friday morning with architects from Triangle Modernist Houses on a new plan for the property. The group hoped to seek a Raleigh Historic Landmark designation, which would have stalled the wrecking ball.

"We really were trying to make it work where you could have built additional houses and left the historic house intact," he said, adding that the owners recently refused to show the house to potential buyers.

Robert Paschal, the son of the late original owner Dr. George W. Paschal Jr., said the family was left with no choice. They had advertised the property in national publications and wrote to architecture school deans to get the word out.

"It's been eight years and we've gotten no offers to restore the house," Paschal said. "I think we tried to take every approach to the restoration we could."

Paschal suspects the house's bathrooms, bedrooms and closets were too small by today's standards. After a renovation, he said, "the finished product would not be what people would expect for the kind of money involved."

Architect Frank Harmon, who has taken students to visit the house, said there was plenty of interest - just not at the $3.3 million asking price.

"They overvalued the land," he said.

Harmon said the demolition is a huge loss for the architecture community, pointing to its sustainable building features decades ahead of their time.

"It's a tragedy," he said. "We've lost the greatest example of residential design in the last 60 years."

The one-story hillside house is one of several remaining in the area designed by modernist architect James Fitzgibbon. The house, built with granite, wood and glass, features an atrium on each end as well as a long, flat roof. Instead of air conditioning, it had expansive windows to ventilate the house, heated floors and a sunken fireplace to provide warmth in the winter.

The home's last resident was Beth Paschal, Robert Paschal's mother, who died in 2009. Asked in 2007 about the idea of razing her longtime home, she said, "I try not to think of that."

After sitting empty for six years, Robert Paschal said the new plan for the site respects the property owners next door.

"We hope that the houses on each lot will fit in nicely with the neighborhood there," he said.

Howard, however, has a different perspective. "What will be built there will be cookie cutter McMansions," he said.

The sudden demolition shows the importance of getting protective covenants for historic properties before it's too late, he said.

"This says loud and clear, if you have a house that's historic ... you need to put some sort of protection on it," he said.

(Raleigh News & Observer, 3/1/13)

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If all goes as planned, Blake Moving Company of Greensboro will lift up a 220-year-old, 200-ton Raleigh house this year and move it 460 feet south to a new lot at the end of Hilmer Drive.

The house, built by Wake County settler Nathaniel "Crabtree" Jones, occupies part of the 15 acres that will become the Jones Grant Apartments. Last March, the Raleigh Historic Development Commission voted to have developer Russ Davis wait a year before demolishing the Crabtree Jones House, in hopes he could find an alternative. Davis, who said at the time that he didn't want to destroy the house, spent the following months working with the nonprofit group Preservation North Carolina to find a relocation site.

The Crabtree Jones House driveway comes out on Wake Forest Road, but the house is set so far back, surrounded by trees, that it's easy to miss. Even partway up the 3015 Wake Forest Road driveway, it's hard to make out the Crabtree Jones House at the top.

"So few people even know this house, with all its interiors and finishes intact, even exists," said Chuck Nitzel, a Raleigh resident, in an email to the Record. "A building that has been on its original foundations for over 200 years, longer than all but maybe five structures in Raleigh is about to be moved."

Davis said Myrick Howard of Preservation North Carolina suggested the move to Hilmer Drive.

"If it were on the site I picked, it would almost certainly lend itself to use as a commercial structure, an office perhaps," Davis said. "This will not just preserve the house, but its designation as a historic house."

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(Raleigh Public Record, 2/15/2013)

Owners of a condemned historic hotel in downtown Walnut Cove have offered to give the property to the town, but officials could not agree Tuesday night whether to accept it.

The town commissioners engaged in a lengthy and sometimes heated debate Tuesday about the future of the historic Dodson Hotel site, with Town Commissioner Sharon Conaway urging them to get more information on the property before agreeing to accept ownership. In the end, the board agreed to table the proposal until more information could be gathered.

Owners Marianne and Robert Northington have offered to "donate" the property at the corner of Second and Main streets to the town of Walnut Cove, Town Manager Byron Ellis reported to the board. They have delivered an executed warranty deed granting the property to the town.

"Nothing's gonna be free, though," Mayor Lynn Lewis noted. "We will have to tear it down."

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(Stokes News, 2/7/2013)

Raleigh -- It's great news that Dix Hill has been transferred to the City of Raleigh. This remarkable historic place will now continue to be a tremendous asset for North Carolinians for another century. Bravo!

Now it's time to dig in and consider how to make Dix Hill work as a park.

Many of the great parks from the 19th century were developed on vacant land, and buildings were then built around them. A century later, they are now treasured places largely because of the buildings and activities that frame them.

Dix Hill is not vacant land. Listed long ago as a National Register historic district, the property is reminiscent of a college campus. More than 50 buildings, many dating back more than a century, have been determined to be historic, with about as much square footage as the two tallest skyscrapers in downtown Raleigh combined.

Rather than looking at 19th century parks as models, planners for Dix Hill should study the new 21st century parks being created on the sites of former military bases and mental hospitals.

An excellent example is the Presidio in San Francisco, a former military base. Owned by the National Park Service, the Presidio's existing buildings have been leased for private residential and commercial use. Those leases help pay for one of the most visited recreational parks in the United States. A useful guide to this 21st century park can be found at presidio.gov.

Based on this model, the historic buildings on Dix Hill offer a tremendous opportunity. They can provide revenue and activity for the park, as well as authenticity. It would be environmentally and culturally irresponsible - and fiscally foolish - to destroy them.

Instead of talking about 306 acres of parkland, we need to recognize that about one-quarter of the property is already developed, leaving about 225 acres of undeveloped landscape for recreational purposes. These two different land uses can be mutually beneficial.

For the historic buildings, we should identify private uses compatible with public recreational uses of the landscape and then find private users willing to renovate the buildings at their own expense under long-term leases. Lease terms would require renovation and maintenance under historic standards and strictly regulate the landscape. No new development, only the reuse of the existing historic fabric.

The main building at Dix was designed in the 1840s by the nation's foremost architect, A.J. Davis, who worked with Dorothea Dix herself. This architectural gem is as large as any of the tallest skyscrapers in Raleigh, and for more than a century it remained Raleigh's largest building.

This building and others on campus could be mixed-use, just like the revitalized American Tobacco complex and Golden Belt Mill in Durham. Those historic projects have attracted creative businesses, artists and residents to downtown Durham. Dix would do the same for Raleigh, while giving the park a strong historic identity. It will be walkable to downtown, the new railroad station and convention center.

The numerous historic homes on campus could once again be homes. Former dormitories could be adapted into private housing, both upscale and affordable. The chapel could again be a place for weddings, chamber music concerts and other special events. A boutique hotel would accommodate those who come to the destination park.

Residents living there would become the park's most dedicated advocates. Their presence would make the park a safer place, 24/7.

If the city leased the existing buildings for only $1 a square foot a year (a low price, but easy math) with a requirement that they be renovated at private expense, the city would receive more than $1 million annually from the lease payments, more than covering the city's rent for the entire property.

At least $250 million would then be privately invested in historic renovation, generating at least $2 million in annual property tax revenue. In the first decade alone, the city would receive $15 million to $20 million in net new revenue, and revenue would increase over time.

The historic buildings would pay for Dix Park, and the park would still have more land for recreational use than many of the parks being cited as models (such as Atlanta's Piedmont Park).

Demolition is not the answer, costing nearly $5 million, filling our landfills with unnecessary waste, reducing the city's tax base and destroying a unique historic place. And environmentally, the greenest building is the one that's already here.

The historic buildings on Dix Hill aren't in the way. They are the way to having a unique and successful 21st century destination park.

Myrick Howard is president of Preservation North Carolina and teaches at UNC-CH's Department of City and Regional Planning.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - In 1898, when Forsyth County was at the dawn of its manufacturing heyday, it was the Idols power station that made the light.

Idols, now a ruin on the Yadkin River just west of Clemmons, was the first commercial hydroelectric generating station in North Carolina to use long-distance transmission of alternating current. No less a luminary than inventor Thomas Edison was an early investor.

David Bergstone, a member of the group Preserve Historic Forsyth, wants to see Idols' historic structures preserved and its story told to generations who can scarcely imagine life without electricity. He organized a tour recently to persuade the group's board to officially take on the project.

"It's a great location because of the history of it and what it meant for the community," said Bergstone, who is the director of architecture at Old Salem Museums and Gardens.

Architect David Gall, another board member, said the Idols station shows Forsyth County at the forefront of industry modernization across the Southeast. "That site has an important story to tell," he said. "To be able to move forward, you have to have an appreciation of history."

Idols' story began with Henry Elias Fries, whose family owned several textile mills and a grain mill, among other enterprises. Fries saw the potential of electricity and formed a company, Fries Manufacturing and Power Co., to put the power of the Yadkin River to work for the community.

The Fries family "was like the Andrew Carnegie of Winston-Salem," said Catherine Hendren, who is the president of Preserve Historic Forsyth.

The station opened on April 18, 1898, with Fries' young daughter, Marguerite, there to flip the switch for the first time.

Power from the plant was an impressive 10,000 volts in 1898 and "long-distance" at the time meant 13¼ miles to Salem - the separate towns of Winston and Salem hadn't yet merged.

But the electricity from the new station would power textile and fertilizer mills, the electric railway and electric street lighting, all of which would help Winston-Salem become the largest city in the state by 1920.

The Idols station continued to generate power until a fire on Feb. 8, 1998, apparently caused by a mechanical failure in a generator.

The station's wooden wheel room, which sat above a stone structure housing the turbines, was destroyed and the brick generator room gutted. The granite dam, exterior of the generator room and brick walls of the wheel pits remain. Early 20th-century machinery such as a flume, turbines and rotor now sit in the grass at the site.

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(From the Winston-Salem Journal, 1/7/2013)

For just $29,000, you can own a two-story, century-old Victorian home just minutes from downtown Raleigh.

The catch? The historic Villa Florenza has been vacant and deteriorating since the last occupant left in 1997. Repairs could run at least $200,000, preservation experts estimate. And the neighborhood is no Oakwood. The house is a few doors down from a check cashing business in Southeast Raleigh.

City inspectors have condemned the house several times, and if it doesn't have a buyer by Dec. 31, it'll be torn down. Preservation North Carolina director J. Myrick Howard says that would be a big loss for Raleigh's history.

"It's a pretty rare survivor of the middle class African-American community from the early 20th century," Howard said. "That house would fit in perfectly in Boylan Heights, Cameron Park or Glenwood ... but at that time, we had a totally segregated residential pattern."

From The News & Observer, 12/12/12

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