Celebrating Our Stories Through Historic Rehabilitation
By Thom Amdur
6 min read
Timmy Awards honor repurposing great buildings from the past
Every building tells a story. Every brick laid and iron fixture cast tells a tale of prosperity and growth. Every crumbling wall and cracked window speaks of a shift that shaped us. These properties are living testaments to our successes and challenges as communities.
Decades ago, when many sought to destroy these buildings in a quest to build something new, Tim Anderson saw something more than dilapidation and decay. He saw a chance to preserve our history, and carry it with us into the future. He saw buildings that not only had the chance to be beautiful again, but could serve the new and evolving needs of our communities.
Anderson helped launch a new movement, pioneering the adaptive reuse of historical buildings. He transformed Boston’s Old City Hall into a mixed use property, completing the nation’s first privately-funded restoration project. Anderson’s work to convert the old Central Grammar School in Gloucester, MA, into housing for the elderly became a national model for adapting former schools in urban areas for senior housing. He also ushered in a new generation of historic rehabilitation advocates as a teacher of adaptive reuse at Boston University.
“Tim was so unconventional, so creative, and so fun. All the students in the class were totally captivated by him,” said Bill MacRostie, Senior Partner at MacRostie Historic Advisors and a former student of Tim Anderson.
MacRostie recalled classes held in Anderson’s apartment in the Prince’s Spaghetti Factory in Boston’s North End, which was among the first historic rehabilitation projects to convert an industrial building to residential use. “The classes always included a few glasses of wine, and always lively discussions. What was crystal clear from the course was that Tim knew what he was talking about from both a development and design perspective, and really knew how to engage his students. Everyone who knew Tim remembers this: he was a one-of-a kind guy.”
Opportunities for reuse expanded when the Federal Historic Preservation Tax Incentives Program became law as part of the Tax Reform Act of 1976. Since then, the Historic Tax Credit has leveraged more than $69 billion in private investment to preserve 39,600 historic properties.
In celebration of Anderson’s passion for historic rehabilitation, and its ripple effect across the development community, the National Housing & Rehabilitation Association hosts the J. Timothy Anderson Awards for Excellence in Historic Rehabilitation each year. Fondly referred to as “The Timmys,” the awards honor the preservation and restoration of America’s historic properties and celebrate innovative repurposing of great buildings from our past.
Since the National Housing & Rehabilitation Association launched the J. Timothy Anderson Awards 11 years ago, it has celebrated more than 85 of these properties for their innovative approaches to preserving historical architecture in 26 states across the country. The first Timmy Awards ceremony honored properties in just three categories: Best Historic Rehabilitation: Affordable Housing, Best Historic Rehabilitation: Market-Rate or Mixed-Income Housing and Most Innovative Adaptive Reuse or Commercial Rehabilitation. In the Timmys inaugural year, the Wharf of Rivertown in Chester, PA, won the last of these categories. Once an electric generating station in the early 20th century, Preferred Real Estate transformed the property into office space, reusing elements of the original design, including 20,000 tons of brick and concrete from the original building that were used to create the property’s parking lot. The property became a key part of the revival of Chester, a distressed industrial town on the Delaware River just south of Philadelphia.
Over the years, the Timmy Awards expanded, adding new categories to celebrate the range of innovative approaches and uses for historic rehabilitation. In 2007, NH&RA created a category to recognize the best of green and sustainable historic rehabilitation. The following year, Venerable Group, Inc., won this award for White Stag Block, which merged parts of three historic buildings—the Bickel Block Building, the Skidmore Block Building, and the White Stag and Hirsch-Weiss Building. The $38 million project layered federal historic tax credits, federal new markets tax credits, and business energy tax credits into its financing. The final product was a facility where the University of Oregon could host degree programs for the university’s students. The property includes many sustainable features, including 12,000 square feet of wood flooring made from the old university gym.
In 2009, the Timmy Awards added categories to specifically highlight properties that leveraged additional housing tax credits. Toward Independent Living & Learning (TILL), a non-profit organization based in Chelsea, MA, won Best Historic Rehabilitation Project Utilizing LIHTCs – Large for rehabilitating three run-down structures once considered to be eye sores for the community’s downtown Bellingham Square Historic District. These deteriorating structures were given new life as 23 units of affordable housing and an 11,000 square foot facility for TILL’s supportive programming for individuals with disabilities.
In another innovative example of using multiple tax credits, Oklahoma City-based Wiggin Properties, LLC, redeveloped a vacant, dilapidated 10-story office building in their city. It was originally built in 1910 during Tulsa’s oil boom and had sat vacant for more than a decade. The property’s newest iteration as a mixed-use facility won the developer a 2012 Timmy Award for Best Historic Rehabilitation Utilizing New Markets Tax Credits. The $34.5 million project was funded by several sources, including federal new markets tax credits, federal and state historic tax credits, a HUD Section 223(f) mortgage and a soft loan from the city of Tulsa. Mayo 420 includes 67 apartments on eight floors, a YMCA, a restaurant, and a community room and rooftop terrace.
Each of these award-winners was considered alongside the others in the applicant pool by a multi-disciplinary panel of judges, comprised of individuals with backgrounds in architecture, real estate development, construction, public policy, historic preservation and economic development. They, and all Timmy Award winners, are selected based on several criteria, including:
- Overall design and quality
- Interpretation and respect of historic elements
- Market/financial success
- Innovative approach to construction and use of building materials
- Community impact
- Sustainability
The prescient projects that excel in these categories illustrate the vision set forth by Tim Anderson more than fifty years ago. They continue a tradition of bringing our buildings with us to continue to tell our stories to generations to come.
