City Council, December 11th - Housing Incentives

Also on the agenda for Council on Monday are incentives for the project at the England-Wade building downtown.

This is alley housing!

The development team behind Fork Forty Food Hall and the former Whitlock Vacuum have a new one for the England-Wade building, a remodeled building from c.1890. The back half, an old warehouse wrapped in corrugated metal, will be demolished and a small apartment block erected in its place. The Historic Landmarks Commission already signed off on it. 

• See previously, "Proposed Building could give good Jolt to Electric Alley Downtown"

Now they are applying for a grant from Urban Renewal funds.

Agency Board [Council as the Urban Renewal Agency] action is needed to approve a grant in the amount of $600,000 as an exception to the maximum grant amount of $300,000. The Director, under the Riverfront-Downtown Urban Renewal Area Capital Improvement Grant Program Guidelines, can approve grant requests up to $300,000. Grant funds will be used to partially fund the costs to rehabilitate an existing historic building and construct an adjacent new building that will include 16 rental housing units at 236 Commercial Street NE. The building is scheduled to be renamed the Retro Electro Building.

Separately, there's a MUHTIP request for property tax abatement to support new construction across the street from Grocery Outlet and north of the Police Station. It will be two mixed-use buildings with two commercial spaces and seven apartments on a currently empty space. The City's land use applications portal does not appear to show any activity there, so this appears to be very early still in the planning stages.

On FB there's already discussion of the planned reduction in Library hours, and Salem Reporter picked up the story. Then the paper added a story.

Shear wall and trellising
at the Library (2021)

There's a "pre-design" update on the Civic Center seismic project, and the Staff Report says

Preliminary analysis identified that the addition of concrete shear walls and other lateral bracing are the most likely way to retrofit the structure to meet a life-safety seismic performance standard...

That's what they did at the Library, and it took out whole banks of windows and wall with an opaque panel in between structural elements.

In discussing the cumulative effect of both the first remodel c.1991 and our just-completed second one, the Nomination to the National Register of Historic Places downgrades the Library to "non-contributing" status and says:

In 2020-21, the Public Library received seismic upgrades, including adding shear walls on all four sides of the building that stretch from the ground to the concrete parapet. These shear walls are continuous and do not feature the bold horizontal elements found on the historic Public Library....Given the overall loss of both design and materials, the integrity of workmanship as reflective of the 1970s craft is also diminished. Many of the concrete finishes have been replaced with glass and the shear walls break up the once unified look of the building. The building conveys a much more modern feeling and character. Considering these substantial renovations, the Public Library is non-contributing.

It will be interesting to learn more about the proposed shear walls for City Hall and how those interventions will affect its total design, which was much more highly regarded as a stylistic exemplar of Brutalism and as retaining a much greater degree of "integrity" with the original design. Will preservationists oppose the structural and aesthetic alterations shear walls entail? Seismic work now might have to go before the Historic Landmarks Commission for approval. This could be a cost to what had seemed like the premature designation of the Civic Center as an historic resource.

Areas that could get shear walls
(National Register Nomination)

Other items in the update are mainly interior, on the circulation of people and on work spaces.

Featuring the new art at the Public Works building

And the Public Art Commission will present their annual report. If you haven't followed the new art and maintenance of existing art very closely, it's interesting to see as a whole. See previous notes here. 

(Separately at the Public Art Commission itself, there's a Hearing on a new mural December 13th, also. It employs graffiti motifs, is located on an alley, and there does not seem to be a great deal to say on it. The Staff Report recommends approval.)