From Preservation Online, the online magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation

www.preservationonline.org

A setting worthy of a Henry James novel, Washington Park in Bridgeport, Conn., was the very model of a modern urban neighborhood. Families of factory managers, bankers, and merchants lived in three dozen high-style Victorian houses surrounding a five-acre landscaped square, thus living out an 1851 vision of P.T. Barnum, the circus impresario, one-term mayor of the coastal city and developer of Washington Park.

A century after Barnum’s plan was fully realized in the 1890s, the square and surrounding blocks had become a crime zone that Bridgeport police attempted to contain. Dealers peddled crack in daylight, street gangs battled over turf, absentee landlords allowed once-grand properties to fall apart, and tenants, many of them immigrants in search of a better life, were trapped in an urban nightmare.

Two miles from downtown Detroit, a similar fate seemed to await four imposing houses and two carriage barns, c. 1890, located just off Woodward Avenue near the Detroit Institute of Arts. Although structurally sound, the mansions and outbuildings on Ferry Street had been spottily maintained for 30 years or so, and the severe blight just two blocks away seemed contagious. There was talk of demolishing the six buildings for a parking lot.

Bridgeport’s Washington Park and Detroit’s Ferry Street houses have in common middle-to-upper-class origins, inner-city decline, recent rehabilitation, patchwork financing, and a certain vision and dogged determination on the part of their restorers. They also share, along with other recipients listed here, 2002 National Trust Honor Awards given on Oct. 10 at the National Preservation Conference in Cleveland.

In Bridgeport, Washington Park resident Robert Halstead set up a nonprofit partnership that received deeds from the city to 10 houses scattered around the square. "So much affordable housing has been torn down in Fairfield County," Halstead says. "There’s a big shortage of places to live for people like health care and construction workers, secretaries, and waitresses, and the tax credit funding was available."

Sixty percent of the project’s development costs came from Connecticut low-income housing tax credits, and the city channeled $457,000 in federal Community Development Block Grant funds into the project; the balance came from conventional financing. Today, thanks to an investment of $5 million, all 35 units in the 10 houses are rented to low-income tenants. (Architects David Barbour and Mark Halstead designed the renovations.) The park itself, with its Victorian bandstand, playgrounds, and basketball courts, has changed into a place where mothers come to watch their children at play, joggers stride through without fear of being mugged, and young men compete in basketball leagues. With the Washington Park project leading the way, two more housing rehabilitation projects have begun nearby, and a former ghetto is becoming a neighborhood again.

In Detroit, the developers of the Inn on Ferry Street have invested $8 million in the cluster of six buildings, creating a 42-room inn that will accommodate visitors to nearby arts institutions, Wayne State University, and the Detroit Medical Center. Behind the restored Queen Anne and Romanesque revival facades are period rooms outfitted with designer lighting, silk draperies, and a mix of antiques and reproductions.

It took the University Cultural Center Association, the Detroit Institute of the Arts, financial consultant Zachary Associates, and restoration architect Elizabeth Knibbe of Ypsilanti, Mich., a decade to find financing and complete the inn. Traditional mortgagors shunned the project, so the project’s managers set up a for-profit subsidiary and lined up 23 funding sources, including foundation grants, loans and grants from the city, and preservation tax credits.

"We looked at a variety of redevelopment options," says Sue Mosey, president of the Ferry Street Development Co. and owner of the inn. "The area is redeveloping into a neighborhood of mixed incomes, and the nearby cultural institutions needed a good place for visitors to stay."

Poster cities in the 1990s for disinvestment, Bridgeport and Detroit today find themselves hosts to high-profile bellwethers of urban rejuvenation.

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