Rescue, restore, reconsider: Our historic buildings

Earlier this month I was pleased to see Holden's Hotwheels open for business in a new location at 1st Street and 5th Avenue. What pleased me wasn't that it was a new building, but that it was very old.

The building at 422 1st St., was built around 1914 by J. K. Bramble, a lawyer and the founder of the weekly newspaper, the Hill County Democrat. Over the the last 98 years the Bramble building has housed a dry goods store, an auto parts store, two different newspapers, and surprisingly, a bordello in the 1960s and '70s. Check out http://www.havrehillpreservation.org for more history. It's a building filled with history, character and stories.

I don't know what sort of cost analysis Holden's did when they decided to move to a new, larger location. Maybe it was a conscious decision to rescue and restore a Havre landmark. Maybe it was simply cheaper to buy and add to an old building rather than build a new one from scratch. Maybe it was a little of both.

When the new, over-sized garage was added to the old Bramble building, it could have been purely utilitarian, a plain slab of sheet metal that did the job and nothing more. But the choice to add brickwork to the corners — and to carefully mirror the brick patterns of the Bramble building's facade — shows a great respect for the visual presence of the original structure. The builders added onto the building without disfiguring it, creating new useful space while maintaining what was already there. Now, instead of an empty ruin facing Havre's main artery, we have a living business. A harmonious combination of old and new. History is preserved while progress continues.

Havre still has a few pockets of century-old architecture, but their care, use and restoration has not always been respectful. Take a walk down 1st Street and you'll see some beautiful brickwork and masonry, but there's even more that's been hidden, obscured under sheet metal and plywood.

The Oddfellows Hall on 4th Avenue has been vacant and on the market for years, waiting silently for an entrepreneur to see its potential. The Masonic Temple's long-term struggle to remain financially viable is well known. Donaldson Hall, the most beautiful building on Montana State University-Northern's campus, almost found salvation in the form of a grant for Bullhook Clinic, but its future is again uncertain. Northern's administration is re-evaluating plans to preserve and utilize Donaldson in the future — and the reasons for balking at the clinic's proposal are understandable — but the old girl's bones can't take many more untended winters.

Empty houses die of loneliness. That's not just a bit of emo poetry; without human attention — heat in the winter, water running through the pipes, windows and doors opening and closing, circulating fresh air — a building gets sick. Pipes burst, mold grows, basements flood, roofs and foundations leak. Windows get broken and the elements intrude.

Cold Hi-Line winters have rendered many abandoned buildings unlivable over the years. There are a lot of holes in our city center that once held historic buildings brought down by fire or structural neglect. (I was pretty young when Gandalf's bar, near where Town Square is now, collapsed suddenly one day in the late '80s, but I remember it vividly. My aunt's little two-door Mazda was crushed by falling masonry while she was inside the bank.)

But it's not all doom and decay for Havre's architectural pride. The historic old Post Office, after years in limbo, has been purchased by Marc Whitacre and his wife Erica Farmer and is being re-imagined as a multi-use building, with a private residence up top and commercial business space on the lower floors. The Atrium, originally the Buttrey Building (which has gone through many renovations and changes over the years, and is now tragically clad in that ubiquitous sheet metal), is thriving as a unique, lively shopping center with more character than a dozen strip malls.

History shouldn't just consist of crumbling monuments and solemn museums. Old buildings can learn new tricks. Change is inevitable, but it doesn't have to be destructive. Our future can build upon our past without paving over it.

(Caleb Hutchins is design editor for the Havre Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected].)