foster
PHOTO BY EMILY MOSELEY
If you’ve been in downtown Lexington lately you’ve no doubt noticed that Short Street and the Cheapside area have sprung to life. But looming there in the very center of it all is the imposing old Fayette County Courthouse. More than 100 years old, the imposing stone structure is off limits to the public after the discovery of lead, asbestos and mold contamination inside. The Courthouse Square Foundation estimates a complete renovation of the century old building at about $18 million. A reactivated foundation has been working quietly in recent months to develop a fresh approach to restoration and a campaign to get it done. Foster Ockerman, Jr. is president of the Courthouse Square Foundation.
TM (Tom Martin): The old courthouse has been shuttered after discovery of mold, lead paint and asbestos. It’s sitting there in this condition, in the middle of the otherwise booming Cheapside district. Where do things stand?
FO (Foster Ockerman): It is critical, with everything happening at the Fifth Third Pavilion on Cheapside, the restaurants and bars, that we can’t have this black hole right in the middle of all of that. There has got to be a solution. Fortunately, Mayor [Jim] Gray and his administration are committed to the restoration of the building, and that’s the key. We’re not going to do a quick fix. We’re not going to rush in and abate the lead without being sensitive to the fact that a lot of this lead paint is 200-year-old ornamentation murals that need to be preserved and contained and not just scraped off, removed and vacuumed out of the building.
TM: So what you’re talking about is actually now obscured from view?
FO: When the courthouse was originally built, it had an open atrium that ran 111 feet from the ground floor up to the inside of the dome. The dome was ornamented. It had brass railings; it had murals.
It actually is a very early electrified building in Lexington. It had light bulbs in the dome, so that when you looked up in the evening, it was like looking up at a starry sky. And there was what’s called a steamboat staircase, a wide shaped staircase that filled the central atrium to a balcony that ran around it. So you had this large, open space and the courtrooms and courthouse offices and county offices around it.
In the 1960s, there was pressure for additional judges, additional courtrooms, for air conditioning, modern bathroom facilities and modern elevators instead of the old cage elevators from 1900. The solution was to fill up this atrium with a mechanical stack. And today when you go into the old courthouse you’ll see two elevators, and around the corner, the bathrooms, and in between, hidden in the walls, are all the mechanical and plumbing. They had to put all the chilling units and all the HVAC equipment somewhere, and so they filled up the dome with those mechanics.
TM: The latest estimate of the costs of reopening the building is $12 million. Does that take into account the removal of that equipment and replacing it with new mechanicals?
FO: The $12 million estimate is an update. It was about $8 million in 2000. Of course, every year it takes to get ready, it’s going to cost a little more. It did contemplate removing the HVAC, [and] moving the elevators to a different location in the building so that we could leave the atrium open. Newer equipment, of course, is smaller, more efficient.
TM: Why, in your view, should the Fayette County taxpayer view this restoration as an imperative?
FO: Well, first off, we own it. This has been the court square, the public square, the government building, since Lexington was founded. It’s marked off from the very first plat. So it’s our building, and it is iconic.
Everybody who comes downtown passes it, if they’re not actually going to it. In the museum, we frequently had visitors who thought the Chamber of Commerce would be there, who thought that the tours of downtown Lexington would start there. It’s on every postcard; it’s in every picture anybody has of downtown. And we can’t afford to lose a building of this importance both architecturally and for its history. It’s part of Lexington.
TM: Some have suggested that some sort of public/private partnership might make this work.
FO: What is happening right now is that the city has found the grant money to go in and actually survey the entire building for environmental hazards, and a separate source of funding for a structural assessment of the building. The assumption architecturally has been that it’s sound, but we really don’t know that. So we’re in the early stages of investigating the status of the building.
In order to take advantage of tax credits, of course, you have to have a taxable entity receiving income to offset the credits. So there has to be a for-profit entity. It’s a government-owned building. There probably will need to be a long-term lease — at least 50 years, if not the classic 99-year peppercorn lease — in order to have a long enough time for the possession to qualify as though it were ownership to take advantage of the taxes.
At the same time, we’re going to want to attract, and need to attract, grants and private philanthropy here in Lexington — and at the end of the day, probably some government funding, as well — to put the whole thing together to make it work.
TM: What is needed to complete the financing structure?
FO: First, a $6 million endowment that is going to have to all be private philanthropy. The government can’t fund that. Grant makers traditionally do not fund that. We’ve learned from the Kentucky Theater and the Lyric and the Downtown Art Center where renovations have been done, and there was no money to maintain what had been restored. We’ve got to have the endowment component. It might be possible to condo the building so that the first floor is a long-term lease to a taxable entity, the second and third floor is museum supported by the endowment, which is not just for the museum but for the building. And the fourth floor might have offices for the Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Community Foundation or other related nonprofits, or even businesses that have some kind of related function. That’s what we’ve got to figure out in the next several months.
TM: One idea expressed for the street level might be a restaurant and perhaps some retail space that would blend in with the street life that’s already occurring and support nonprofit uses of other spaces in the building.
FO: Those ideas have been put around. There’s even one idea floating around to put a one-story glass enclosure around the plaza or the veranda. If that occurred, you could increase the retail space by 30 percent and create a very bright, vibrant sort of atmosphere in the evening, with the lights of the restaurant activity there, maybe show windows and mannequins. It’s one of those things that is an important enough project that we can’t afford to close out any ideas at this stage. We need to look for the best packages that will make it work.
TM: Restoration was back-burnered for a while. The recession hit. And now the closing of the building has called attention to it once again. What are the prospects of finally seeing something happen?
FO: I think the prospects are good. And I say that because the pieces seem to be the right size. Of the $12 million to restore it — and maybe even call it $14 million, assuming it’s going to take a couple of years to get there and maybe the lead abatement costs us more than we thought — $2 million to $3 million of that could be the result of tax credit savings.
If CentrePointe is successful as a tax increment financed or TIF project, when you look at the list of projects that the TIF money was to be spent for, they’ve either already been done or they are off the table. A tunnel under Limestone from Phoenix Park Garage to CentrePointe: that’s not going to happen anymore. There’s not going to be a garage. A pedway from CentrePointe over to the parking garage by Fifth Third; that’s not going to happen. A renovation of Cheapside Park; that’s already been taken care of. So you look at the list, and once you get past infrastructure for the hotel, restoring the courthouse is next. There could be $6 to $8 million, without being too optimistic about how that might shake out. You look at a couple million dollars in grants; you look at a couple million dollars, possibly even traditional financing.Three or $4 million coming from the urban county government, and the taxpayers would get a $20 million project for $3 or $4 million dollars of taxpayer investment in three to five years, by which time the city’s bonding capacity ought to recover enough to allow that.
TM: So, what’s the message to Lexington?
FO: I think the importance of keeping the heart of Lexington beating is the message. We’ve saved a lot of buildings in time in Lexington. Perhaps the one that comes closest to this is the Opera House, and fortunately that was wrapped into the original Rupp Arena Project. That’s why we were hoping that the courthouse might be in the rough district.
Now, looking at it from the almost-crisis opportunity we have now that it’s been closed and forced onto the table, this may be doable — and faster and easier than Rupp District, because that’s a huge number. It involves a huge amount of money from a lot of different places. Comparatively, this is a small project for a municipal project. It shouldn’t be that hard to do, but it is something we have to do.