FEDS ANNOUNCE NEW COURTHOUSE SITE

                        Project could present challenges for historic preservation

It’s not every day someone announces they’re buying an entire city block.

That’s what happened Friday, as the federal government’s General Services Administration distributed a release saying it would move forward with plans to buy the downtown block bounded by 10th and 11th streets and Gurnee and Moore avenues.

The announcement is a big step in a years-long effort to find a replacement site for the current courthouse, at the southeast corner of Noble and 12th streets. It comes at a time when a number of downtown projects are nearing fruition, potentially re-making a sizeable chunk of the city’s core.

But while the project — when it begins — doubtless will have a big impact, not everyone with an interest in downtown redevelopment is thrilled with the GSA’s choice.

The site is one of three the government had been considering for more than a year, including the former location of the First Baptist Church of Anniston at 15th Street and Gurnee Avenue and the block just to the north of the one the GSA chose. That block, between 11th and 12th streets and Moore and Gurnee, the site of City Hall, the Anniston Water Works and Sewer Board and property owned by the Calhoun County Commission, had originally been the planned site for a new courthouse in negotiations among the federal government, the city and the county, local officials said.

Friday’s announcement said “factors such as the site’s ability to satisfy our project purpose, security, environmental, physical characteristics, traffic and parking” all contributed to the selection of the land between 10th and 11th streets. The release also cited “the connectivity to the social cultural need economic base for Anniston.”

The GSA, which manages federal property, emailed the release Friday, but it was marked as being a press release from the city of Anniston, signed by City Manager Don Hoyt. Attempts Friday to reach Hoyt and Mayor Gene Robinson by phone were unsuccessful.

Jim Tyson, owner of Tyson’s Model City Glass at the corner of 10th Street and Gurnee Avenue, said he was informed of the government’s choice in a letter delivered by FedEx early this week. He said he was surprised and pleased with the choice.

“What I’m most excited about is it’s coming to Anniston and not going anywhere else,” Tyson said. “It’s a real plus for Anniston and Calhoun County.”

Tyson, who said he’d been acting as a “block chairman” for his neighbors, said he expected property values on nearby blocks to rise because of demand for professional offices and other businesses looking to be close to the courthouse.

In the release, Mayor Gene Robinson was quoted as saying the site selection “provides us the notice to effectively proceed with comprehensive, downtown core district planning.” In 2009, Robinson told The Star he was hopeful the GSA would pick the City Hall site.

In 2005, local officials thought they had just such a deal. That year, the local agencies approved selling their property to the GSA with the expectation that the sale was imminent, with a total purchase price of $1.76 million. But federal officials later said they’d learned part of the site was in a flood plain. The GSA invited other parties to suggest alternate sites and held a public hearing on the three finalists in March 2009.

A GSA spokesman said Friday that negotiations and purchase agreements with property owners on the new site could take up to a year. After that, it’s unclear when construction could start on the new courthouse, as Congress must first allocate money for the building. Eventually, it will house U.S. district and bankruptcy courts, plus space for the U.S Marshals Service and a congressional office.

Progress meets preservation

Betsy Bean, director of the city’s downtown redevelopment agency, Spirit of Anniston, called the GSA’s choice “a mixed blessing.”

While she was excited about the possibilities for development, Bean said she was concerned about the impact on downtown’s historic character. She was especially concerned, she said, about altering the streetscape on the Gurnee Avenue side of the block. East across Gurnee is the site of an old bus station, where a bus carrying Freedom Riders — activists protesting segregation of interstate bus lines — was attacked by locals in 1961. The incident made international headlines.

Bean has proposed plans to use Anniston’s civil rights-era history as a magnet for tourists interested in the period, much as Memphis and Birmingham have capitalized on museums and landmarks in the struggle for blacks’ rights. The blocks around the former bus station have changed little in the intervening decades, she said. She said she hoped reviews by the federal government before beginning construction would take all that into account.

“It’s not the first time that progress and preservation have had to meet in the middle,” Bean said. “Hopefully they will be sensitive to the importance of what happened in that area.”

David Schneider, director of the Alabama Trust for Historic Preservation and vice chairman of the city’s Historic Preservation Commission, said he needed time to asses the full impact of the GSA’s decision, but called that decision “frustrating.” He too was concerned about the proximity to historic sites, and to the possibility of losing an entire block of buildings from a period earlier in the city’s history.

“We’d rather have it than not,” Schneider said of the project. “It’s just frustrating that they’d ignore what has been a rather long public comment process.”

He said the government would have to conduct a study of the impact on historic structures because the block is part of a recently expanded historic district. The Alabama Historical Commission would then review the government’s

plans, he said.

A domino of development

Robert Downing listed a number of reasons he was unhappy with the government’s choice. As a county commissioner, he had been part of the negotiations to sell the county’s property on the block to the north. He also owns Downing’s General Store, on the northeast corner of the block the government announced it would buy. His parents opened the store, which sells seed, gardening and hardware supplies and fabric, in the early 1960s.

“Four generation of folks of my family have made a living out of the store,” he said, including his grandparents and his son, who works there now.

Downing said he did not want to stand in the way of his neighbors who own other property on the block. But, like Bean and Schneider, he was worried about the loss of historic features of downtown.

“Certainly we have not had a very good record on historic preservation,” he said of downtown. “I think the federal government’s efforts to take a (block in a) historic district certainly will not help the present efforts.”

The old proposal to place the courthouse on the City Hall block was to be the first domino in a series of planned redevelopment projects, local officials said. The Water Works planned to renovate the vacant, 10-story former home of AmSouth Bank, built in the 1920s, and move its offices there, leasing more space to other tenants. Anniston was to look for a new City Hall, with the vacant and deteriorating Anniston Land Co. building mentioned as a possible site.

The water board, with the help of the city’s purchase of its existing property, is moving ahead with the 10-story project now. It expects to move into the new space, just a block away from the GSA’s new courthouse site, by the end of the year. Jim Miller, general manager of the Water Works, said Friday the old plan fell under the category of “the best-laid plans of mice and men.” He said the GSA’s choice would be good for downtown.

“We’re just tickled to death,” Miller said. “Federal courthouses are economic engines any way you slice it.”

He said the water board’s eventual new neighbor would create demand for office space in the 10-story building now known as Watermark Tower.

“When we’re done we’ll have the nicest real estate in the county,” he said.

And another project nearby, the site of the former Chalk Line mill just west of the GSA’s planned site, is being redeveloped by the city. It will soon be home to a new office for the state Department of Human Resources.

Meanwhile, the fate of one more historic property in the city remains unknown. The government’s existing federal courthouse at 12th and Noble was built in 1906 as a post office, and later became the courthouse.

Schneider said the federal government typically requires buyers of its historic properties to preserve them.

Contact Metro Editor Ben Cunningham at 256235-3542.