Seeing the New Into Our Historic Street Front
Reviewing our progress on the historic facades of the Hill’s Buildings against the vision cast in our renderings grows increasingly exciting as the finishing details are installed. We have tracked the installation of glass storefront panels that are incredible in size. This allows for finish carpentry work to frame the windows with trim profiles meticulously researched and reinterpreted.
An Interior Environment Transformed
As our rehabilitation efforts have been comprehensive, the extent of enhancement on the interior is manifest in the steel beams installed throughout the month of April—lining the ceilings of 108 and 110 S. Main. These provide support to the upper floor spaces and ensure that the interior ground floor spaces can maintain their freespan, open floor plan.
Preserving History In Place
An incredible feature in our 106 S. Main building interior is the tin ceiling that remains largely in-tact throughout the ground floor space. The structural work that is in progress in the 106 building is carefully orchestrated from the second floor—where steel beams are also being added, but from a “top-down” approach so there is no disturbance to the historic tin ceiling.
The tiles are being stripped of their layers of paint and carefully restored where damaged. Where the few new infill tiles are needed they will be produced by a fabricator of ceiling tiles that has been supplying tiles to the construction industry for more than a century.
The fun fact we learned in this restoration process is that our tin tiles are so unique that there is not an existing mold for their pattern, although there are hundreds of original patterns from the late 1800s to early 1900s on file. We believe that our tiles may have been fabricated by a local vendor at the time of installation, and only made in low production quantities for distribution locally and/or regionally.
A special thank you to Morgan Macomber and the Frederick Construction team for their incredible effort to keep progress on pace!
