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BUENA VISTA

For decades, Avery-Parsons Elementary in Buena Vista had a building problem. 

It wasn’t the school, but the old gymnasium next door. 

The school district owned the McGinnis Gym, but it was a wreck. And the deeply underfunded district was at a loss for what to do with it. 

The long, brick building that had once been Buena Vista’s main gathering space was not only an eyesore but it was filled with asbestos and lead. It was built in 1936 through the Public Works Administration program that employed Americans during the worst days of the Great Depression. But it fell out of use in 1986 and was condemned in 2008. 

In the decades since, water had seeped into the roof and the cancer-causing asbestos in the drywall and joints. Lead paint covered 5,000 square feet of the walls and floors. 

The roof wasn’t even attached anymore, said Katy Welter, a Buena Vista resident and co-founder, with her husband, Rick Bieterman, of Watershed, Inc., a nonprofit that restores buildings for public benefit. “And it sat, like, 50 feet from the elementary school, so it was perilously close to there being an asbestos spill on the campus. It was posing a threat to our most sensitive population.”  

The McGinnis Gym was also a repository for memories created over the 50 years it was in use, Welter said. “People held reunions and funerals and weddings and proms, and nobody wanted to see it torn down, but they couldn’t figure out what to do with it.”

So when the school district put out a call for help with the gym in 2021, she did what any transactional lawyer, owner of a working hay farm and mother of two kids under age 5 would have done: She ran through her knowledge of historic preservation, looked up state and federal funding sources for such projects and told the school, “I think we might be able to do something.” 

FIRST PHOTO: The outside of the recently open and restored, 1930s McGinnis Gym in Buena Vista. This was a 2-year restoration campaign accomplished by Watershed. SECOND PHOTO: Katy Welter, the president of Watershed, walks with daughter, Millie, 4, inside of the McGinnis Gym on Nov. 11. (Anna Stonehouse, Special to The Colorado Sun)

There began a two-and-a-half-year project that included gutting the building and making it usable again. The total cost was around $3 million, said Welter, contributed to by the Environmental Protection Agency brownfields grant program, the Colorado State Historical Fund, the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade historic preservation tax credits and the Buena Vista School District. 

But when Watershed and the school district turned it back to the community Nov. 11 it wasn’t a “new” McGinnis Gym. 

It was renovated, toxin-free and gleaming, but it retained its original character. Now peals of laughter will bounce off the walls as kids race in for afterschool programs. The town rec department will use it for things like pickleball. It’ll be a space for the performing arts. And it’s already doing one of historic preservation’s most important jobs, said Pat Howlett, president of the Trinidad-Las Animas County Chamber of Commerce, another beneficiary of historic preservation funding in Colorado. 

“When you start resurrecting some of these incredible buildings, it sets the tone in a community for what’s possible,” he said. That’s vital to rural towns like Trinidad, which has struggled to shake its historic boom-and-bust economy. “You can see what a town is investing in by driving around,” he added. Projects like McGinnis Gym, and the East Street School in Trinidad, “bring hope to a community. They reverse trends in a community, and they show the way forward to a community.” 

Since Colorado’s State Historical Fund was created in 1990, History Colorado has awarded $365,439,294 in historic preservation grants and the Office of International Trade and Economic Development has issued $57 million in historic preservation tax credits to projects in each of the state’s 64 counties. Some are further along than others. But many are proving what proponents have always known: When you pour time, money and passion into carefully preserving history, things that might appear dead can breathe new life into communities. 

Not just for asbestos-ridden buildings 

In 2023, History Colorado awarded $11,041,369 to 119 historic preservation projects through taxes on gaming in three historic mountain towns: Black Hawk, Cripple Creek and Central City.  

A total of $5,947,841 was spent on 62 projects in rural communities. The grants ranged from $50,000 to $250,000 in general grants to mini grants of $50,000 or less.

Rebecca Goodwin, preservation officer of Otero County’s historic preservation board, urges people to avoid thinking of historic preservation as “just about buildings.”

“It’s also about sites and landscapes and structures and all of the things that go with it,” she said. “For example, we did a project to document an African American homestead community south of Manzanola in Otero County, called The Dry, and there are no buildings remaining.” 

Without physical evidence, The Dry’s history had been largely forgotten. So Otero County contracted with archaeologist Michelle Slaughter to work with the University of Denver graduate program on an archeological field school and public outreach through a youth archaeology workshop, Goodwin said. The goal was “to let kids see what archeologists do and to relay why it matters that if you see something on the ground you don’t pick it up. Like a piece of pottery or small toy by a homestead. Pick that up and lose it, and now you’ve lost the story.” 

— Pat Howlett, president of the Trinidad-Las Animas County Chamber of Commerce

The State Historical Fund also funded the development of a National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Valley View-Hillcrest Cemetery in Rocky Ford that was once two cemeteries that were built between the 1890s and 1920s and laid out in two completely different designs. One was laid out in a pattern of overlapping ovals and the other in a grid, Goodwin said.  

Otero County wanted the cemetery preserved “because the contrasting designs tell the story of what was happening in the country at the time,” Goodwin added. “But more importantly, we wanted a national register designation because there were a lot of pioneers and business people and notables there, but also a lot of early Hispanics and a very large Japanese American section with over 250 burial sites, many with Japanese writing on them,” she added.  

In the past year, History Colorado awarded other structureless projects. A $178,000 grant went to Historic St. Elmo and Chalk Creek Canyon Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the ghost town of St. Elmo and various other historic sites in Chaffee County’s Chalk Creek Canyon.

Another $187,316 is helping Dolores River Boating Advocates conduct an ethnographic study to identify sites along a 241-mile span of the Dolores River associated with Native American Tribes with ancestral homelands.

And $114,636 went to The Community Foundation of the San Luis Valley, which we’ll get to later. 

But all preservation is “basically about people,” Goodwin said. Which includes another person who used historic preservation benefits to revive a key building in Leadville. 

Fancy cabins named for female sex workers and an event center for quinceañeras 

For decades, Nan Anderson and her husband Dave have been preserving the past in projects across the country through their architectural firm, Anderson Hallas Architects. 

Many of them are internationally renowned, including a refresh of the visitor center displaying 148-million-year-old fossils at Dinosaur National Monument, the 40 National Register Historic Structures project in the Denver Mountain Parks System, and a modernization project in the Colorado capitol building’s legislative chambers that retained its original character, among others. 

But several years ago, the Andersons discovered a different kind of project: a beat-down, boarded-up railroad depot just off Harrison Avenue, the main drag in Leadville.

It’s called Freight and they transformed it into a rustic-chic event space with several cabins for rent with help from OEDIT’s historic preservation tax credit incentive.  

They first saw it on a walk with their grandchildren in 2017, and acting on instinct, they broke in.

“We have kind of a history with that, because of our preservation work,” Nan said. Once inside, they fell in love. 

Nevermind the filthy interior, the floor riddled with holes or the fact that there was no running water, sewer, electricity or a real ceiling. What they saw was an opportunity to bring a building that had been crucial to life in Leadville in the 1880s back to service in a way that current residents and visitors could appreciate. 

To fund the project, they invested $367,000 of their money to buy the old lumberyard on which the depot sat, plus the depot and a couple of outbuildings. Cleaning the depot, fitting it with modern utilities and restoring it cost around $2 million. And they choose not to disclose the cost of the handful of cabins they built, each honoring a female sex worker from the 1800s and rentable for a reasonable nightly price, because they created those without help from OEDIT. 

OEDIT awarded them $435,000 in historic preservation tax credits for qualifying rehabilitation expenses on the depot. Nan said rural projects like theirs receive 35% of the expenditures back as a tax rebate compared to 25% if they’re in urban areas. 

“But frankly, it’s really hard to make a business proposition for having enough income in the hinterland to justify such a huge expenditure,” she said. 

Yet Freight is a tribute to a time gone by and a place Leadville residents come to dance, watch ski movies, get married, discuss important issues, and, for the many nonprofits that keep the community up and running, to hold fundraisers in a beautifully restored event center (the depot) for free or at a discounted rate. 

That’s the beauty of Freight for Adam Ducharme, tourism and economic development director for the town of Leadville. 

FIRST PHOTO: Nan Anderson, co-owner of Freight, and CEO Amber Rossman, make up a bed in one of The Freight’s cabins on Nov. 14. SECOND PHOTO: A view of a fully restored event space at Freight. (Anna Stonehouse, Special to The Colorado Sun)

“We actually need three Freights. I can’t have enough Freights in our community,” he said. “The in-kind services that they donate is equivalent to, like, 50 grand a year. They host everything from quinceañeras to a public forum to discuss issues that affect our whole community. I just think it’s an incredible space that is set up to do so many different things, and the fact that they’re also a very successful hotel and event space is just brilliant.”

The real tally of in-kind services Freight gave Leadville in 2024 is far greater, according to CEO Amber Rossman. There were 22 nonprofit events in 2024, for which beneficiaries paid $7,950, while the market rate was $61,750, she said. 

“Additionally, we gave significant discounts to the local school district and local government,” by holding six events for which beneficiaries paid $2,150, compared to the market rate of $14,000. 

The money harkens back to something Sara Kappel, preservation tax credits and incentives specialist for the State Historic Preservation Office, said about the return on investment for historic preservation. Several studies have shown “in general, it’s one dollar for every four dollars spent.” 

Funding pieces of the whole 

In the years since OEDIT started the historic tax credit program, it has helped fund projects in every corner of Colorado.  

Some have seen quick success and others are pieces of a whole that will take longer to bring to fruition. 

One of the latter is the People’s Market in San Luis, known formerly as the R&R Market. For eight generations the little store built in 1857 was up and running. But in 2022, its last proprietors retired and turned it over to the Acequia Institute, a nonprofit with plans to make it both a thriving store and health hub for the community.

The sale went through with funding from state and federal grants as well as private sources. Part of the vision was to have local farmers grow crops they could sell in the market, so residents could have fresh food without having to travel to other towns to get it. 

But renovation of the building was stalled by various problems including black mold, asbestos, and plumbing problems, said Jason Medina, executive director of the Community Foundation of the San Luis Valley. 

Project workers “pulled out all of the refrigeration because there had been some stuff that was leaking and they found asbestos in some of the floor tiles, so abatement for all of that happened,” he added. But the renovation problems continued until “they had to completely stop and start all over.”  

By October, progress had been made on the market. But it still needed money to complete the renovation. Medina said that could come from the State Historical Fund, but only if the new owners “make sure what they’re going to do will be completely historically accurate.” 

In order to do that, they need to know exactly what the original store looked like. So the Acequia Institute applied for a State Historical Fund preservation grant and was awarded $114,336 to create comprehensive construction documents that will guide the ongoing development. 

The end goal is “to rejuvenate one of the state’s earliest, and most unique Spanish-influenced communities, provide a roadmap for other rural communities looking to build self-sufficiency and to give us healthy food options,” Medina said. “There are literally no food options left within a 60-mile radius besides the Family Dollar in San Luis and the Dollar General in Fort Garland, where everything is canned or frozen or full of preservatives. ” 

An arts school for artists of all kinds

A hundred miles east of San Luis is one of those successful projects. 

At least that’s how it appears on the outside, and what you would imagine if you knew the person behind it. 

Dana Crawford is known as a development genius, a preservation guru and in her own words a “nice nag” who gets things done. In her six-decade career, she has redeveloped some of Colorado’s most historic buildings. Think Larimer Square. Think Union Station. Think East Street School in Trinidad, which functioned as an elementary school from 1919 until it closed in 2002, only to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007 and transformed into housing geared toward artists in 2023.

Lisa Evans, a longtime friend and colleague of Crawford and manager of the East Street School project, said Crawford saw the building during a trip to Trinidad around 2018 and saw its potential to “get a new lease on life.” She connected with the RedLine Contemporary Arts Center in Denver through artist Clark Richert, and brought them in as partners. When she learned that the school sat in one of OEDIT’s Opportunity Zones, she went to Four Points Funding, which invests in the zones, “while knowing she was also going to go for the historic preservation tax credits,” Evans said. 

FIRST PHOTO: The East Street School in Trinidad was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. Opened in 1919, the building stood idle for 20 years until 2023 when developers transformed it into 15 live-work units, artist studio rentals and a culinary arts space. SECOND PHOTO: Shelby Smith brings in a load of clothing as she moves into her loft apartment in the building. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)

The project received a $4 million grant from Colorado Creative Industries, another OEDIT program. The rest of the $9.3 million has been coming in different chunks, including a $1.9 million loan from a new market tax credit lender and $1 million in historic preservation tax credits for phase one, rehabilitating the roof, exterior walls and first floor, according to Evans.  

Phase two included completion of the second floor interior, outdoor landscaping and “all of the horizontal work around the building,” Evans said, for which the project received another historic tax credit of $575,000. Four Points Funding brought $1.8 million in equity. 

“In very simple terms, the construction costs of the project are double what they would have been in Denver. So if it weren’t for the grants and tax credits this building would have been demoed and gone to the dump,” she added. 

Instead, it has become a version of what Crawford envisioned, if not the exact thing. 

It’s a two-story building preserved, like all qualifying projects, according to the Interior Department’s historic preservation standards and guidelines. 

It was built with artists in mind, so some of the 15, private live/work units have an elevated platform where residents can put things like a potter’s wheel or a painter’s easel. Although “artist” at the East Street School has many different meanings. 

Jake Liuzzo, the property manager, said “the vision has been slow to be realized.” What he means is currently only two artists are living in the apartments; “the rest are working-class folks: a doctor, a dentist, a short-order cook and someone in auto detailing.” 

If it weren’t for the grants and tax credits this building would have been demoed and gone to the dump.

— Lisa Evans, Manager of the East Street School project

But Evans said a doctor is in “the medical arts.” Carry that forward and a dentist is in the “oral hygiene arts.” A short-order cook? Culinary artist. Auto-detailer? Car painter. 

And one of the unexpected benefits of the school is that because landlords can’t discriminate when choosing tenants, anyone is legally entitled to live there. 

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That opens up clean, safe, affordable housing in the form of 550- to 1020-square-foot loft apartments and studios that run from $950 to $1,450 per month in a town where much of the available housing “is old and certainly not up to what a lot of folks want,” Liuzzo said. 

“The units are gorgeous and it’s a really pretty building,” he added. “So it’s serving folks that are working class with a nice place to live. The leasing company and RedLine are also incredibly responsive to fixing anything that has gone wrong.” And it’s still fulfilling the original vision, just not in a linear way. 

“A very diverse bunch” of artists have come through East Street, Liuzzo said. “One fellow from the African American arts community was in need of housing, so he ended up getting a space.” Currently a Native American artist lives there, “and getting away, for him, is a big deal,” Liuzzo added. A traveling mural painter “who wanted to see some real mountains and do some real painting,” came through. And if you want to see artists’ work-in-progress, you can drop in and cruise through day studios on the lower level. 

“It’s been kind of a neat gift for Trinidad in that way,” Liuzzo said.