Artsy tenant sought for updated Port Gibson building|[6/3/06]

Published 12:00 am Monday, June 5, 2006

PORT GIBSON – Port Gibson residents have celebrated the renovation of the first floor of a historic downtown building and are hoping an art-related tenant will occupy it.

Renovations to the first floor of the Meyer-Marx Building, 623 Market St., are complete and plans are in place to finish its upstairs and rent it to an artist or an art-related business.

The city’s preservation commission hosted a May 15 reception attended by about 80 people, said Al Hollingsworth, Port Gibson Main Street director from its inception in 1990 until 2004.

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In October 2001, the city bought the Meyer-Marx building for $10,000. In two equal state Community Heritage Preservation grant awards since then, the city has received $300,000 to rehabilitate the building. The 2001 award was for structural stabilization; the 2002 award was for the phase that has most recently been completed – exterior and interior restoration and roof repair.

The city government has provided $180,000 in grant-matching funds, Hollingsworth said.

&#8220This space is competitive with good space anywhere,” said Hollingsworth. &#8220This floor is absolutely gorgeous.”

The building floor is made of old pine, Hollingsworth said. Its second floor has a large rectangular hole so that much of the ceiling appears two stories high. A peaked skylight on the building’s roof allows natural light in through a window about 20 feet by 10 feet.

Hollingsworth explained that the first building on the spot was built between about 1815 and 1830. An 1839 fire destroyed that building before the building that has been restored was built. Hollingsworth said 10 two-story units were built on or near the site by a developer of &#8220utilitarian, commercial buildings” – essentially the strip malls of their day.

The building that is being renovated has been unoccupied since at least five to 10 years before Port Gibson’s Board of Mayor and Aldermen decided to buy the building.

&#8220No one else would’ve brought this building back,” Hollingsworth said of that purchase by the city. &#8220We would be in a vacant lot.”

The building’s last three tenants were Bock’s Department Store, Krause’s Department Store and the Meyer-Marx business, Hollingsworth said. They were department, dry-goods or drug stores, Hollingsworth added.

Port Gibson mayor Amelda Arnold said the city applied for and received the grants with the idea that the building would be renovated for use in an art-related purpose.

&#8220It would be great if this became like an arts center – an art mall, with lots of different artists,” Arnold said. The city is searching for the right tenant for the building, Arnold said.

Funds from an applied-for third grant would allow the third and final phase of work on the building to begin this fall, Arnold said. Any tenant who may move into the building would need to agree to allow access for that work to be performed, Hollingsworth said.

The project’s architect is listed as Waycaster & Associates of Natchez and its general contractor as George Harris Building Roofing Company of Hazlehurst.

The building is next door to an art gallery and about a block south of Mississippi Cultural Crossroads, the nonprofit arts agency for Port Gibson and Claiborne County.

It is just northwest of and around the corner from another vacant building the city bought, for $40,000 in 2001, the 105-year-old, former Mississippi National Bank Building on Walnut Street. About $70,000 has been invested in the early stages of renovating that building, Arnold said.

The state grants were funded through bonds issued by the state and came through a program called the Community Heritage Preservation Grant program that was begun by the Legislature in 2001, said Mingo Tingle of the Historic Preservation Division of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

For a building to be eligible, it must be designated a Mississippi Landmark by the MDAH. Eligible buildings are schools and courthouses with the designation and other buildings in communities that have been certified through a National Park Service historic-preservation program.

Port Gibson is among the Mississippi cities that have received that NPS certification and the Meyer-Marx project was made grant-eligible through that program.

Governments and nonprofits are eligible to apply for the grants. They must match each grant award with at least 20 percent of the cost of each restoration project, Tingle said.

The Legislature has funded $18.19 million in 93 CHPG grants over four years, beginning in 2001.

Vicksburg is also an NPS Certified Local Government community.

Other grants that have been funded through the program are: