Category Archives: Historic Preservation

Donjek Project: Historic Hudson Manufacturing Building Reuse

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Visual rendering of a revitalized Hudson Manufacturing Building. Image: Stark Preservation Planning and Peter Musty.

I’m currently in the process of concluding work with a historic reuse team focused on next steps for the H.D. Hudson Manufacturing Building in Hastings, Minnesota. The City-owned Hudson Building is of substantial size, and offers open floor plans and high ceilings – a blank, solid canvas. The Hudson was featured as a “hot property” recently in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

From a finance perspective, the chief hurdle for historic reuse is reconciling long-term lease rates or purchase prices, with a rehabilitation investment that may include remediation, demolition, site costs, and a collection of items that can petrify typical investors: HVAC, roofs, stormwater management, vertical circulation, accessibility improvements. My role on the team, led by Will Stark of Stark Preservation Planning, has been to:

  • Evaluate and quantify the long-term financial gap between the value of the building’s net income and its required investment
  • Identify funding sources and mechanisms that private and public parties could employ to make reuse of the building feasible in a financial sense
  • Inform scenarios for the City’s next steps with the building, with financial analysis. Cost, speed, and scale of reuse each impact the financial outlook for its future
  • Narrate findings related to the downtown marketplace and project finance, to citizens, the City Council, and other stakeholders.

Historic structures offer uncommon attributes for the very reason that their construction occurred in a different marketplace. In the late 1800s when the Hudson Company put up the Hastings facility, materials including stone and lumber were available at lower real cost than today. The proximity of the building to the Mississippi River distinguishes the building regionally, in part because regulations have evolved to protect the river from development impacts. The reuse or demolition of the structure will, either way, continue to influence the health of downtown Hastings.

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The Medium is the Message, or Parks as Performance

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IMG00020-20110812-0852 Last night I enjoyed seeing good friend, a professional musician, perform with two bandmates. As at times in the past, I was struck by the generative power of a talented, experienced performance artist. At one moment, there are three people on a stage, poised to play. The next moment, they create something that establishes a connection not only among the producers, but among the audience, and between the two groups.

Given that a primary filter of mine is that of placemaking, I wondered what this shared musical experience means for our work in urban design and redevelopment. Current Donjek projects include an initiative on urban open space, focused on building links between residents and workers to a major riverway and to the green space itself. An (implicit) goal is connecting people to each other using open space as the medium, to create a distinct experience. Another current engagement relates to exploring reuse of a historic industrial building; a substantial element of the community’s preservation interest is to use the structure to connect people today to yesterday’s residents and the heritage of the place. In each case, physical design acts as a language that allows us to relate to others.

Music and other performances can trigger a powerful connection among us. Our places can become more vital and durable if we build and preserve them with connection in mind. 

@Strib Forum: New Recommendations for Fort Snelling Reuse

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VoicesSMAs I mentioned previously, I have participated as one of seventeen writers in a new project created by the Star Tribune. The forum, Your Voices, features commentary by artists, advocates, entrepreneurs. Today, I posted a story describing prospects for reuse of historic structures at Minnesota's 160-acre Fort Snelling complex. A Joint Agency Task Force has been meeting since last year to develop concrete recommendations for how to complement and connect activities at the Historic Fort and the substantial recreational assets widely used there, including athletic fields and the State Park. A long story made short: State policy must be changed to allow private parties with reuse ideas and capital to engage in the reuse of dozens of underutilized buildings on the site. Failure to establish such a process will likely lead to the structural demise of buildings located at a strategic hub of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area.

Stay tuned for discussion of task force recommendations.

Donjek Project: Renovation of Little Rock’s MacArthur Park

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Street_section
Readers will find continuity in another brief comment on parks:  The Cents of Place blog has touched on the economic value of parks and the multiple layers of significance in a space like Rice Park in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota.

Donjek has been retained to assist in the implementation analysis for MacArthur Park in Little Rock, Arkansas.  In our office, implementation means raising the capital and operating funds required to renovate and operate quality open space into the future.  Partners, which have moved the project for the last twelve months, include lead consultants Conway + Schulte, as well as Oslund and Associates, each of Minneapolis, and the University of Arkansas Design Center and McClelland Engineers of Little Rock and Fayetteville, Arkansas.

MacArthur Park represents an urban open space with significant historic elements and a physical location close to commercial and academic assets, but challenged by the close proximity of two interstate highways in Little Rock.  Over the coming weeks, we will be examining public and private funding mechanisms and their application to MacArthur Park and the realization of community objectives for the space.  

Graphic:  Courtesy of Conway + Schulte

Revelations in Milwaukee: Historic Reuse, Natural-Lit Parking and Free Parking

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I’ve returned from a recent junket to fair Milwaukee. I hadn’t been to Milwaukee
in fifteen years, and parts of the city have changed dramatically since
then. Two examples and a policy
observation:

• I noticed on my tour of the lakeshore, the vital reuse of
the Milwaukee River Flushing Station (pictured). Alterra Coffee (in combination with the
Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District and Milwaukee County)
rehabilitated the station, which was built in 1888 to flush sewage harbored in
the river into Lake Michigan. Does this strike you as an ironic piece of
infrastructure to reuse as a coffee shop?

In fact, it works conspicuously well. The building remains owned by the sewerage
district (“MMSD”), and the county owns all land from the periphery of the
building to the edge of the site. The physical
structure is aligned with its new mission: Pervious pavement and water filtration systems are narrated on displays constructed
by the county’s parks department. The
building’s lakeshore location is not surprisingly home to a brisk business
moving excellent food and coffee; Alterra also sponsors a music series with
wares ranging from opera to Latin American.

Special thanks to Bill Robison, Principal at Engberg Anderson,
an architecture firm with offices in Milwaukee, Madison and Tucson. As the lead architect on this reuse project,
Bill partnered with Alterra, MMSD and the county, and generously responded to
my recent cold inquiry about its development.

• Milwaukee Art Museum’s
renovation and expansion includes dramatic architecture and serves the need for
a much-enhanced connection between downtown and Lake
Michigan. Of course, as
principal of a public finance and transportation consulting firm, I was most
drawn to the Milwaukee_parking
underground parking garage lit with skylights (also pictured). Facilities Director Charles Loomis explained
that sensors evaluate the quality of light admitted through the skylights and
adjust the use of lighting to supplement, creating significant (but to date unquantified)
energy cost savings to the museum.  And to preempt your question before you read below, museum parking is not free.

• A recent post at Urban
Milwaukee cited SBT and Colliers data showing the median metered hourly
parking rate in downtown Milwaukee is $0.63, versus a national average of $1.48. Author Jeramey Jannene suggests an oversupply of metered parking
downtown has suppressed redevelopment efforts: The zoning code requires structured
parking in site plans, which represents a mandate to lose money in an
environment with an oversupply of cheap on-street parking.

In St. Paul,
a very different discussion is taking place regarding the anticipated loss of
roughly 85% of on-street parking on University Avenue as light rail transit is added to the
street’s modes. At the same time, the
Metropolitan Council has indicated their wish to discourage the building of
structured parking just off the avenue in order to avoid the avenue’s use as a
park-and-ride. Arguably, the main impact
of this move is to drive up land values and favor those who control larger
parcels near University. It also highlights
the importance of the type of transportation consulting that Donjek’s Dan Walsh
can provide, including analysis and negotiation for structured parking, shared
parking, and travel demand management (TDM).

The travel log would remain incomplete without noting our visit to Sprecher Brewery, where I sampled their very fine Shakparo beer, fermented according to an African protocol using bananas.  The beer tent in Milwaukee continues to get bigger and bigger!

Photo of Milwaukee River Flushing Station: Retinal Fetish, Flickr. Parking garage photo: J. Commers