Greeley takes care of core properties

GREELEY – Rumors started brewing in January not long after a Greeley real-estate investment and management company bought the State Armory, a mainstay in the city’s restaurant industry and a hallmark of historic downtown.

“We got a call from someone in the city who had heard we were going to demolish the building,´ said Drew Notestine, a partner with Thomas & Tyler LLC. “We’re not going to tear it down. We’re prepared make a major investment in the building. We want to maintain its historical integrity.”

Greeley is following a national trend to put life back into downtown areas by refurbishing old buildings. In the past few years, several downtown buildings with historical significance have been getting a face lift. These include:

n The former Greeley Tribune building, 714 Eighth St., sat vacant for 15 years before the city of Greeley obtained it and did a $4.6 million renovation to turn it into the Greeley History Museum.

n  The Shaw Building at Eighth Avenue and Eighth Street, former home of Garretson’s Sports Center before it moved farther west in Greeley, was also refurbished a few years ago to house retail in the ground floor and eight lofts on the second floor.

n Historic Greeley Inc., a nonprofit organization, got a $90,000 grant last November to restore parts of the Greeley Masonic Temple at 829 10th Ave. The temple is on the Greeley Historic Register.

n The Camfield Court building at Eighth Avenue and Sixth Street is undergoing some major reconstruction. Tinted windows installed in the 1960s that covered the historical façade have been removed, and new windows in keeping with the original building will be installed.

The interior is also undergoing a remodel. The ground floor houses the Academy of Natural Therapy, a massage-therapy school, and several apartments make up the second floor. The project is expected to be completed by this fall.

Buildings with character

“These old buildings are what set downtown apart from the rest of the city,´ said Mark Olson, executive director of the Downtown Development Authority, an organization that started in 1998 to promote downtown Greeley. “The character of each building is so important to downtown.”

Refurbishing buildings adds life to downtown, Olson said, and makes it more attractive to businesses and residents. In recent years, some longtime businesses have left downtown, lured by more population and more space in west Greeley. At the same time, other businesses have grown or moved into downtown, including the Greeley Ice Haus, an ice-skating rink at Eighth Avenue and Ninth Street.

“For every business that moves out or closes, we get two businesses that move in,” Olson said. “The more we do down here, the more people get excited.”

The development authority and the Mongan family, who own the massage therapy school, got a $132,000 grant from the State Historical Fund to refurbish the outside of the building. The Mongans are financing the remodel of the interior.

The city’s historic preservation commission has to approve exterior renovation plans to the nearly 70 properties on the city’s register of historic places and on buildings within the city’s two historic districts. The Camfield Court building is on the register and lies within the Downtown Historic District.

Building owners usually nominate individual buildings to be placed on the city’s register, said Betsy Kellums, historic preservation specialist for the city of Greeley. To be placed on the register, buildings have to meet several criteria, proving they are of historical, architectural or geographical significance to the area.

Certified historic

The State Armory isn’t on the city’s historic register, and it lies just outside the Downtown Historic District. That means the owners don’t have to get approval from the historic preservation commission before making changes to the building. But Notestine said he’s looking at getting the building on city, state and national historic registers.

The advantages to getting placed on a register are access to state tax credits, low-interest loan programs and State Historical Fund grants.

Notestine’s company was originally interested in the Armory because the parking lot adjacent to it would provide more parking for the people who work in the office buildings owned by Thomas & Tyler LLC. The firm owns about 100,000 square feet of office space in downtown Greeley, including the Chase Bank building and the Greeley Building at 710 11th Ave., the former Greeley High School which is on the National and the Greeley Historic registers.

Notestine and his brother Ty, partners in the firm, are looking for a business, probably another restaurant, to occupy the State Armory. The building had a colorful past before it became a restaurant 30 years ago. It served as a temporary morgue for two of Northern Colorado’s biggest disasters, a 1961 school-bus accident that killed 20 children and a 1955 plane crash. In the 1920s and ’30s, the building was the site of boxing and wrestling matches.

 Regardless of whether the building ends up on a historic register, Notestine said he’s committed to maintaining the Armory’s historical significance to Greeley.

“I’m a firm advocate of adaptive reuse,” he said. “You cannot replicate what you already have with some of these historic buildings. You can try to create something that looks old, but it ends up looking like Disneyland.”

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