Historic Gainesville Incorporated

Part I
Historic Gainesville, Inc. (HGI) was founded in March 1972 for several reasons. The most immediate centered on a rezoning application submitted by Earl May. He wanted to demolish the Baxter house, at the northwest corner of N.E. 5th Ave. and 3rd Street, to build a new office building. The resulting neighborhood uproar coalesced into a determination to organize opposition to development plans that threatened the neighborhood's residential character. In the back of everyone's mind lay the fact that Santa Fe Community College's five year lease on the Hotel Thomas was nearly up, and office development zoning already overlaid the hotel land. During February and March 1972, a little digging turned up a slew of plans that if implemented would utterly destroy any hope to maintain a residential character: a convention center slated for the lower part of the neighborhood and conversion of N.E. Boulevard into a downtown loop road. There was no doubt the neighborhood had to face continuing assaults from rezoning, road, and development plans to survive the next five years. The westward development drift, not so pronounced in 1972, encouraged major city and county planning efforts to concentrate on saving and expanding the old retail center. The neighborhood needed an ongoing network that rallied people to confront the plan boards and commissions with large, noisy, feisty crowds. Before the Earl May rezoning action sounded the clarion call, the city planning board formed a subcommittee, composed of Herrick Smith and Sam Holloway, to investigate the feasibility of using historic preservation as a redevelopment tool in the downtown area. While the Northeast area was not blighted, a number of houses had fallen into disrepair or, worse, been abandoned. It was not enough to stop rezoning; the neighborhood had to rebuild and redevelop itself. The subcommittee, accompanied by Blair Reeves and Carl Feiss, sponsored a workshop on historic preservation in early March for the neighborhood. Blair Reeves, a professor of architecture at the university, had put his students to work on creating inventories of Gainesville's historic structures for several years. One of these inventories encompassed the N.E. Boulevard. Carl Feiss, who taught urban planning at the university, had done historic structure inventories for decades, including the 1932 Charleston and the Savannah inventories. He was also the executive director of the United States Conference of Mayors Special Committee on Historic Preservation and edited the committee's report, "With Heritage So Rich" (Random House, 1966), that led to passage of the first national historic preservation act. The workshop indicated that the neighborhood's bedrock desire to remain residential could best blend with a historic preservation approach. Asked what the next step should be, Carl Feiss stuck his finger up in the air and yelled, "Organize!" The neighborhood clapped its approval, set to work, and by March 12 held the first HGI meeting at Ben Pickard's house. A second reason, then, for forming HGI was to cast a critical eye on the neighborhood itself to encourage landlords and homeowners to clean it up. A third reason for organizing HGI, one that I think is ultimately most important, united the city and the neighborhood into a planning team. The city needed volunteers to do the groundwork for mounting a historic preservation effort: inventories, developing nominations for individual buildings or districts, researching the history of structures and neighborhoods, describing the architectural elements, and investigating local historic preservation ordinances already in place around the country. Eventually, hundreds of people contributed to write the 1978 federal nomination for the Northeast Residential Historic District, as well as a county-wide historic structure inventory. HGI sponsored out of town speakers to lecture on historic preservation experiences, both good and bad, in other cities and turned this information over to the city and county planning staffs. Out of the research effort the residents became more than a feisty crowd; they became contributors to a city and county effort that enjoyed broad community support. Historic preservation, however, was not a perfect tool for what the neighborhood wanted. While it certainly worked for preservation of structures, it did not necessarily promote the preservation of the structures' original use. As long as a plan retained important design elements, historic preservation didn't stipulate use: rehabilitating a historic house into a law office was OK. The Hotel Thomas, for instance, became the Thomas Center, a city office building and cultural center. Thus, HGI, as a neighborhood group, found itself in an ironic position. It advocated historic preservation but it also advocated something more, the maintenance of the original residential use in certain areas. HGI exists to explain the tension between these occasionally contradictory goals. HGI evolved. Its primary purpose emphasizes historic preservation throughout the county; indeed, its broader vision required its original neighborhood to found another organization, the Northeast Duckpond Neighborhood Association, to address local concerns. It supports the Spring Pilgrimage and Christmas on the Boulevard; both encouraged people to come into the historic neighborhoods and build bonds between people living in the historic districts. HGI can celebrate its success now and encourage display of the extraordinary progress made by historic districts. Like Russian nesting dolls, all the reasons for HGI's existence remain. Cities and neighborhoods are alive and, therefore, change, and change means both opportunity and threat. HGI continues as an organization to promote historic preservation, build and rebuild community consensus to save and use our historic resources, contribute research to the planning effort, and contribute to or organize events so that people can enjoy what they have saved. The reasons for HGI's existence are perpetual.
 

Built as the Hotel Thomas, the centerpiece of today's Northeast Residential Historic District was sold in 1968 to Myrl J. Hanes, R.A. Hanes, and John M. Steadham. The property had been zoned for residential/professional development, and the time seemed proper to raze the structure to make way for a new office building complex. Downtown redevelopment had become an important issue, and the 6.2 acres had good investment possibilities. The new owners leased the property to Santa Fe Community College for five years. The college was planning a new campus in the northwest, but in the interim it desperately needed expansion space. Thus, the building, with its once proud interior furnishings stripped out and auctioned off, became the college's East Campus. On its grounds, the Santa Fe Spring Arts Festival was born in 1970. Eventually the college's lease was extended to seven years. Since the owners thought the hotel would be demolished, its buildings saw hard use and little maintenance during those seven years. The neighborhood surrounding the property had also suffered from suburban sprawl. Many of the larger houses had been subdivided into apartments or rooms and, like the Hotel Thomas, looked their age. Indeed, a late 1960s study undertaken by consultants to the City of Gainesville recommended razing the entire area to provide for new housing and a convention center site. Some residents of the locale became increasingly concerned about the potential impact of the hotel's redevelopment upon the quality of life in the peaceful old neighborhood. Early in 1972, John B. Pickard and Sam Mace circulated a petition requesting that the city rezone the campus for lower density, residential use. While this rezoning request did not succeed, it awakened the area to a problem. Once again, in February 1972, the neighborhood was threatened by a rezoning request which, had it passed, would have changed the neighborhood's characteristics. This time, the residents organized, creating a not-for-profit corporation, hoping both to defeat the proposal and to enhance the possibilities for long-term protection of neighborhood amenities. They called the new corporation Historic Gainesville, Inc. (HGI), when they determined an historic preservation program could become a redevelopment technique. The extended lease on the Hotel Thomas provided some breathing space, but since the new community college campus was well under way, it was unlikely that the lease would be extended again. Early in 1973, the owners let it be known that they were interested in selling the property. Although many of the Santa Fe College faculty had banded together to push for continued use of the East Campus, the college administration considered the concept impractical. When this movement collapsed, Sara Drylie and Sam Gowan, then President of HGI, proposed to the HGI Board of Directors that the corporation obtain an option to purchase the property. The Board approved the proposal, established a "Thomas Committee," and set about to "save" the hotel. Working through M.M. Parrish Real Estate office, HGI negotiated and signed an option for the hotel on April 30, 1973, paying $300 for the option, which ran for 340 days and stipulated a purchase price of $318,000 net. Before signing the option, HGI had hired three University of Florida students, Brian P. Bowman, Richard C. Crisson, and Philip A. Werndli to prepare the forms required to nominate the site to the National Register of Historic Places. The nomination moved through the various state and federal offices in record time, and the site was listed on the register July 16, 1973. Registration enormously enhanced the possibilities for federal aid to the project. At the time, the restoration of the Hotel Thomas was the first major historic preservation project for Gainesville or Alachua County, but information from other areas in the country pointed out that a feasibility study was essential. John D. Milner, president of National Heritage Corporation, had visited Gainesville in early May, looked at the hotel and grounds, and expressed an interest in undertaking the study, for an estimated cost of $30,000. HGI approached the Alachua County Bicentennial Committee and recommended that the project be named a "Bicentennial Project." The local Bicentennial committee approved the recommendation, and when the American Revolutionary Bicentennial Commission in Washington made in planning money available to the state, the local Bicentennial committee applied for a $15,000 grant to underwrite one-half of the feasibility study's cost. The grant was awarded on September 29, 1973, and Vincent Gabianelli was appointed project director. The Gainesville City Commissioners voted to match one-fourth of the study's cost immediately. But Howard Weston, then-County Manager, refused to recommend that the Alachua County Commission match the grant until a preliminary feasibility study was undertaken. HGI hired Richard D. Tarbox, a local planning consultant, to undertake the preliminary study, the "Tarbox Report," submitted to HGI on November 14, 1973, for the "Programming and Feasibility Study for the Preservation of the Hotel Thomas." Initially, HGI hoped to finance the project itself by converting the hotel wing into offices and opening a restaurant in part of the residence. The delayed feasibility study, which would take 100 days, wiped out this hope. The finished study was presented on March 15, 1974. Gladstone Associates, Economic Consultants, who had undertaken the economic portion of the feasibility study, and National Heritage Corporation found that the building was definitely savable but that it was not practical for HGI to undertake the project unless substantial start-up funds could be obtained. Since the option expired April 5, 1974, giving HGI only two and one-half weeks to raise at least $700,000, HGI appealed to the City Commission on March 25, 1974, for assistance. The appeal outlined the various grant opportunities available to HGI and the City, the possibility of a much needed area history museum to be housed in the old hotel, and the interest of the Junior League in developing such a museum. According to the HGI report, the rest of the Thomas house could "be made available to non-profit organizations which had been so long without any community center." The report noted that the hotel wing could provide 20,000 square feet of office space at a reasonable cost, and ended with a request that the City provide funds to carry the initial rehabilitation cost by lending the money to HGI or by adopting the hotel's rehabilitation as a City project. The City Commission referred the request to its public works subcommittee. James G. Richardson and William S. Talbot, then the two members of the subcommittee, discussed with B. Harold Farmer, then the City Manager, whether the City could utilize the office space. Fortunately for the project, the City had long since outgrown its 1966 City Hall, and the purchase would allow the consolidation of offices then spread throughout the area. The practical aspects, as well as the historic preservation aspects which the city had long supported, convinced the subcommittee, and they voted to recommend the purchase to the full Commission. The following Monday night, April 1, 1974, undeterred by calls for more study, the City Commission voted to buy the property. However, before the purchase could be completed, an appraisal for the property had to be made. Don Emerson did the appraisal and reported that the land alone was worth in excess of $350,000. One day before the option expired, on April 4, 1974, HGI donated its option to the city, which then purchased the property for $316,202.15, using revenue sharing funds. At the time, it was the largest use of revenue sharing funds for an historic preservation project in the nation's history. The City appointed a "Hotel Thomas ad hoc Committee" to recommend new uses, and this citizens' committee quickly advised that the hotel wing be converted into "general governmental office space." With rehabilitation designs provided by Architectural Designs Associates, Gainesville, the work soon got started. The committee continued to consider various uses for the house portion, but an increasingly deep recession and subsequent budget cutbacks indicated the house restoration might be long delayed. Dent McGough, the City's Grant Coordinator, succeeded in obtaining two grants from the Department of Interior's chronically underfunded historic preservation program; but, although the grants were among the largest funded in the state, they represented no more than 2% of the total budget required. The committee recommended that the second grant be used to stabilize and seal the building. Community interest in the project had been whetted by a "Hotel Thomas Museum Workshop," held February 11-13, 1975, and sponsored by the Community Museum Program of the National American Studies Faculty and coordinated by the Gainesville Junior League. Even more interest was generated by the first "Spring Pilgrimage" held in the old northeast section, on March 8, 1975. This cooperative effort of the Gainesville Garden Club, the Gainesville Women's Club, and HGI, was centered at the Hotel Thomas. Its specific purpose was to raise money for the restoration, but later in the year the Spring Pilgrimage Board elected to establish the "William Reuben Thomas Endowment Fund." Mrs. William Wade Hampton III, Mrs. Frank S. Maloney, and Mrs. Charles Ross, the cochairpersons, in a letter to the city, restricted the fund's income to expenditures used "to underwrite educational and beautification projects at the [Thomas Center]." The battered house, perked up for the event by massive decorations hiding the crumbling plaster and water damage, desperately needed this kind of help. Another year and one half went by without hope for funding the house restoration. The hotel wing, however, was successfully renovated. Early White, the overall supervisor of this project for the prime contractor, M.M. Parrish Construction, had won the "Craftsman of the Year" award from the Florida Association of the American Institute of Architects. He said, "I wouldn't mind going back to do Building A (the house)" and, fortunately, he got his wish. Dent McGough had prepared an application for a "Public Works Grant" and submitted it to the Department of Commerce's Economic Development Agency. Based on unemployment and a variety of formulas, Gainesville qualified for the $3 million grant, and part of the grant, a little more than $1.2 million, was budgeted for the Hotel Thomas Restoration, Phase II. The Thomas Center ad hoc Committee, as it was now called, recommended the City accept this no-match-required grant and submitted its final report on January 31, 1977. The restoration was at last completed, again with designs provided by McKellips & Tuckerman, the successor firm to ADA, and with M.M. Parrish Construction as prime contractor. On February 10, 1979, the house was dedicated as the home for the City of Gainesville Division of Cultural Affairs. The Thomas Center is meant to foster a sense of place, to express and define the community's heritage and goals. It now sits, surrounded by its gardens in the midst of the City's Northeast Residential Historic District, as a fine old house with a new use. It is faithful to Major Thomas' ideals, for it rededicates Gainesville's cherished tradition that a seat of learning must also be a place of beauty and grace.

This history was reprinted from the HGI quarterly newsletter, _Preservation in Progress_