ATTICA — A statewide preservation group is calling attention once again to the heart of Fountain County’s largest city.
For the second straight year, downtown Attica has been featured on Indiana Landmarks “10 Most Endangered List” of historic places on the verge of being lost without an action plan to save them.
The downtown historic district “remains in need of investment and a plan to protect declining landmarks,” according to a post on the group’s website. The group called for a preservation ordinance and a local historic designation to boost efforts in revitalizing the area.
At the center of the call to action is the long-vacant Hotel Attica, which partially collapsed in a 2012 windstorm. The hotel, where Hollywood celebrities booked rooms on brief stopovers, later became a restaurant and has sat crumbling since the storm.
The owner is now donating the building and selling the land to Attica Main Street. The organization doesn’t have the money for renovations and plans are being set to find a permanent owner.
“We’re just hoping to attract someone who sees that it’s not a lost cause because there’s still hope for it, and I’m hoping that someone will … see that hope and save it,” Main Street President Lexxi Haddock said.
A contest for an upcoming HGTV town makeover series gave new energy to local revitalization efforts, she added.
Attica was one of more than 2,600 small towns in the running for the cable network’s “Home Town Takeover.” An Alabama town won the competition, but everyone from high school students to nursing home residents sent in videos supporting Attica.
“To see this thing that you drive down to get to Pizza King is something that everyone was quietly wanting to hold on to,” Haddock said, “but with that campaign of trying to attract HGTV, it brought everyone out into the public and saying, ‘Yes, this is something that I find really important. I want to make sure that it’s here so that my kids and grandkids have the same memories.’”
Main Street is distributing state grant funds to local businesses recovering from the COVID-19 shutdown. The city placed a 1% tax on local food and beverage sales to generate more funding for revitalizing downtown.
Younger people are opening businesses downtown, including a pet grooming shop and a real estate office. The children of the owner of a furniture and carpeting store are attracting customers with new window displays.
Challenges remain with addressing buildings deemed unsafe by the city. A business fair is in the works.
“Our biggest hurdle to start with [was] just trying to get people to understand, like, what we have in our own backyards and kind of change the attitude, and I think we finally accomplished that, thankfully,” said Haddock, who joined Main Street three years ago.
“So we actually have people that are seeing what we have in our town and talking about the good of it and not just the bad of it.”
