Another one of Denton’s historic buildings is scheduled for demolition, possibly today.
The 3,800-square-foot brick building at 210 and 212 N. Austin St. has needed a new roof for years and has other structural problems, according to its owner, Chris Landry.
Most recently, the building was home to a furniture restorer but has been vacant since 2010. It was erected in 1910.
Landry inherited the building along with a few historic homes on Oakland and Oak streets, and another home on Glenwood Lane from his father, Harrell Landry, who was a professor at Texas Woman’s University. Landry said his father bought the building on Austin Street in 1976 and, for a brief time, had a French restaurant there.
“The Square downtown then wasn’t what it is now,” Landry said. “My father was definitely ahead of his time.”
A series of restaurants followed and then it became a workshop. His father later became ill with Alzheimer’s disease, and both the houses and the building got run down. Landry said he worked on the houses but balked when he saw the cost to rehabilitate the business building.
He talked to contractors and estimated it would cost more than $200,000 to shore up the walls, put on a new roof and repair the heating and air conditioning system. He wasn’t worried that he wouldn’t recover the investment, given what downtown rents fetch these days, but he was concerned that the building’s foundation and the plumbing and electrical systems would always need work, the way the older houses have been.
“They are costing me money every day,” Landry said.
He said he had offers for the property, including some that would have demolished the building for new apartment buildings, but he wasn’t keen to that. Instead, he’s going to lease the lot for a food truck court, he said.
If the building is demolished, it will be another loss of a historic building in the city in recent years.
In June, the Board of Regents at Texas Woman’s University voted to demolish University House. The Texas Historical Commission deemed it eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places, but the regents opted not to do that.
An historic home on East Oak Street was razed after the city of Denton acquired most of that block, which includes the former county tax office, from Denton County.
And a Houston developer bought properties along Fry Street in 2006 with plans to redevelop the area. Despite a public outcry to save the historic buildings, the developer demolished them in the summer of 2007.
Peggy Riddle, a member of the city’s Historic Landmark Commission and director for the Denton County Office of History and Culture, is working with a commission subcommittee to help identify other historic buildings, like the one on Austin Street, that may be threatened.
Even though the Square is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, those buildings could be threatened, too. Changes to 102 N. Locust and 110-112 N. Locust restored their historic integrity, but two others were changed enough that they could no longer be listed as “contributing” to the Square’s historic status. At 114 and 116 N. Locust, the recent addition of a second story, which included nonhistoric windows and a raised cornice, took those two buildings off the list.
When the city originally applied for the national listing, officials listed 50 buildings, 26 of which were “contributing” because of their historic integrity. The county office recently updated the listing at the request of the Texas Historic Commission, Riddle said. Generally, the National Register prefers that more than 50 percent of the buildings in a district be “contributing.”
“Otherwise, it could be de-listed,” Riddle said.
PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE can be reached at 940-566-6881 and via Twitter at @phwolfeDRC.