 My name is Gayle Landreth and I want you to know that preservation works. I found out through a post on Facebook that this building was going to be for sale and likely be torn down. I looked in the resource book which were written in the 1980s and I found this structure and it said that there needed to be more research on it so I started digging and the more I dug the more I found that was available and there was plenty that convinced me that this was the real deal. It is possibly and probably the only remaining structure from World War I's camp buoy army base that was here from 1917 to 1919. All of the structures that were associated with that army base training camp were only meant to be temporary and so the fact that we have even a portion of what was a hospital building is amazing and worth saving. I knew that this house deserved historic designation and I probably do know more about that than the average person since I've been on the board of Historic Fort Worth for a long time. The whole project took from very beginning from when I saw it to the end right now year and a half and that would be my process of doing the research, buying it, applying for the landmark status and getting that approved and then getting the plans from an architect finding a contractor and so forth. So I started my research in July last year and by August I had what I felt like was enough to support my case. After that then the work began on it for me to turn this into a living structure that's appropriate for this century. The house was really in bad shape. It had been lived in for a long time with actually rather large families been chopped up into little rooms. It had wallboard but no insulation. It had window units that were falling off. It had holes in the ceilings, holes in the floors and by the time it was for sale it had been completely gutted on the inside. But the good news was was that that exposed the diagonal wood slats that were just behind the wallboards and that convinced me that this is the real thing because I saw a photograph of the interior of the hospital building and it was identical right down to the door, to the window and and all of it. So that convinced me. I have redone houses before but they've always been the ones that I've lived in. So this one is the first time I've made an investment in something other than my own structures. I called the real estate agent and I said I'd like to go see it and he said we'll just go in and I thought uh-oh and I saw some plans that were laid out on a little makeshift table and you could see that someone had thought about doing it but probably thought oh it's just going to be too expensive. One of the reasons why preservation works is because of the historic site tax exemptions that are available if you go through the process the right way. The way to get approval for such exemptions is to either apply for landmark status on an individual building or have a structure that is part of a historic site. Some of our neighborhoods in Fort Worth are already historically marked. The taxable values from the year prior to the application are used to base the year on a praised taxable values and so they have a differentiation between your land values and your improvements and in order to get the historic site tax exemptions you have to spend 20 percent of the improvement value which is really not that hard to do when you have a project that needs as much done to it as this but then you will have the tax exemptions which are a huge bonus to all homeowners and property owners for the future and not only do you get the historic site tax exemptions but they would be transferred to the next owner should you sell it so that's a really good deal and it makes economic sense for preservation but to be honest even if I hadn't had the ability to get the tax exemptions I would have done this project anyway this is important to me and I'm doing this for Fort Worth. If the right project came along I think I could probably do this again in a very short time history is forgotten and right at the end of my street where I live we have Veterans Memorial Park and there's a beautiful statue there called In Flandersfield about World War One and I had no idea that the headquarters are actually where my house is sitting today so I knew all about World War One and its impact but not as much as I probably should have and certainly way more than most people that even live in Arlington Heights and to me that's important I mean we're all here standing on the shoulders of those who have come before us and the same is true with our city their success makes the rest of it successful also it's an important story and Fort Worth should be proud.