In March, downtown Phoenix lost a monument important to the LGBT community and the city’s history.
The GreenHAUS boutique at 222 E. Roosevelt Street was demolished to make way for development. Along with the building, the murals painted by notable Phoenix artist Ted DeGrazia inside it were destroyed.
Bob Diehl, a community activist involved in efforts to preserve the building, said GreenHAUS represented something interesting and lively, unlike housing structures and other developments in the city that lack character and contribute nothing to the value of downtown Phoenix.
“It becomes cultural amnesia rather than cultural memory,” Diehl said.
The building had been a lot of things, including a gay bar titled 307 Lounge, Diehl said.
The loss of GreenHAUS and buildings like it in recent months were a blow to the Roosevelt Row community and some are worried that future demolitions will threaten the character and identity of downtown Phoenix, community members said.
“If [city officials] continue to do what they allow (developer) Baron [Properties] to do, they will lose in the end,” Diehl said.
However, awareness of historic designation qualifications and the city of Phoenix’s abilities can be the difference between a celebrated property and an empty gravel lot. Officials said the city is powerless to protect many buildings like GreenHAUS because of its lack of authority and resources.
“The idea with historic preservation is not to preserve everything old, it’s to preserve the most significant,” said Michelle Dodds, the city’s Historic Preservation Officer.
Dodds said there are three crucial requirements for a building to be deemed historic: significance, age and integrity.
Significance is defined as being associated with events, individuals and design characteristics that contribute to Phoenix’s history.
The problem for the GreenHAUS building was that, even though it was significant to the community, it wasn’t listed among the properties eligible for the preservation office to protect, Dodds said.
Dodds said the owners of GreenHAUS were not open to designating their property as historic. Unless it is a special case, the Historic Preservation office will not designate a property as historic without owner approval.
“Because the city has so few tools to try to maintain these older vintage buildings, people like to use historic preservation for everything,” Dodds said. “But it is not the appropriate tool to save every building. It is only the appropriate tool to save historically significant buildings.”
If a building doesn’t meet the historic requirements, and the community does not reach out to the city for help, then the city can’t do anything to save the building, Dodds said.
A bond fund can be used with threatened buildings that are eligible but not designated, Dodds said. In 2006, the state issued a $13 million bond to the Historic Preservation Commission.
The majority of the remaining money will be used in fiscal 2016 for the four departments of Historic Preservation including the Exterior Rehabilitation Grant, Demonstration Projects, Threatened Buildings Rehabilitation and Exterior Property Rehabilitation, a total of $1,104,373, according to a city council report. After that, $831,600 remains for a future project.
“I’m a little scared about what is going to happen over the next few years,” said Mark Briggs, the chair of the 2006 Historic Preservation Bond Subcommittee and member of the city of Phoenix Historic Preservation Commission. “There is going to be a lot of stuff that we can’t do anything about. Once it is gone, it’s gone.”
He estimated that the next bond fund wouldn’t be created until 2023. When the current money runs out, there will be no emergency funds to finance and protect threatened buildings that may be in danger from now until then, he said.
Briggs said the bulk of the city’s power is to slow developers down if they claim a building.
However, activists point to an additional safety net for a historic building: an easement. An easement is an insurance of protection that is agreed upon by seller and purchaser to maintain a building’s integrity for an allotted amount of time, he said.
Dodds said an easement prevents a building from being demolished. However, GreenHAUS wasn’t granted one because the money left in the bond fund wasn’t sufficient for an easement, she said.
The next option for a building like GreenHAUS is adaptive reuse, which is the concept of recycling an old building, she said.
Instead of demolishing a vintage structure, adaptive reuse calls for that building to be repurposed for another business while making minimal changes that don’t affect its historic significance, Dodds said.
Jim McPherson, Arizona Preservation Foundation board president, said awareness of the importance of the GreenHAUS building to the LGBT community came after it was threatened.
“We tore down one of the few buildings of that slice of Phoenix history before it had been documented,” he said.
To ensure that the preservation office is considering buildings of importance to the LGBT community, Dodds said the office will conduct a survey. These properties will then be placed on a list to be funded by the bond fund, if they were to be threatened, she said.
Diehl said he was relieved to hear about Dodd’s plan to include the LGBT community.
Briggs said the city should take advantage of all the empty gravel lots and use those for construction. With the lack of bond money, and no set plan for a renewal, there is a general fear for the unknown, he said.
“All we know is that we are running out of money,” Briggs said. “I am hopeful that the city steps up with a plan.”
Contact the reporter at lauren.negrete@asu.edu.
