 There's history here. And here. There's history there. History is everywhere. Welcome, everybody. This is really exciting evening. My name is Kristi Van Aken. I am Director of Social Services for the Housing Authority of Jackson County. And we just want to celebrate this wonderful old building, the Grand Hotel, now the Grand Department's built in 1914, 1915. And so I'm just going to act as a moderator today. I'm not the expert here. We have some wonderful experts to talk about the history. And then when we bought it, we have Adroit and the architect here to talk about that piece. So any of you that saw the flyer, that's pretty much what I'm going to use as the order of people speaking. And first off, I just want, we have a lot of Housing Authority staff here. So if you all could just raise your hands. They're all in the corner. And our Executive Director, Scott Foster's here. So first up is Ben Truy. So take it away and I'll let you introduce yourself. All your accolades. No, I'm not going to introduce myself. I'm just going to start talking because I have too much to say in too short a amount of time. I unfortunately have 66 pictures to show you. But that means that you can focus on the pictures and not on me. We're going to start at the beginning. This is Medford in 1884, probably April. If you're taking this picture, looking down Main Street from where this picture was taken six months previously, there would have been nothing there. This town is less than six months old when this picture was taken. The first commercial orchards in the valley would be planted the next year in 1885. And but 20 years later, it's not working, Pat. Ah, okay, all right, thank you. Twenty years later, those orchards have reached maturity and the orchardists who are sitting on the best soil in the valley are making a thousand dollars an acre, some of them. Huge money in 1905. And the real estate guys get ahold of this and are broadcasting this. Right over across the whole country, they're broadcasting this in cities like London and Paris, come to the Rogue Valley, buy 10 acres, and you'll be set for life. Of course, it didn't work out that way, but that was the story. They printed beautiful brochures. Oh, that's, ah. These people are mean laughing at me. They're terrible. They're terrible. I should just run out. Thousand national magazines and 1910, by 1910, between 1900 census and 1910 census, the population of the valley has quadrupled. Huge growth. This depot across the street was built in 1910. Medford's population was under 10,000 at the time. And they sized this depot for a population of 25,000. People in Medford were saying Medford would be the next San Francisco. 1910, Medford built its first skyscraper. I thought you were going to take care of that. Well, I mean, you can't do it without the remote's technical control. Okay, we'll just pretend that's not there. Medford's first skyscraper went up, the four-story tall Garnett Corrie building. It's still there on the corner of Maine and Grape. And Medford is assuming the proportions of a small city. And Medford, in 1910, when this picture was taken, is what, 27 years old? And people are complaining that there are houses in the middle of the street because they're moving all the houses from the core area to the west side. So if you're driving around the west side and you see what people will call a farmhouse surrounded by tract houses, those weren't farmhouses. Those were houses that were built in the 1880s in downtown Medford and removed during this orchard boom, during this real estate boom, to accommodate commercial buildings. And the story is that Medford grew so fast that they couldn't build houses fast enough to accommodate them. They had to build a tent city. The real story is that there was more money in real estate speculation than there was in building rental properties. And that's why people had to stay in tents or one guy lived in a piano box. The tent city was right next to where the courthouse is today, that big brick building was Washington School, which was on the courthouse site. And here's where we start talking about the Barnums. This is William Barnum and he ran this five mile railroad between Medford and Jacksonville, one of the shortest railroads in the world. And this picture was taken before he took it over, but this picture was taken near Jacksonville. That's the little engine that they just brought back. The Ashlands bought it and you can climb on it now on Bigham Knoll and Jacksonville. William and his wife Bertha lived on Front Street. They had a lot of property on Front Street. They actually had just north of this building, just north of where the hotel would be built several years after this picture was taken. It was a family operation. It was not only one of the shortest railroads in the world. It was the only family owned and operated railroad in the world. And their youngest son, John Barnum, when he was 13, was the youngest certified railroad conductor in the world. And this is John Barnum in the middle in 1913, when he's what, 33 years old. And by this time, he's managing the railroad. This picture was taken in the railroad in their depot in Jacksonville. That's his grandfather with him. That depot is still there in Jacksonville. And in 1910, John Barnum announced that his family is going to build a hotel, build a commercial hotel across Front Street from the depot in Medford. Didn't get built in 1910, wasn't built in 1911 either, which is kind of surprising, because 1911 saw the biggest construction boom that Medford ever saw and maybe has seen since proportionally. This is the Medford Hotel built in 1911. Medford Hotel? This is the Holland Hotel, which is on the corner of 6th and 6th and 4th. At one time, Medford had five big hotels like this in downtown. Now, there are just two left and only one of them is the original building, this one. In 1911, they also built the Carnegie Library, Jackson School, Roosevelt School, the Sacred Heart Hospital, the Sparta Building, and the Medford Furniture and Hardware Company building, which you know as the Woolworth Building. All this construction in a town of 10,000 people, crazy. It was a boom, and if you ask me, I think that's what killed the boom. People saw this and realized, okay, we've gone too far, and maybe it's time to start pulling out. And the boom went bust in 1912, it sold the 10th city. And historians ever since have been trying to explain why the boom went bust. We couldn't have done anything wrong. It must have been a lack of irrigation or a crop failure or a drought. Well, this picture was taken in 1906. There was irrigation, not as much as there is now, but there was irrigation. And irrigation or no, you can't see it because this thing's there, but this was on the front page of the Medford Mail Tribune about the bumper crop in 1912. There was no crop failure. The boom went bust because it was a real estate boom. And that's what happens to real estate booms as we learned once again in 2008. And we'll forget again during the next real estate boom. But not everyone acknowledged that the boom was over and the barns were smart enough or lucky enough to sell their railroad. And the guy who bought it was going to lay, electrify the system and lay tracks to Jackson, lay tracks to Ashland and Grants Pass and make himself a lot of money. This picture is showing them laying tracks on East Main. The tracks did go out to Capitol Hill, East Medford, which again is crazy. 10,000 people, who's going to buy the tickets to make this trolley system pay? And you never did make any money off that thing. And the next year, 1914, the barns built their hotel. I guess it's made some economic sense to them at the time because they were across from the depot. The railroad is still the major transportation through the valley. Certainly it is for the salesman. Their idea was that this would be a commercial hotel. The salesman would stay here. Very quickly became the Barnum Apartments, however. And we only have one picture. The last picture was actually taken in 1922. This is the only picture we have of the Barnum Hotel. It's probably taken in Christmas of 1917. That's why there are flags on the wreath because the war is on. And we know it's the Barnum Hotel because you can see the cafe has a big B on it. What? What was this, the cafe? Presumably over there or somewhere. But the ground floor has been completely remodeled since a couple of times. William Barnum managed the hotel for a few years. He was their middle son. And in 1918, when Spanish flu came through, not only the Rogue Valley, he came through the whole world. In October, he and his wife and two-year-old son caught Spanish flu. They tried to tough it out here and ended up in that Sacred Heart Hospital on the top of Nob Hill. And he died. He died of the Spanish flu. And when they were burying him, his wife in the Oddfellow Cemetery, which is just the next hill over from where the hospital was, his wife and child were still in the hospital. The Oddfellow Cemetery, the I-O-F. You know, no one really knows. There are several different theories. You'll have to Google that, and you can read up all about it. So Brother George, the oldest brother, took over management at the hotel. And I looked for something to make this story interesting. I'm going through the newspapers thinking, oh, please let there be a murder. Please let there be a murder. And I found no murder. The most exciting thing that ever happened here was when it burned. 1921, the place burned. The fourth floor was gutted, and the roof was ruined. And it looks like the rest of the building was heavily water damaged. The fire broke out against the next day on the second floor. So there was lots of fire damage. Apparently a gas explosion was to blame. Interesting thing about this story, it gives us a list of the people who are living here, who are evicted. And also, who of Medford? Ward Spots was an orchardist. E.C. Jerome, Jerry Jerome, at the time was the Grand Puba of the Oaks Lodge on the next block over. Gus Clarker, Gus and Ada Clarker ran Clarker Printery downtown. So this was still a pretty fashionable place to live. That would all change. Still live? I agree. And this picture is obviously taken after the fire, but before the hotel was sold in 1928. And it was sold to John and Minnie Goswick, who bought the hotel, renamed it the Hotel Grand. Although interestingly, in almost all the newspaper references, it's called the Grand Hotel, not the Hotel Grand. Go figure. What's that? It's a fire star back there. I don't think they had a star system. Certainly didn't have a star system for Medford hotels. I don't know. I don't know. It was actually apartments. It was mostly long-term residents, even in those days. And John and Minnie ran the place until 1944. John died in 1938. Minnie died in 1944, and then it had several different owners over just the next fewer than 10 years. And I think that's when it went into its decline. The North Front was becoming pretty seedy. And if you go through the newspapers, the hotel is rarely mentioned in the papers through the 30s and the early 40s. Getting into the 50s, you start to see mentions where every time it's mentioned, it's mentioned in passing, and it's mentioned because at first it's because someone was robbed or assaulted near the Grand Hotel. Then later, someone who lived at the Grand Hotel was robbed or assaulted toward the late 50s and the 60s. Someone living at the Grand Hotel is doing the robbing or assaulting. This is not funny. This is sad. But the hotel had a commercial element as well that people would come through and rent space or have offices here. This psychic was here in 1941 briefly in room 207. This is from 1949, the real estate and insurance offices here in 1955. This photo studio from Seattle came through and set up offices here briefly. And come on, come on. And this section over here was a barbershop. Initially in 1915, it was a grocery store, and at least from the 30s on it, it was a barbershop. Jim Porter was there in 1955 and 1962. It was Mr. Tim, and he wasn't a barber. He was a hair shaper. In 1979, they're talking about tearing the thing down. And the articles point out that most of the residents are either old men or bus drivers from trailways, which was right across Fifth Street there, or employees of the Southern Pacific on the other side of Front Street. And looking at this picture, you count the ashtrays. At least there are three visible, probably more. I can just smell that room. I remember what rooms like that smelled like. And it still looks pretty good from the outside in 1979. But you can see this picture was taken in 1980 in the interior. You can see one of the reasons it lost its cache. They didn't have the money to update the furnishings. And you can't really blame the owners on that because you need to be a fancier place to charge rents to make it a fancy place. It's a vicious circle. And it just wasn't fashionable to live in a hotel in downtown Medford anymore. So it was really pretty inevitable. And you can see another 1980 picture, three ashtrays in this picture as well. And you can see the taped together window, not a lot of money going into maintenance. And this is a picture of the entrance here. You can see, I don't understand this decision, but someone thought it would be a good idea to put stairs to the basement right by the front door with a lovely inch pipe railing there. So I assume that's why this carpet is here instead of the original tile. They do have a chain going across though, for safety. Oh, yes. Yes. Beautiful. In 1981, they're going to tear it down. So they actually have an auction sale. You could go through the building and you could put bids on all the furnishings. You can see how old some of these furnishings were. Did you go through the building? What's that? Did you go through the building? I did. I didn't win anything. I'm too cheap, I guess. What did you bid on? Everything. I don't know. And this is probably from 1984. I hope George can fill in what happens after this because I'm going to get really vague. I know it went through a couple different owners and it was declared uninhabitable for several years. 1984 was probably finally bought by some Salt Lake developers who rehabbed it. And you can see why it desperately needed some love. Really a sad picture. And to save the building, they had to tear out a lot of it. And I assume this is a picture of the room we're in today. And that's all I have to say, George. Now you can tell us what I said, what I got wrong and tell me what happened from here. Thank you, Ben. So I'm going to kind of go backwards a little bit and then I'm going to go forwards too. First off, I want to talk a little bit about 1915 when this hotel was built. Not so much Medford, but really what was going on. Just to give everybody, I think of buildings as sort of little time travelers. This building was built in a different world than we all live in. And when it was built, the front page of the paper was all about President Woodrow Wilson and Pancho Villa running a muck in Mexico. So that's what was going on when the Barms decided to build this. Ben talked a little bit about that this was built for traveling salespeople, single men mostly, who still use the train. The train was still the way you got around. The Pacific Highway, the first part of the Pacific Highway, what we think of as Highway 99, wouldn't be paved for another year when you could go from Medford to Central Point on a paved road. You couldn't go through the whole length of Oregon until 1923 without hitting mud or gravel somewhere on Highway 99. Basically when I tell this story, I say it would be another three years before those slackers in California finished their road so you could drive the whole way from Mexico to Canada on a paved road. People showed up at the depot, buy train, could take their baggage across here. Salespeople would set up and probably use some portion of this room or a nearby building for what were called sample rooms. Have you ever seen the first part of the musical, the music man, where all the guys are, they're drummers, they're drummers going out drumming up business, salespeople. You didn't want, if you sold anvils, you didn't want to walk around town and go into all the blacksmiths and so you would come to a hotel and you would set up your samples. We have one sample room left in Medford. It's the building that's right behind the Medford Hotel was literally built as the sample room. There's another one in Josephine County which is now our restaurant behind the old Hotel Josephine. So this hotel was built with single rooms, small rooms for single traveling men. Within 10 years, not only would the Pacific Highway be paved but really rail travel would start to give away to automobiles and downtown hotels did not compete terribly well when the traveling public went to autos. We start to get those new fangled contraptions, motor hotels or auto courts and it's only a matter of time before somebody takes motor and hotel and comes up with what? You got it. Out on the highway, away from all of the traffic where you had more parking and you could stay with your car because your car was kind of, you know, important. And that's why this hotel converts to apartments so quick because it was designed for use that no longer was needed. And that's not atypical where all of these working class, working men hotels, single room hotels and they're all up and down, the rail line are converted into apartments or single room occupancies and this is just one of them. And Medford with the real estate bust and then the growth of town, I mean I'm wandering all over, but 6th Street, prior to 1926, you could not get across the railroad reservation in a vehicle except on Main Street. 6th Street did not go through. When they cut 6th Street through in 1926, Medford had a huge parade because now they had two ways to get across the railroad reservation. They made all kinds, there was like a major, they called it the jubilee or something and it was a big deal. So this hotel was totally geared towards a technology across the street that changed within 10 years of the time it was built and it fell on these hard times and you have all of the stories that Ben showed you and it ends up in the 1980s and the early 1980s some of you might remember Front Street was really rough. There were the bus depot here and a bunch of little shabby bars and pool parlors and places that respectable folk didn't go and Rod Reed from Ashland tried to put together a National Register Historic District, the Front Street Historic District, which the city was not terribly thrilled about and all of the buildings were really modest and preservation had not gotten to the point where it recognized anything other than great architecture and that nomination failed and as a result the city said, well they were not of any value and that's why we had that great three hour parking lot right over there on the other side of what used to be low leased as I recall. What's now, Mexico? Habaneros. Habaneros. Thank you. It used to, wasn't it used to be low leased before that? Yeah. And low leased is the one when they tore down the bus station and built the addition anyway. So this was like not the best part of town and that's why the building looked like it did at the end of Ben's slideshow. The couple of guys, the developers that came in in the 19 late 80s, Pinigree and Dahl out of South Lake City were investors that bought old hotels. They bought both the Grand Hotel and the Hotel Medford. Took advantage of tax credits from the federal government both for restoration and for assisted housing and renovated them. And that's what happened to this hotel. And as Tom and Mark will tell you, and I worked on the Housing Authority's renovation of this hotel, I would not accuse Pinigree and Dahl of being known for high quality. And so they came in and they sort of did what they did to this building. They took their tax credits and then they moved on. With both of these hotels, frankly, the Medford Hotel is a whole other story. I think Ben's really wise to point out that at the five multi-story hotels that once existed in Medford, this is really the only one that's left. Because the Medford Hotel is what I usually call a building that looks a whole lot like the one that used to be there. Because there's really nothing other than the first floor concrete cage of that building that was built. So anyway, so that's what happened to this building. It sort of was built at the wrong time for the wrong purpose in the wrong location. And it struggled along for basically 70, 80 years until it finally got the attention that it needed, which is what happens to it next. And I think I will turn it over to Mark. What a great segment. So if I can get this fall, there we go, you figure that. So I'm Mark McKekney with Oregon Architecture and my Tom Walker with the Drake Construction. And so we were the team that was involved. The Housing Authority actually asked to help put this hotel back together and restore some of its original charm. And so we'll talk a little bit about how that happened. I think as George kind of alluded, the hotel was renovated in the late 1980s and it, I think probably from 1990, it suffered from maintenance, from lack of maintenance. And they pretty much by the time the Housing Authority actually bought it, the owners at the time had wrung every nickel that they could possibly have out of the building. And so we were really tasked with a couple of things, I'm going to talk just in kind of general terms. One, of course, is the building had no air conditioning. And so all the people that lived here, if they wanted air conditioning, they had to put in a window unit. That was causing some stress on the electrical system. And the heating system was basically could put. Not to mention that some of the air conditioning units were ready to fall out. Oh, well, there was that too, yes. And the window probably with them. So we worked very closely with George on this because the building had some federal financing. We had, it basically was the same as if we were rehabbing the building to the secretary standard. So before they would actually let us replace the windows, we had to go out and actually do a survey of every single window. So a poor guy in my office that is scared to death of heights was on a man lift around the entire building, photographing and looking at every window and documenting the condition of it. And I think that's about the time we got involved. Yes. And it was a call from Betty saying, I have this much money. How much can we do? So Mark and I teamed up and started putting plans together. And so what we tried to do was, so I mean, it matters probably in our business, not so much in yours, but so we needed to provide an efficient mechanical system. We really needed to replace the windows. And while we were at it, we needed to make the building more energy efficient. And all of that had to be done while the building was occupied? Oh, yes. While the building was occupied. The state put did not move them out. That's right. On a popper's budget. Right. And so what we tried to do is we really, oh, well, you should, anyway, and, oh, I'm sorry, my mind is running about 4,000 miles that way and my mouth is going about 2,000 miles that way. One other thing that was interesting is one leftover from the 1980 renovation was a gigantic pile of dirt in the basement that nobody knew. Yeah, it was a structural upgrade that was done in the 80s. And if you're in a basement and you have to dig new footings, the dirt's really hard to get rid of. It's really hard to get out of the basement. So what's the easiest thing to do? Leave it there. Just push it into the corner. Just push it into the side and leave it there. So fast forward, what, 24 years and Betty said, and by the way, when you guys are on your way out the door, could you take that 60 yards of dirt out of the basement and figure out how to get it out of there? That was one of the more interesting challenges of the project is how to get 60 yards of dirt out of a hole about that big, through a basement window, eight or nine feet up. We did it. Yep. Yep. And so, yep, yep, no dirt down there now. So with the limited budget we had, I think we did end up with a fairly nice project. And thankfully, George really worked with the state so that we could spend our money on the little bit of discretionary money we had on really this public space, which is this room here. And then we did some fancy things with the apartment next door to actually make it livable. Since it was a commercial space to start with and it got changed to a residential one, we had to do some things with the windows. That didn't make the person feel like they were on public display all the time. You know, fortunately for the building, what, 95 years into its history, the housing authority acquired it and cared enough to take the time and the effort to restore the building. I think our task was probably threefold, first preserve it, let's get a roof on it, let's stop the building from deteriorating, repoint the masonry, new windows to keep the building from falling further into disrepair. And then it was, let's try to upgrade it. Let's make it more energy efficient. Let's make it more comfortable for the tenants. And the windows did that. Like Mark had mentioned, we got all new heating and cooling systems, which that was the first time in the building's history that it actually had cooling, some electrical. And finally, but not least, was let's try to put the building back to some state of its former glory. You know, we were able to put some canopies, awnings out front. We were able to refinish the stucco around the base of the building, clean the building. We pressure washed the entire building. We repainted the little marquise on the corners, the garden bolt on the corner. And it's amazing what you can do with a relatively small budget to make the building look similar to what it did. I mean, the inside of this room here, new windows, new wood trim. And it still looks very nice today. It looks a lot like the pictures from the 1950s. It does. That's our story, and we're sticking to it. Am I next? You get to ask. I'm Scott Foster. I'm the executive director of the Housing Authority. And I was hired in September of 1986, just the month before the rehab by the fellows in Salt Lake was done. It was a very interesting project then. They did a lot of hotels in Oregon. They did the New Medford Hotel. They did the Chandler Hotel in Coos Bay. They did the Aster Hotel in Astoria. And they did a hotel in Albany also. And as George said, they did the minimum in the rehab and the minimum to take care of it as well. We were very lucky to get Mark and Tom as a team to help us restore the hotel because, as they said, we had a limited budget. We're very happy with the way it turned out. I can add a couple of comments to the history. The hotel was actually closed in about 83, I think, and wasn't occupied between 83 and 86 by any tenants. It was purchased by one of the local veterans organizations. And they had hoped to model it for veterans housing. And that didn't work out. They were unable to find financing. And Norm Dolly and Bill Pingry from Salt Lake City bought it from them. We have owned it since 2009, which is when we actually did the rehabilitation and rented the rooms as affordable housing. And we're very happy to have it in our portfolio. And we hope to keep it up, looking as good as it does. My name is Kathy DeWolf. And I am on the city's Landmarks and Historic Preservation Commission. So I guess I'm representing the city tonight. And our commission, which is made up of citizens like you, has the responsibility to review before construction or work starts any update changes to work on a historic building, such as this building is. And we had the pleasure of reviewing this project presented by the architect and the builders and saw the wonderful designs to preserve, restore, and bring back to its former glory this wonderful building here. And we also then, the next year, each year we give out awards for projects that have been completed in the city each year on historic buildings and structures. And we had the pleasure the following year to honor this building with one of our awards for the restoration and preservation of it.