Preservation Commission - Regular Meeting

the July 10th, 2026 public hearing of the City of Prescott Preservation Commission. I'm gonna do this a little bit differently, and I'm gonna have the members introduce themselves. You wanna start?

Yeah.

Rick Sprain? Rick Sprain?

Thank you. Connie Cantelmi.

Jeff Miller.

Thank you, everyone. Staff members present, Tammy DeWitt, Jacob Lund, Karen Kompian, Elaine Moore, and Mary Fredrickson. Thank you. The following agenda will be considered by the Prescott Preservation Commission at their meeting today. Notice of this meeting is given pursuant to Arizona Revised Statute Section 38-431.02. Discussion and action items. Approval of the May 8th, 2026 Prescott Preservation Commission meeting minutes and HP 26005, a request for approval of the sign face change. Do I have a motion for last month's minutes?

Rick Sprain, I make a motion to pass the minutes for the May 8th, 2026 meeting.

Second. Motion approved.

Need a vote.

Oh, I'm sorry. Need a vote. All in favor?

Aye.

Aye. Motion approved. Next, HP 26-005, a request for approval for a sign phase change at 110 East Gurley Street. The owner is PF Investments, LLC, and the applicant is Morgan Sign Company. Any questions on this? I would like to have city staff do them all first and then ask Morgan Sign rather than going back and forth, if we can do that.

You want me to do my presentation first?

Jacob, are you? Yep.

Yes. All right. So good morning, Chair. Good morning, Commissioners. Jacob Lund, Community Planner for the City of Prescott. Today, we'll be looking at HP26-005 for approval of a signed face change at 110 East Gurley Street. So a little sign history for this area. Originally, on the back of this building, there was a painted sign from 1923 to 1957 for the Old Valley National Bank. Sometime in the 80s, the sign was painted over without a permit. So in May 2011, the Preservation Commission moved to approve repainting of the sign. So that's what you have down here in the first image was that original painted sign from 2011. In 2015, they converted it to a lower profile canvas system, which is what you see in the second photo with the Realty Executive's white background. And then on October 2018, they approved to update the canvas panel, and they actually added a wall mount to the sign. So the mount is always there. They're just doing face changes to the existing sign. This third picture is what was approved in 2018. And then the bottom photo, there was a historic preservation approval in 2022 for a sign face change to what's currently existing there today. This canvas sign here for Stringfield Ranch or Stringfield. So zoning information, the property is located within the North Prescott National Historic District. It is a listed contributor. The property is also located within the Courthouse Plaza Local Historic District, which is why we're here today. The property is owned downtown business, and it's located on the corner of Cortez Street and Gurley Street. This is subject to historic preservation approval because of ordinance number 3744 that was adopted in April of 1998. The ordinance was amended in June of 2001. That ordinance number was 4119. So this is a site plan provided by the applicant showing the location of the sign. So this is a... two-story building, and this is gonna be located, it's already existing, located on the back southeast rear facade of the building. So this was a rendering of the sign provided by the applicant. So they are proposing to install a 15 by 17 vinyl canvas print to replace the existing 15 by 17 sign that's in its place. The sign will be mounted to the existing sign frame. The sign will not be illuminated. And the materials, colors, and size will match the existing size that's already there. One thing I will point out, the main difference from what they're applying for today versus what you saw on the second slide, there used to be like an old-timey kind of finger graphic down in the corner that was pointing to the entrance of the sales office. That wasn't included in this, so that's really the main change from this sign to what's previously been there. We did send this out to Broadbent and Associates for a third-party review. There's a more detailed analysis in your packet, but the main things that this was determined to be in compliance with is that it does not distract from the historic architecture of the district, it's placed flat against the rear facade of the building, and it does not include any illumination or mechanical movement, and it will be placed below the roof line. So that would bring us to the recommended action for today, move to approve or deny HP 26-005 for the sign phase change. And that would conclude my presentation. And the applicant is here if you have any questions as well.

Thank you, Jacob. Do I have any questions or discussion?

I do, real quick, thank you. Is the vinyl, you said it's vinyl, so is this, I'm assuming it's attached to a backboard that would be attached to the building?

Yes, the frame is already attached to the building. That was approved in 2018, I believe, when they changed it to the vinyl sign originally.

Thank you.

Anyone else? Do I have a motion?

I make a motion to approve HP26-005.

All second.

All in favor? Aye. Motion approved.

Thank you.

Next on the agenda, presentation and discussion from State Historic Preservation Office, Arianna Grande. Or not Grande. I'm sorry.

It's not the first time. No problem. Hi, everybody. Is my presentation? Oh, perfect. Thank you, guys. OK. My name is Arianna Urban. I am the Certified Local Government Coordinator at the State Historic Preservation Office. Chair Travis and... members of the commission staff, thank you for having me today. I love coming to Prescott. I got here a little early and got a bagel at grandma's and sat in the courthouse plaza, which I have confirmed in my heart is the best pedestrian activated space in Arizona. It is so beautiful to see it being used exactly how it was intended, and I love it here. So thank you for having me back. I think it's been almost a year since I've come to talk to you guys, so thank you for having me. I'm a planner at the State Historic Preservation Office. I also have a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from the University of Oregon, but I am born and raised in Arizona and love it here so much. And I'm so happy to come and talk to you guys today. So many of you know me already. So good to see you guys. And thank you. I always like to pander a little bit to commissioners because you guys do this out of the kindness of your hearts and love for the built environment and for Prescott. And you are not compensated. And this job is hard. It's hard. It can be thankless sometimes. So I just want to make sure to thank you guys. OK. So many of you have seen my training already, so we're not going to talk necessarily about Secretary of the Interior standards too much or anything. We'll just do a couple slides on standards and then just talk about maybe some case studies today. Because I did a training, gosh, it was over a month ago now, my yearly CLG training in lieu of our conference, which we are sadly not having this year. Yeah, Karen was able to be there. And we spent a lot of the day just talking about different projects. And so I thought that might be fun to do today. So we know about the seven aspects of integrity. We want to make sure that good candidates for historic preservation retain all of these different aspects of what we call integrity as a term of art with a capital I. And so we think about location, whether it's been moved, the setting, so the environment around it and how it interacts with and contributes to the historic qualities of the building itself. Workmanship, if there were any particular details in craftsmanship, like these beautiful wood squares that I was admiring earlier. Materials, physically what is it made of and how much of those original historic materials are left. Association is a tricky one. It sort of doesn't necessarily mean if the building is being used for its original intention, but if there are any historic associations. to broader contexts or patterns of history. We'd like to see if we can make those connections. Is this too loud? Am I okay? Okay. Design, of course, what does the architecture look like and how much has it changed or not changed? And then feeling, which is my favorite one, which it really means How does the building land? And how does it read? And the best way? In first day of graduate school and preservation school, they teach us. If the building was built in 1890, and someone from 1890 time traveled and walked in front of the building today, would they still be able to recognize it? And if the answer is yes, then it retains its integrity. And if the answer is no, and you go, ooh, what happened to that building? We might think about some other treatment options. Okay, and so all of these characteristics or all of these aspects of integrity, the way we express them and kind of quantify them is through what we call character-defining features. And these are those physical features, these visual components, the actual... the actual original historic details, materials that we can point to and we can touch. And like I said, we can quantify. So when we're evaluating a building or writing a National Register nomination, we often actually make a list of character-defining features. It's not a paragraph. It's not prose. It is just a table of what the character-defining features are and kind of sort of elucidating why it's important to preserve them. And a building isn't historic anymore without its character-defining features. So things like shape, massing, size, windows, roof pitch, chimneys. For this little Tudor example, I was trying to find a better one, but this is really the best one in the book. We can recognize a little Tudor revival cottage, but if the roof pitch was different and The, did I see like a, ooh. And if this curved doorway wasn't there, and if this half timbering was gone, we might not recognize it anymore. So those are those character defining features we wanna look out for. Okay, this is kind of a fun one. We, when we realize that we've got integrity or we understand integrity, we take a look at character defining features of a building. The next thing we need to figure out is, excuse me. pregnant pause, what kind of shape it's in, what sort of condition the building is in. And condition is often something that's kind of knee-jerk. Like, we can look at a building and go, oh, gosh, that's in bad shape. But it's possible for a building to be in bad shape but still have good integrity. Does that make sense? So like the buckhorn baths up here in Mesa, this is not the greatest picture, but the building is not doing well. It's been neglected for several decades now. But its character-defining features are all still there. You can see these little vigas, the parapet, the roof line, this porch. In the back, there's still the original neon signage, the stucco siding. All of these things still exist. And because they do, we can either preserve them or repair or replace them because we have the record. And so on the opposite direction, a building can be in very good condition, right? Look brand new and shiny, but have poor integrity. This is the Portland building in downtown Portland, Oregon. And it was a postmodern masterpiece by Frank Gehry. Frank Gehry? I'm blanking. I'm so sorry. It was a postmodern masterpiece listed on the National Register seven years after it was built. But the building was making people sick, which is a real thing. It's called sick building syndrome. And when a building has poor circulation, poor light and air, like this building did, people that spend most of their days in the building start to not feel well. And so the options for the city of Portland were to tear it down. or to re-clad it, and so they did. And this new glass curtain wall was completely, the building was totally skinned, this new glass curtain wall was installed, and it was delisted from the National Register, but it still exists. This is a good example. This is a building that's still standing down in Oracle outside of Tucson. And it was formerly the Mountain View Hotel, which was highly significant, not just for its architecture being a cool building, but it was also owned by a black hotel owner. And she was a woman. And this hotel was totally integrated. And during the... sort of the tuberculosis era of southern Arizona, where people would, of course, come from the East Coast with pulmonary issues to sort of dry out and convalesce. This was a extremely popular and very fancy place for them to come, and Miss Annie, the proprietor, was well-loved all throughout southern Arizona. And we thought it was gone until one day... I don't know if someone, I think someone drove by it or we got a tip that it actually is still there. What do you guys think about its integrity? Do you see anything resembling the original building?

There's a lot still there.

Yeah. Can you point out one thing? Yeah, the dormer roofline. Exactly. This little gable. And my favorite part is a little window right there inside the gable. Still the same window opening from the original one. So of course, it's now a congregation. I'm sorry, it's a church. And it is attached to this sort of 1960s brick building. But given how significant this property originally was, I would say that there is enough integrity there to consider it still a good candidate for preservation and eligible for the National Register. What do you guys think? Yeah. OK. Good deal. We all know, hopefully, about the Secretary of the Interior's standards. This is like the Bible for historic preservation. And really, I like to just think of it as common sense. And I know in historic preservation, sometimes we need to hone our skills a little bit. I still am doing it every day. But we have good instincts about preservation, too, right? We can look at a building and go... you know, that's been changed from its historic condition and go, oh, you know, there's a little bit of a gut reaction to these things. And I like to think of the secretary standards as guidelines for sort of our good preservation instincts that we have. And we use these standards all the way from the local level. You guys, you know, CLGs base their local design guidelines off of them, all the way up to the president's advisory council for historic preservation. These are kind of the guidelines that govern best preservation practices. And there are four of them. And these are, again, terms of art. We use rehabilitation and restoration sort of colloquially. But in this context, these are defined terms, methods, strategies for doing historic preservation. So preservation technically means to sort of just take a building that's serviceable and kind of keep it the way it is. Maybe we need to do a few code upgrades, new HVAC, a fresh coat of paint, but preserving preservation treatment of a building is kind of just like keeping it and making sure it can be used again. Restoration. is sort of the opposite it's a building that has gone through a lot of different lives and the experts or the owners or the consultants will choose a certain period in time that the building was perhaps most significant and uh through photographs and documents drawings will restore the building back to that particular period of time so that involves a lot of recreation of um architectural features, materials, and oftentimes removing additions that were added later. Reconstruction is pretty self-explanatory. We don't do it very often. But when a resource is completely gone, it can be reconstructed sometimes. And every once in a while, still remain on the National Register. But rehabilitation is the one we use 98% of the time, I would say. is gonna be most relevant to what you guys do and your decision making on a regular basis. So, rehabilitation is the process of updating a building. Pardon me, I'm a little out of breath today. Rehabilitation is the process of taking a historic building, we know it's still important and in you know, even if it's not in good condition rehabilitation can take a building that is almost wrecked and Bring it back into service. Especially we do this a lot with vacant buildings underutilized buildings And the most important thing is to bring a building back into service so it can continue to contribute to its community. And that's why we do preservation, is to keep old buildings a part of not only the physical landscape, but a part of the community it has forever been involved in. And so the other fun fact that I like to say is vacant buildings deteriorate five times faster. than a building that's in use. And so even if it's not quite right, it's always preferable to have someone in a building living there or using it just to make sure it doesn't deteriorate. So rehabilitating a building involves creating a new but still, of course, compatible use for a historic building. It sort of runs the gamut from new HVAC to potentially a new ADA ramp, a new elevator tower, an expansion or additions to a building while still preserving those character-defining features, those quantifiable architectural elements that we had talked about. And of course, like I said, code upgrades. And this almost always takes a building that was used for one thing and turns it into something else. post office, the original Phoenix downtown post office. It was sort of swallowed up by Arizona State, as a lot of stuff has been downtown. But they decided to keep the building. And on the inside is actually still a post office. But the rest of the building, they don't do any sorting there anymore. But the rest of the building is now the student union for downtown ASU. All right. The main things to know about rehabilitation is that the new work should be differentiated from the old. And this is something that gets tricky sometimes, because when we're doing historic preservation, sometimes we think about just like, oh, well, if we're going to do an addition to a building, let's just make it look exactly like the original building, because we don't want it to stand out or be weird. But in fact, the Secretary of the Interior and the Park Service feel it's important to differentiate new additions or new construction that alters the envelope of a historic building. So let's see, do I have the whole standards on here? Yes. So we don't gain this number three, which is a false sense of history. And that's a tough one to explain, but you guys already kind of know what this is about. And what we would never want is for a pedestrian walking down the street to be confused about when a building was built. And if there's a space in a historic downtown, a building burned or whatever, and the new building was rebuilt exactly like the old one, there wouldn't be a very good way for someone visiting to understand that there was a fire there at all or that that building is new in the first place. So we always want new work to be modern in some way or differentiated in some way while still, of course, being compatible and subordinate. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. But yeah, number three is the big one. And then numbers nine and 10 are also the most important of these rehabilitation standards in that, like I said, when we're doing new additions or new construction in a historic context, we want it to be compatible, respectful, and ultimately subordinate to the original building.

Okay, so what I kind of wanted to go over today

was talking about downtowns and commercial districts, because I don't always often focus on my trainings on commercial buildings, and so I think might be a fun thing to do today, and we'll start going through some examples, and I'll ask you guys for your comments. I know you'll be very excited to express your opinions, so this is the time to do that. But when we think about downtowns, when we think about historic places at all, but especially downtowns, we know that they're gonna change. Historic districts can never remain frozen in time. We don't ever want to freeze something in a block of ice because then it might not be... It might not be... Like I said, it might not be... That building, if it is frozen, it might not be used for its best capabilities. I'm sorry, I'm tripping over my words. The most important thing to realize is that change is always going to happen. We are never even able to freeze a building in time, and we don't want to. And so we're looking at preservation not as a way to, you know, preserve something and never touch it again, but as a tool or a framework to manage the change that we know is gonna happen. And so we want to think about preservation when we are doing future visioning, when we're doing general plans, or when a developer comes in and is interested in building something in or near a historic district, we want preservation to be at that table and we want it to be a part Not the most important thing necessarily, but a part of those conversations. And so I call it the Applebee's effect, and that cities, Prescott is the example that I use when I do trainings all over the state, because Prescott is... Prescott is Prescott because of its downtown, because of Whiskey Row, because of the courthouse, because of Charlotte Hall. And without those things, oh, you know, like people can say, oh, well, we're just going to lose one building here, one building there. But eventually. isn't Prescott anymore if these buildings start going away piece by piece by piece. And so cities have that value because of these elements that make them unique, which are these historic places. And without these historic places, cities are indistinguishable from any other ones. You know, without its historic resources, Prescott could look like Amarillo, Texas. Like, you know, every time we lose a historic commercial building and we build an Applebee's instead, A little bit of that uniqueness goes away. And what do tourists want to come and see is the unique parts of Prescott, not the McDonald's is and not the Applebee's. So managing change is kind of the theme that I've been working with for the past couple of years. Okay, so when we are looking at historic... When we're looking at historic projects that are potentially coming up for review, you guys do this all the time, when a building owner comes and says, these are the changes that I'd like to make to my building, this sign is a nice straightforward example. These are the key principles that we want to look for. These are sort of based on the Secretary of the Interior standards. But we want to think about appropriateness, sort of whether the changes are appropriate, not just in respect to the historic building facade and exterior itself, but also to the buildings around it. Are these changes going to make a minimal impact on those character defining features, those original architectural qualities? How reversible is it? Sometimes we wanna plan for reversibility in that a sign is a great example of something that's reversible and so an easy one to approve, right? Because we know that the next owner could take the sign down and it wouldn't make any impact on the historic character of the building. And this is the most important one is this idea of respect or subordination when we're doing new construction or an addition to a building. All right, you guys ready for some examples? Yay, okay. This is the Douglas Public Library, but it was formerly the Douglas J.C. Penney. Isn't that cute? I love this building. What do you guys think about, well first of all, what changes do you guys see that were made to this building to transform it into the library? The front windows? Yeah. But that's kind of it, right? I think this is a building behind it. So we won't consider that brick volume in the back. But they were able to preserve these fenestration openings along the top here and the storefront itself. We're usually OK with storefront changes to the... to the windows and the doors and, and oftentimes more than that, but they were able to keep the, the, the profile of the windows intact. So I love this example of an adaptive reuse of a rehabilitation project. It is even better, right? Right. We love to see access, uh, to public places. This is a great example. All right. You guys may know this one, the Nile feeder in Mesa. So this is, this is, uh, This is what it used to look like in the 1930s. This is what it looks like in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and the beginning of the 2010s. And then it has this new life as it's actually still being used as a theater. So I can't say a new life. But what do you guys think about the rehabilitation?

They did a good job with it in the last one.

Yeah. The marquee is brand new. They just installed that probably a year ago. But there are some changes, right? Do you guys see any particular ones?

Yeah, the arches are gone back. They're gone now and back to the elevation of the building, which is much better.

Yeah, so this structure in the front is actually not even attached to the building, but it was a colonnade, part of a big program that Mesa did in the 90s to provide shade to downtown, which was a great idea, but it... had the effect of obscuring all of the historic buildings. So they did an awesome job with it now, right? It's not exact. The windows in the top story are different than the original ones. And of course, this transom is gone, but this building was easily, easily re-contributed to the National Register of Historic Places.

In the center picture, the roofline or the facade is flat. Did they go back to the original one? They were able to take part of it off and find the original?

Yeah, so what I believe happened was when they removed the stucco from the facade of this building, they found the bricks behind it, but I believe they did have to reconstruct the parapet, the... I'm blanking on the name of what those little sticky, yuppie things are. But they were able to find historic brick from the original brick works and rebuild it. And of course, the best part is that we have so many extremely clear historic photographs to be able to restore it back to. That's always an important thing. OK, what about the Teatro Carmen in Tucson? It's a pretty big change.

That's actually a really good job.

Mm-hmm. Do you... Okay, I'll just go to the next slide. Here's the fun part. Yeah. So, again, we had this fantastic original photograph. Um, and I guess, I mean, it was, it was kind of lost to time that the building had used to look like this. Um, and everyone, as long as they could remember it had, it had been stuccoed and it had been yellow. Um, and these two side arches were windows. Uh, and then, uh, the, actually the state parks office, um, was able to give them a grant to do the facade restoration. And they found this photo and said, wait a minute, this building is brick. And it has so many features there that we didn't know about. So this was a really fun example of changing a building pretty significantly, but for the better instead of the worse. OK, I like this one a lot, the Cottonwood Police Station. So it's not being used as a police station anymore, but has it changed all that? This is just from a couple of years ago. Had it changed all that much since the 1950s when it was built? Not really, right? It was pretty amazing. And so the city of Cottonwood came to me and said, we've got a new tenant, and they want to do a food truck garden. And I said, great. That's an awesome thing to adapt in a historic downtown, but how are they going to do it? So this is what they proposed. Ignore the red circle. That was one of the notes on my drawings when I was redlining it. But wait a second, sorry. What do you guys think about the proposal? Are the changes appropriate?

What is the white material to the right there?

Good question. That is this volume right here.

Yeah, on your concept drawing, it kind of looks like brick from this angle.

It does, yeah. So that would be a cladding change. But is it that big of a deal, do you think?

Looks way too modern now.

It does look modern. And a part of that is the rendering. But I could only find this in-process construction photo. I need to go back and photograph the final. But this is what it ended up looking like. It is same. Yeah. But different. Right. And it looks fresh. But all of those original, which character defining features do you guys see still intact?

The roof line.

The roof line. Yeah. And on mid-century buildings like this, we often look at the mullions of the storefront, the windows, the big sort of aluminum dividers. This, yeah, this little porch projection right here. This lattice thing that you can kind of see is still intact. So I think they did a fantastic job. Good job, Cottonwood. Okay, so I promised you we'd talk about additions. I know. And there are a couple of principles that we look at when a property owner needs more space. And it's OK to need more space in a historic building, right? I never like to tell a property owner that they can't make more space in their building, their home, if they need it. And my personal preservation philosophy is that no one should ever be miserable because they live in a historic house. Because then they start to hate their house. And we don't want that. We want people to love living in a historic house. And so if someone comes to me and says, you know, I need I just had another baby and we need to build another room. And, you know, my my roof. A roof isn't a good example, but my windows are are old and they're leaking air. I'm never going to tell them. No, you can't do any. You can't fix or update or replace any of those things just because it's historic. That would be terrible. We want people to love living in their historic house, in their historic neighborhood, and to tell other people how great it is to live in a historic house. And so there's always a compromise. And that's my other preservation principle is compromise, much like most things in life. But additions are a good way to think about altering and expanding historic buildings, obviously, without changing them too much. So of course, we want it to be compatible. Excuse me. We want it to be compatible with that architectural historic character defining features and not really alter them too much where possible. You know, we want we want additions to be smaller. Like I kept saying, subordinate in mass and form and if possible, situated at the rear of the building. If it needs to go on the side, it's always a good idea to recess that. the addition, and that big standard number nine being that we don't want to replicate a historic construction. We want it to be different, visually different, but still compatible with the original building. So we can also think about a lot of those principles when we talk about infill. a new construction in a historic context or district or neighborhood. And it's a really big deal. People don't really think about this. It's a really big deal to build a new building in a historic district, right? You are forever altering the landscape, the streetscape of that historic neighborhood. And so it needs to be done with a sense of responsibility and a sense of gravity because... The rest of those buildings were built way before that person was born. And here we are sort of imposing ourselves into this historic context. So we always want to think about it in relationship to its immediate neighbors, to the entire street, to the district as a whole. Because not only do individual buildings have historic integrity, but districts do as well. And so character defining features of an entire historic district can be generally one-story houses or wide, like in Mesa, wide streets or specific setback patterns. How far away are the houses from the street? You know, carriage houses versus garages. These are all, these are all sort of group character defining features. And if a new building comes in and disturbs that to a great extent, then the integrity of a district as as a whole can start to be harmed as well. It doesn't happen very often. But these things always are going to be on a case-by-case basis. It's really hard. And actually, the Park Service doesn't have a lot of guidelines for infill and new buildings in historic districts specifically for this purpose, because it is so hard to make blanket statements about what a new building in a historic district should look like. So that's why you guys exist, is to examine these proposals one by one. And we know new construction shouldn't replicate the historic construction, always be subordinate and respectful to its neighbors. But this idea of compatibility is really important. And so again, we're not, we're not trying to build a brand new craftsman bungalow in a neighborhood of craftsman bungalows, but in general, we want the size and shape of the new building to be sort of similar to a craftsman bungalow. And the, The architecture itself can even be modern if it wants to. But we just want the form and shape and massing of the building, and setbacks especially, to be similar or compatible. All right. I took a trip to Laramie, Wyoming earlier this year, and I stopped cold. My fiance was just minding his own business. I said, stop. Look at this block. What do you guys see? Obviously tell me which is the infill building. Yes. What do you like it? What's your preservation gut telling you? No. Yeah. Yeah, that's totally another thing to think about, too. But... Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And where... So you mentioned the gable, the little pointy roof. Where do you think they got that idea from?

I think it has a sort of a nod to neoclassical in a way.

Yeah, it's definitely postmodern. I think it was done in the 90s. But I... There's no... By the way, there are very few right or wrong... There are very few right or wrong answers. So we're just talking, right? It doesn't, this is not necessarily a yes or no. But some of the elements that, so I love this. I loved it. Some of the elements that stuck out to me were, of course, this pointy gable. But look where they got it from. Deet, deet, deet. this one right here, this historic one. And it actually is almost the same dimensions in pitch and height, which I really loved. They definitely didn't try to replicate anything around it. And my guess is that this was a vacant space. Whatever was in between these two historic buildings was gone. And so they actually sort of played with that and made it glass to kind of give the effect of a void instead of a solid block. So I I loved this one. It's definitely distinctive. There's no no mistaking whether it's old or not, but different, different but compatible things to think about. Okay. This is also in Laramie, which is the new construction.

The first building.

Which one? Range. Range. Coffee. Yeah. Any other guesses? You're right. That is it. What gave it away, though, Connie?

I think just they simplified down. It's void of any ornamentation at all, but newer materials.

Yeah.

And then, of course, just the streamlined roof line. Yeah.

Yes. The setback is a really good clue, right? We were always, you know, new construction is always good to be set back. And, you know, it created a little patio with chairs in the front here for people to enjoy their coffee, which is even better. Yeah. I loved how they took these three windows and sort of, not exactly cut and pasted them, but nodded to them in the new building. It is the same height, or around the same height as the other one. Do you guys like this info? Yeah, yeah. I would not have let them paint this building white, but you know, I'm not the preservation officer for Laramie, Wyoming.

You know, Arianna, even on that last one, I think what threw some people is the turquoise. Sure. Think about that. If that had either been white or even black, it would have been completely different. The color, I think, updated it too much.

Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, colors is something that can be controversial, as we know, but it does make a difference, too. So one of the cute things that I always like to encourage people is to not paint. It's not cute. It's serious. But to not paint historically unpainted masonry. Because once we paint a brick, what happens? It can never be unpainted. You can't remove paint or stucco from brick without removing the faces, the fired faces of the brick, and sort of irreparably damaging the brick. Once the face of a brick is removed, the building will just begin to deteriorate.

So, Ariana, here in Prescott, St. Michael's used to be Pepto-Bismol pink.

No way.

And they sandblasted it, I think, in the 80s. Was anybody here? Probably not. You guys weren't alive then. But it was a mess. They sandblasted it.

Yeah. And they did a nice job. And I think they coded the building with something. And that is a treatment. There are nuances to it. But for the better, right? It's great that they sandblasted the St. Michael's because now it is so much more true to its character. Okay. What do you guys think is going on here?

Other than painting the precast?

Yeah. Cast iron is almost always painted.

Oh, I thought that was precast.

No, no, no, no. Sorry. These columns are cast iron. But what happened is... Okay, I'll just tell you. This building is actually brand new. You can see by how sharp the bricks are. You guys see how sharp these corners are? and how sort of straight the mortar joints are. But I looked closer and was like, St. Louis, Missouri, what? And so what happened is, I don't actually know what happened. This building had to get removed somehow. But they were able to salvage these columns, these cast iron columns from the original building, and reset them into the new building.

And is that allowed? Because in a sense, they're replicating.

Yeah.

I mean, I think it looks cool, but it sort of does defy.

As a layperson walking past this building, would you recognize any of this? No. So to me, this is sort of a false sense of history. But is it better, and this is not a hypothetical question, I want you guys to think about it, is it better than not salvaging the columns and them just going to the trash?

You can tell the bricks knew, but most people aren't going to recognize that.

No, but really what adds to the... at least for me, that probably is precast, the plinth at the top of the windows and then the fretwork. That, to me, really puts it over the top of a replica.

Yeah. So yeah, I would agree with you that this is a replica building. I wouldn't have done it this way, personally. But I do think it's important to salvage materials whenever possible, especially cast iron storefronts, which are rare. But yeah, this was this was this one sort of makes my stomach go. Yeah. um and a way that i would kind of not remedy but sort of mitigate this is uh i just want to see some signage i just want to see a sign with this with the story of this building what happened what happened here because when someone can understand why this sort of frankenstein building exists i think it not only generates interest in the historic fabric of the downtown but it that false sense of history sort of starts to fade away because you understand the real history of what happened. Okay.

Well, the other thing, the other thing too, Ariana, if the fact that they've left off that precast application above that third window.

Oh yeah. I thought that was weird.

It also gives you the sense like, oh, it is old and they're just missing that piece.

Yeah.

I think it's done well.

That one stumped me. I did not understand that, but good eye. Very good eye. Yeah, yeah. Do we know what the building looked like before? Did it have, like, on the roofline, the characteristics? I mean, that would be good to have, like, if you say it's a story of the building. That is the principal question that you would want to answer before you do something like this. And I couldn't find a photo of it, but I'm sure the historical society folks have it. Yeah. These are just observations from me walking down the street. OK, this one is dramatic, and I am excited to see what you guys think. So this is the original general offices for the mine in Bisbee.

Excuse me.

It's actually outside of Bisbee and sort of a little mining enclave called Warren. But for many years it was used as a city hall until a half fire, which was which was terrible. And they lost a lot of records, unfortunately, in this fire. But is the building mostly still there? Yeah. And most of the damage was just to the roof, right? So we were surprised when we drove by. And yeah, I made my boss like slam on the brakes and stop the car so I could take this picture. The side view mirror is just out of view. This one was like, this was a punch in the stomach, right? Because... For all intents and purposes, of course, I'm not a structural engineer, but it doesn't seem like it seems like this is a little overkill to me personally. So what where to go from here? And they did not ask us at the State Historic Preservation Office. They just went ahead and built a brand new building and they did it extremely quickly, which is weird. But they kept that. door surround in the front. This is the historic part of the original building. Oops, sorry. But this is what they came up with instead. What do you guys think? It's not exactly the same, right?

It's not terrible, but it's very minimalistic.

It's definitely a stripped version of the original building. There's a lot of those character-defining features that are missing. But we wouldn't want them to rebuild it exactly right. So this was a choice. And, you know, hopefully, I haven't gone to see it yet, but hopefully there's some interpretation or signage that talks about what happened here. This was a hard one. This one was tough. Okay. And these are just a couple more examples. My family lives in Durango, and I was just there for Fourth of July weekend and always have a good time walking up and down their downtown. So this building is one of my favorites. This is an infill. It's the same building as this one right up here. What do you guys see? There's a lot going on in this building. Yeah, it was definitely built in the 90s, like the, I think, late 90s. What about height? How tall is it?

I mean... The roof line itself is similar to the next door, but they've added that top area for decorative purposes or something. Right.

It's... It is different. And you're totally right. They kept the technical height of the building the same, but they wanted more roof space. And you can actually see around the corner here, the real height of the building is one more story. But they set it back from the, this is the main street here, to appear as though, and you can kind of see it right here, to appear as though this building is the same height as its neighbors. And then they added these little phantom, Gables, and maybe the original building had something similar to these arches in Gables. I don't actually know. I couldn't find the original picture either. But one thing I did like about it is this is the Strader Hotel, which is sort of the jewel of downtown Durango. And what about the height in relationship to the Strader?

So yeah, it's definitely subordinate. I think they did a good job of hiding the addition on the back.

They did, definitely.

But this is a really good example, in my mind, of way too much red brick in one area. You know, they just haven't broken it up enough.

Yeah.

It's a lot to take in.

It is. And the building is pretty massive. But it was on a corner, so likely the footprint of the historic building was something similar. You know, I like this. I think they did a nice job. The window patterns, the fenestration pattern is historic-ish. The size and opening of the storefronts is also done pretty well. But there's no guessing that it's an old building, right? It's obviously new. All right. What about this one? Sorry, we're talking about this one in the middle. But I put it in context with the buildings to either side of it. Safe, yeah. But they obviously needed to build two stories of apartments on top of this little brick building. And they did it. And I'll tell you, as a pedestrian standing here in front of this building, you can't see those apartment buildings. Across the street, you can. But what did they do right? The setback, exactly. Yeah, the setback. Yeah. So this one, I mean, they're actually set back pretty far. And again, it creates like a little patio, a little rooftop patio, which is also nice. But these, the new apartments are definitely taller than the surrounding buildings. So this one's a, I give it a C. I don't know about you guys. Okay, what about this one? What is it that we're looking at?

Again, I think they replicated too much of the old historic buildings that are surrounding it. It's nice, but it's

Yeah, that was my question. Is it just the addition and back?

Yep. Interesting that you said that, Diane, because sometimes when buildings, especially when historic windows get changed a little bit, it is, and from a Google Maps street view, it is hard to tell whether a building is original or not. This is the historic building, this brick one, but this rooftop addition is new. And I even had trouble. I noticed all these buildings when I was walking through them, but I couldn't even photograph them myself because my angle and my lens wouldn't do it. So I did have to go to Street View and zoom out. But this one, I think, was done really well. Yeah. I mean, it's not visible from either side of the street. And clearly, this is a very deep building, so they had the room to do it. And in terms of height, what about, it looks like it just matches the neighboring building. So good job. This is a little aside. I know you guys have a lot of ghost signs in Prescott. So what do we do with ghost signs? I did find the original picture of this building. It's obviously not the same as it used to. But this is what it looked like before 2014. And this is current. What do you notice about the ghost signs that are different? What did you say? Yeah, which one? The white one. Yeah. How do you guys feel about repainting ghost signs?

Mm-mm.

No. Yes. This is a tricky one. The official recommendation is to never repaint a ghost sign because it creates that false sense of history. If you repaint an old sign, there's no way to know whether that sign used to be there or it's just an artist's interpretation. And we see this happen a lot. But at the same time, it's kind of sad when they go. And so there are some intermediate treatments where you can kind of coat it. I've seen like a clear coat on a ghost sign to sort of preserve the flakes. That's my favorite part because these are just – these are like – These, like, stop traffic. You know, when you're walking down and you see a ghost on your side. That was going to be my question.

Could you clear coat it to preserve it?

Yeah. Yeah. It's not done that often, but that would be my preference. Okay. Good job. You guys nailed it. And this is the last one. I think this is the last one. Oh, no. We'll go to the last one. This is my favorite building in downtown Durango. This one right here. Which seems crazy. But... What do you notice about it in relationship to the historic building which is next to it? It is sleek, right? Late 1970s. What about those key aspects? So compatibility, design. Subordination.

It is kind of same but different.

Yeah, exactly. What are the big similarities? The roofline. Yep, exactly.

The roofline, the windows are the same shape, different size, but different same shape.

Yep. The more you look at this, the more you see, which is my favorite part. What about the cornice at the top? Yeah.

The cornice is fine, but that application I'm not even sure what that is. This right here.

What material?

Is that copper? This is brick.

Oh, this at the corner, that's wood panel.

Wood? Okay. Is that why they're coming apart at the top? Yeah.

But, fair enough. But they did a great job with this building. I think this is just like... peak historic preservation, right? You know, this property, I don't even know if these were originally, you know, this was the original property owner that wanted more space or a different, I think this was actually used to be a theater of some kind. You see sort of a marquee right there. But I think it's perfect, right? They were able to take the motif of the arches and pull it into the new building, not replicate it exactly, but use it. The cornice is, again, sort of there, but different. And the building, of course, is the exact same height. The materials, even the brick, is not the same as this mined stone, but it's compatible. And it's very obviously new. It's not set back, but I didn't think they need to in this situation. What do you guys think? Yeah. What grade do you guys give this? One person give it a grade for me. The new one? The late 70s. Yeah. You got it. Yeah. And that's OK. So ultimately, this is the lesson of historic preservation. And there's always going to be a subjectivity to these things. And it's because historic preservation, I believe, is an art and not so much of a science. And we are we're always going to disagree there. It's very hard to come to a perfect yes or no consensus about especially new construction or new design. because everyone feels a little different about it, and that's okay, and that's the challenge of the historic preservation staff in a city, is to make those judgment calls, and it's always gonna be a judgment call, and you're always gonna get someone on the phone saying, you know, that would never have gotten approved by the last historic preservation officer, and you're just like, I'm not that person, so I don't know, right? So for context, I was the historic preservation officer at the city of Mesa for a couple of years before I came to SHPO and struggled with a lot of these things. But it made me a better person, so better preservationist. But anyway, to close, there's no exactly right or exactly wrong way to do this. We sort of have to, like I said, hone those instincts and do our best. So do you guys have any extra questions at the end?

No, thank you for coming up or coming down.

No problem. It's my pleasure. Thank you, guys. All right. Oh, I have. I think that's it. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Are there any updates, Jacob?

No updates at this time. I know Alex wanted us to check in and see who has a copy of the Secretary of the Interior Standards, so we could make a note of that, and then anyone without it, we'll make sure to get you a copy. Okay, so Diane, Rick. Need a new one. Do you have one, Jeff? Okay, perfect. We'll make note of that and we'll make sure to get those for you so they're available. And we don't have anything on the agenda currently for next month. But if we do have anything submitted early next week, we'll let you know.

Great. Thank you very much. That's all. Meeting adjourned.