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Statesville refines its vision for downtown

Jim McNally | .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) | Aug. 6, 2007

When it comes to old structures in Statesville, the focus in recent times has been on houses and the effort made by city leaders to spruce up some of those that seem to be losing their battles with time.

The Statesville Historic Preservation Commission recently released a list of the 10 houses that fall under their watch as being in the most serious need of refurbishment.

But in the city’s downtown area, there are a number of buildings that could probably also benefit from a good dose of attention.

Marin Tomlin, director the Downtown Statesville Development Corporation, said unoccupied and unattended to buildings in the central business district are sore spots for the city and a problem that needs addressing.

Tomlin has been working with the city to come up with “guidelines” for the downtown area.

“But it’s not something that can happen overnight,” she said.
Tomlin said one option for Statesville is to do what Salisbury did to bring strict ordinances to that city’s downtown area: establish it as a local historic district.

“Again, this is not something that happens right away,” she said. “I’ve been studying the way Salisbury did it and I’m in the middle of about 90 pages involved in the application process.”

Tomlin said another idea involves a kind of incentives plan that would make the refurbishment of the buildings a more attractive business proposition.

Statesville City Councilman Cecil Stallard is among those who believes the downtown could be a vibrant place with the right amount of elbow grease.

“It’s going to take a lot of work and planning,” he said. “But I think there is a great opportunity waiting downtown.”

Stallard is one man who has put his money where his mouth is.
He is the current owner of the Historic Vance Hotel, a building whose success many see as the catalyst for rejuvenating downtown.

Stallard said he is “getting too old” to bring the old building - which sits prominently at the corner of Front and Center streets - back to its former glory and is in the process of selling it to Mooresville businessman Tom Wilson.

Stallard said Wilson’s plans for the building are in a transitional stage.

Wilson, he said, originally planned to retain about half of the hotel’s 91 rooms for daily rental and convert the others - the top two floors of the five-story building - into apartments or condominiums.

“But after he got into it, he decided to go in another direction,” Stallard said.

He said Wilson now plans to sell the Vance to a hotel chain.

“I know the Marriott and the Hampton Inn have been interested in it in the past,” Stallard said.

Wilson’s plans also called for the refurbishment of the shops connected to the Vance that run along the Front Street side of the building, he said.

“That could really be a very nice situation there,” Stallard said.
But the Vance is only a part of the puzzle.

There are other buildings downtown that need even more work and whose rehabilitation is essential to any kind of make-over the city may have in store, he said.

The so-called Clock Tower building on the corner of Center and Broad streets has been at the center of downtown rehabilitation talks for years.

“The main problem with that building,” Stallard said, “has always been parking. It’s a big building and there is really no place to park at it.”

When local businessman Bob Dooley took over as the chairman of the DSDC, he said the Vance and Clock Tower buildings would need to be up and running before the downtown could reinvent itself.

Dooley also said that private business people have to adopt an ‘if you build it, they will come’ philosophy. The ‘they’ in this case is the government and public funding of projects.

“If you look at the successful downtown revitalization projects, they all enjoyed a strong private/public relationship,” he said.
But before “they” will come, Stallard thinks the owners of some of the buildings should meet potential developers or buyers halfway.

“There are some buildings that are just ragged,” he said.
Stallard said he was mostly referring to the upper floors of the store-front buildings.

“I would really love to see apartments go in above these stores and shops,” he said. “And to get the backs of some of the buildings cleaned up for parking.”

Statesville Mayor Costi Kutteh said there could be accessibility problems with the upstairs of most of the buildings. He said that very few of them have elevators.

Stallard, however, believes that a lot of the buildings are owned by those who don’t seem to care what shape they are in. He said many of them are parts of estates that the current owners inherited.

“I think some of them are being ignored, because it’s nothing to them (the owners) if they stay the way they are,” he said.
The city seems be working on the problem.

Earlier this year, the city purchased the former Downtown Motel and quickly razed it to make way for a parking lot that has not yet been built.

At tonight’s regular city council meeting, an item calling for the demolition of a dilapidated building on the edge of the downtown area is likely to pass without dissent.

City Planner David Currier said the city already has the authority to shut a building down, in a sense, if it does not meet minimum standards.

“We can do commercial condemnations,” he said. “They have to meet the code or they’re gone.”

But city leaders are also working on an ordinance plan that would include aesthetic guidelines as well as safety regulations.

“We are looking at ideas for design standards,” Currier said. “We’re looking at ways to get the ‘plainness’ out of the architecture.”

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