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ATLANTA—When
Debra and Doug Harkrider of Gainesville
came to The Georgia Trust for help
re-tooling the 1940s JC Penney building on
the city’s square, little did they
realize their latest downtown
rehabilitation project would be a landmark
for the Trust.
The
Penney building, which the Harkriders
transformed into Main Street Market, a
multi-vendor marketplace featuring
specialty shops, a fresh take-out market,
a restaurant and a nightclub, is the
2,000th project with which the Trust’s
Main Street Design Assistance (MSDA)
program has worked during its 21 years of
existence. Paul Simo, manager of the
Trust’s MSDA program, consulted with the
Harkriders and Main Street Manager Joe
Burnett and created renderings showing how
the building façade could be restored to
keep its original features and materials,
enabling the Harkriders to qualify for
federal tax credits.
The
Trust’s design assistance renderings do
not constitute automatic approval for tax
credits or other grants, but they show
property owners how context-sensitive
design works. For each rendering, Mr. Simo
visits the building to carefully study its
original architecture and make
personalized recommendations for the
project.
“The
Main Street Design Assistance program
provided us with a wealth of knowledge. It
helped us keep the project historically
accurate and true to the design of the
rest of the square,” said Ms. Harkrider.
“The building’s rehab is very close to
the final rendering.”
In
1980, the National Trust for Historic
Preservation selected Georgia as one of
the first six states in the country to
pilot the Main Street program, but the
state provided no funding for design and
technical assistance. The Georgia Trust
recognized the program’s potential to
move historic preservation beyond a focus
on individual properties into a broader
arena of economic revitalization and began
raising the funds and providing design
assistance. When the program’s downtown
rehabilitation projects proved to be
cost-effective, with tax income exceeding
program costs, the state assumed the
funding of the design assistance program.
Cities
throughout Georgia have embraced Main
Street, steadily uncovering storefronts to
reveal their historic nature. Information
about Main Street and the design
assistance program, as well as specific
projects with which the program has
worked, is available on the Trust’s Web
site, www.georgiatrust.org
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The
Georgia Trust offers design and technical
assistance to Georgia’s Main Street
cities, as well as to other communities
throughout the state, in order to
encourage the rehabilitation of historic
downtown commercial buildings. The program
provides insight and guidance on how the
appearance of any historic, non-historic,
“non-contributing,” or planned infill
commercial structures is important to the
individual characteristics of Georgia’s
historic downtowns.
Gainesville
illustrates the “domino effect” seen
in many other downtowns using the Main
Street approach. “Marketing a building
involves good design,” Mr. Simo said.
“If we can direct one owner to an
appropriate aesthetic and traditional
coordination of their façade, many times
it helps other owners realize the impact
traditional design can make.” This
building-by-building approach generates
initial buy-in and continued support from
community partners including local
government, business owners, financial
institutions, residents and visitors.
Georgia’s
Main Street program, currently housed in
the Department of Community Affairs (DCA)
has expanded from its initial five cities
to 107. (The Better Hometown program,
which encompassed cities between 500 and
5,000 in population, was recently joined
with Georgia’s 47 traditional Main
Street cities, which have populations of
5,000 to 50,000). DCA figures show that in
2002, public and private investments in
central business districts totaled more
than $116 million. Almost 300 businesses
were created, expanded or relocated in
Georgia’s downtowns, and those
businesses created more than a thousand
new jobs.
The
Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation,
celebrating its 30th
anniversary this year, is the country’s
largest statewide, nonprofit preservation
organization, with more than 8,000
members. Committed to preserving and
enhancing Georgia’s communities and
their diverse historic resources for the
education and enjoyment of all, The
Georgia Trust not only provides design
assistance to Georgia’s Main Street
cities, but also generates community
revitalization by finding buyers for
endangered properties acquired by its
Revolving Fund; encourages neighborhood
revitalization; trains Georgia’s
teachers to engage students in 50 Georgia
counties to discover state and national
history through their local historic
resources; and advocates for funding, tax
incentives and other laws aiding
preservation efforts. The Georgia Trust is
a recipient of the Trustees Award for
Organizational Excellence from the
National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Find
out more about the Main Street Design
Assistance Program.
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