Tag Archives: Van Buren Street in Downtown Phoenix

Historic Roosevelt Home 2017 Tour Explores Phoenix’s Rich History

The annual Historic Roosevelt Neighborhood Home Tour will be taking place Sunday, November 19 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Presented by the Roosevelt Action Association, this tour will feature many historic properties in Phoenix’s “first suburb.”

Craftsman Bungalow,Historic,Phoenix,Roosevelt,neighborhood,District,real estate

A perfect example of an early twentieth century home in Roosevelt Historic District

The tour will take you through neighborhoods built in the late 19th century to the 1930s, from McDowell to Van Buren, and Central to 7th Avenue. This tour will explore the history of the featured homes as well as the turn of the century architecture, including bungalows, Neoclassical, Tudor, Period Revival and Southwest Vernacular homes.

The Roosevelt Neighborhood was the first neighborhood in Phoenix to receive historic designation, one of 35 historic neighborhoods in Phoenix. It is considered the city’s first suburb, and was the home to several prominent early Phoenicians.

Learn about the residents, the historic architecture, and so much more as you walk down the 100-year old streets alongside towering, century-old palm trees and explore the rich history of Phoenix.

The Roosevelt Action Association holds this informative historic home tour every year to promote the understanding of Phoenix’s past, and to foster neighborhood pride. There will also be food trucks and a craft fair, making this a perfect family event.

The self-guided tour tickets are $13 through Nov. 18 and $16 day of event. Guests can buy tickets to tour guided by “hip historian” Marshall Shore for $22 through Nov. 18 and $25 day of event.

If you go:

What: The Historic Home Tour
When: Sunday, November 19, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Where:  Between McDowell and Van Buren, from 7th to Central Avenues.
Tickets: Buy online through Nov. 18 or at the event on Nov. 19. Visit rooseveltneighborhood.org

The Historic Roosevelt Neighborhood is a modern name for a series of historic neighborhoods that grew North of the city between 1893 and 1930 and it spans from McDowell to Van Buren and from Central Ave to 7th Avenue. Every year, The Roosevelt Action Association hosts a family friendly and informative historical home tour where you can explore turn-of-the-century architecture (Bungalows, Neoclassical, Tudor, Period Revival and Southwest Vernacular Homes).

The 120-Year-Old Clinton Campbell House Is Slated for Demolition

TUESDAY, JUNE 13, 2017 AT 6 A.M By Robrt L. Pela

Historic Phoenix Real Estate

It looks like Historic Phoenix is about to lose another old building. This one, the Clinton Campbell house, is among a handful of 19th-century homes left downtown. It’s slated for demolition later this summer.

Historic,Phoenix,real estate, Clinton Campbell House“There are only about 50 houses that are this old in the entire city,” says Steve Dreiseszun, a historic preservationist and one of the advocates of the Clinton Campbell house. “We think it could be adaptively reused and incorporated into a residential redevelopment.” The home, Dreiseszun argues, could stand “as a bridge to the past” as part of the new owner’s residential development plan.

Located downtown at 357 North Fourth Avenue, between Fillmore and Van Buren Streets, the 120-year-old house was built by Clinton Campbell, a well-regarded Phoenix builder. Several of Campbell’s other buildings still stand, and are protected by the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. These include the El Zaribah Shrine Auditorium on West Washington Street and ASU’s President’s House, a western Colonial structure built in 1907.

Glasir Capital Partners LLC, a development firm, paid $750,000 for the Campbell parcel in 2015. The sale included the house and two vacant lots on either side of it. Glasir planned to demolish the building, arguing that restoring it would cause “an unnecessary economic hardship.”

Following protocol, the developer was required to prove that financial burden before getting the go-ahead to tear down the former Campbell home. The company’s defense is hard to deny. Rehabbing the building would cost about $400 per square foot, Glasir reported, an exorbitant amount for an unassuming reclamation project. Real estate math suggests that a restoration of the house would cost $200,000 more than what the home would be worth on the market.

In March of last year, Glasir filed a demolition permit after determining the building’s age and significance wouldn’t keep them from tearing it down. A month later, the Historic Preservation Commission initiated a historic overlay, which usually results in historic designation and special zoning from the city. It’s a popular stalling tactic that can prevent demolition of a significant building while preservationists regroup.

But the Campbell building’s poor condition ultimately outweighed its value as an historic Phoenix home. The house has been damaged by fire and would require significant repairs before it could be moved to another lot, an increasingly popular means of saving old buildings here. Relocating the building would, the new owners determined, be too costly. Moving the house would require that power lines in its path be repositioned, another added expense to relocation.

The city offered no financial assistance in saving the building, having spent its 2006 historic preservation bond money on other projects. National historic tax credits weren’t an incentive for the developers, either. In the end, relocation and preservation of the building was going to top out at more than $500,000.

An appeal filed last week looks like a final attempt to save the house. “It’s not a lost cause,” Dreiseszun insists. On June 19, he reports, community members will present adaptive reuse alternatives to the developer and members of Historic Preservation.

“People say, ‘Well, it’s just one building, you should let this one go,’” Dreiseszun says. “But eventually we can ‘just one’ ourselves into having no architectural history at all.”