Seventeen years ago, the Montgomery County Commissioners spent almost $200,000 to demolish several historic structures at the corner of Market and Washington streets (that it had also purchased adjacent to the historic courthouse). As the Journal Review reported back then, the plan was for those parcels to become an annex and parking garage. Almost two decades later, this highly visible site remains a parking lot, creating an asphalt gash where a valuable traditional streetscape once helped define downtown Crawfordsville for over a century.
Today, commissioners plan to build a new courthouse annex to relieve overcrowded office space, and there is a possibility that consultants will recommend building an important civic site outside of downtown. In this waning era of car-centric development patterns, it is still common to build on a greenfield site with a large parking lot on the edge of or outside the city limits — and of course, it’s the easiest approach for architects and construction companies. But this would be a missed opportunity. The county should consider doing right by our recovering historic downtown by repurposing several surviving 19th and early-20th century commercial buildings — or at least locating these offices downtown, as past commissioners once promised, in the historic district of our county seat.
While downtown Crawfordsville has made great progress — notably in Pike Place, Fusion 54, the planned Ben Hur Hotel, and the rebuilt courthouse clocktower — our county government can also contribute to enlivening our public realm, and that means locating most civic business there. At a cursory glance of the real estate listings, at least 100,000 square feet of commercial buildings are for sale in the downtown blocks immediately adjacent to our historic courthouse, and many are either vacant or underutilized. Most of these irreplaceable historic edifices are the very symbol of our local and cultural capital, and are more likely to deteriorate without sufficient investment.
Yes, reusing our existing downtown structures may be just as expensive as a shiny new building. But if local taxpayers are going to foot the bill, our county offices should help us build pride in our heritage as citizens walk down improved streets and employees spend money in local eateries and shops. Yes, parking will be marginally less convenient than driving to Walmart, but saving our historic county seat will be worth having to walk half a block. So in seeking bids for the annex, the commissioners should contact at least one developer who specializes in what is called “adaptive reuse.”
Adaptive reuse sounds sophisticated, but is simply newfangled language that borrows from very old approaches, much as generations past built tracts of land incrementally. Sometimes you need to develop on farmland, but often slightly more density or improved old buildings can do the job. This small-c “conservative” way of moving things forward is the way to build real wealth, both in terms of preserving our heritage and bottom-line economics. When comparing the advantages of adaptive reuse with new construction, we should also be cautious about committing to more sprawling infrastructure; expanding roads and sewer lines on the edge of town also increases taxpayers’ long-term maintenance liabilities.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support growth, but careful and incremental planning supports resilient places. For example, because our 19th-century downtown was built with a traditional, adaptable development pattern, communities like ours with authentic cultural resources are now sitting on a goldmine of economic development — or tragically, throwing away important landmarks and streetscapes. Crawfordsville Main Street has led the way in promoting the value of investing in our historic core, promoting respected studies on these issues from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Less than 20 years ago, our community allowed wanton demolition of historic structures, but further into the 21st century, we are now more cautious.
We have seen great adaptive reuse in our own backyard, with our city leading the way in the old high school at the Athena Center and the former hospital known as Whitlock Place. As our commissioners make one of the most important public land-use decisions for a generation, our fellow citizens should follow in this tested but innovative path to take our community forward.
Lewis McCrary lives in Crawfordsville. A journalist and editor, he covers the New Urbanism movement for The American Conservative magazine, based in Washington.