There a couple of pockets in Tallahassee of historically significant homes. Preservationists at TalTrust are working to support homeowners in maintaining the city’s architectural past.
Wednesday evening at Burnett Park, just south of Gaines St., twenty or so people are chatting before the presentation begins. They’re here to hear from Casey Rychlik who spent a few months restoring the house with the metal roof sitting just across the street.
“Getting the call a couple weeks ago to give this talk was gratifying,” Rychlik says. “I hadn’t really thought of myself as a preserver of history, but I guess I am. I hadn’t thought of it in that context.”
Rychlik explains the structure, known as the Douglas house, was built at least 130 years ago. He passes around an 1885 illustrated map pointing out what we now call Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. In the map it’s a broad thoroughfare with trees in the center, rather than the divided roadway we see now. And down near the bottom left, on the corner of the boulevard and unnamed street, is the Douglas house.
Melissa Stoller is Executive Director of the Tallahassee Trust for Historic Preservation—or TalTrust—and she says maintaining buildings like this one is an important part of building community and retaining heritage.
“To have those historic buildings still here, still in use, still occupied really gives people a sense of what the community’s history is, what it was like, and you know you’re saving those properties for future,” Stoller says.
But Stoller says preservation is also about re-purposing.
“As we’re going up here to Grasslands, this is another example of educating the public about the value of reuse of historic properties." Stoller says. "It may be a similar use to what the property had before, it may be a completely new use.”
Grasslands brewery is one of a handful of businesses that have set up shop in a rehabilitated warehouse near the intersection of Gaines and Macomb Streets.
Rychlik explains getting the building on the historic register and working with TalTrust made it much easier to complete the restoration.
“I saved quite a bit of money on building permits,” Rychlik says, “they don’t charge you for building permits if you’re on the historic register.”
“And they also got me a grant when it was time to do the roof,” he continues. “I basically paid for a shingle roof and I got a metal roof, so they gave me about $7,000.”
Taltrust is a non-profit organized in 1988 that helps regulate architectural changes for historic properties in the Myers Park, Calhoun, and Park Avenue districts.
