How do you disassemble, with an eye fixed toward posterity, a 170-year-old cottage-style house with limestone partitions which might be two feet thick?
The reply, in accordance with Don Peltier, principal with Pelco Construction of White Bear Lake, boils all the way down to two words: Very fastidiously.
Pelco this week began removing the Justus Ramsey House, believed to be St. Paul’s oldest house still standing in its original location, from its perch on the patio of Burger Moe’s Restaurant on West Seventh Street. The person stones can be catalogued and placed in storage, with the expectation they’ll be reassembled inside one and a half years or so on an empty lot farther down West Seventh.
As construction projects go, “it’s not a killer,” said Peltier this week, acknowledging that inclement weather created some curveballs and days off. “We’re just dismantling — a reverse of constructing it. It’s all laser scanned, measured. Every stone is numbered.”
Measuring little greater than 430 square feet, the Justus Ramsey House, one in all the state’s oldest limestone houses, barely avoided everlasting demolition last month, a skin-of-its-teeth save few saw coming that was hard won by historic preservationists and neighborhood advocates. The weird trajectory of the small but historic structure is a tale that might have been scripted for, well, Valentine’s Day.
A house and an attorney each ‘getting on in years’
Don Kohler enjoyed his coffee on the JS Bean Factory on St. Paul’s Randolph Avenue. So did Rita Dalbec. The couple whittled away time on the coffee shop over sips of black java talking about their various loves — gardening, living life in a way that preserves the environment for the subsequent generation, city living.
Soon Dalbec, who rents a 650-square-foot apartment at Grand Avenue and Lexington Parkway, was sharing with Kohler pictures of her hypothetical dream home. And it was smaller. Much smaller. In December, Kohler showed her an image, too — a newspaper clipping of a historic property he was open to purchasing, and living in.
“I’m getting on in years,” said Kohler, 68, in an interview last month. “I’m not that old, but I’m closer to the top than to the start. Somewhat than go to Florida or Hawaii for vacations, or wherever people go, I would like to preserve something for future generations.”
Dalbec, 60, who works in safety operations for a trucking firm, was shocked by “the mastery of the design allowing people to live in smaller space, with all of the amenities,” she recalled in a recent interview. “At this point in my life I even have children that continue to exist their very own. This apartment is plenty. I want to do away with about 90% percent of my possessions, after which I’ll have the simplicity of life that I enjoy.”
Kohler, an estate planning and private injury attorney, was sold on the thought. But where in town could they construct their tiny house? It needed to be accessible to public transit, and shut enough to shops and restaurants to walk to. A speculative real estate purchase — an empty lot he’d purchased a 12 months ago south of Randolph Avenue and the Schmidt Brewery along West Seventh Street — got here to mind.
“I’ve had my office in White Bear (Lake) for 20-some years, and I assumed once I retire, it will be nice to have the general public transport right outside the door,” said Kohler, who had sold his previous home on Randolph Avenue on the urging of his daughter, a Realtor, and moved right into a townhouse in Woodbury a 12 months ago until he found a everlasting residence.
After which, within the pages of the Pioneer Press, an epiphany. Kohler shared with Dalbec an article he ran across in December concerning the Justus Ramsey House. It was positioned, because it had been for 170 years, right there on West Seventh, perhaps improbably enough on the patio of a burger bar.
And in accordance with owner Mojtaba Sharifkhani, otherwise generally known as Moe Sharif, it was teetering and needed to be demolished.
A plea to City Hall for clemency — and money
Neighborhood advocates and historic preservationists were furious. Kohler and Dalbec were elated, for various reasons entirely. Over the course of little greater than two weeks, they met with attorney Tom Schroeder, who had saved and restored the historic Waldmann property off West Seventh Street right into a restaurant and brewery, in addition to architect John Yust.
Schroeder was leading efforts to avoid wasting the Justus Ramsey House, even promising to park his automobile in front of it to delay demolition crews. Kohler desired to buy it, relocate it and live in it.
“This chance to preserve a historic constructing, it’s something I can do for future generations,” said Kohler. “I used to be telling a co-worker at work, and he said, ‘Well, perhaps in 100 years they’ll call it the Kohler house.’”
The events of Jan. 23, Jan. 24 and Jan. 25 unfolded with almost Hollywood urgency. Sharif had asked town for a demolition permit to tear down the Justus Ramsey House last 12 months, only to be blocked in December by town’s Heritage Preservation Commission.
Shortly after 5 p.m. on Jan. 23, a Monday, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter overruled the commission and signed an emergency order requiring that the Justus Ramsey House be demolished as a threat to public safety. Schroeder and members of neighborhood organizations similar to the Fort Road Federation rallied that night to Tom Reid’s Hockey City Pub round the corner, with some vowing civil disobedience if obligatory to guard the small cottage.
At around 7:30 a.m. the subsequent morning, a Ramsey County District Court judge signed a brief restraining order effectively demanding that every one sides cool down and schedule a gathering before the court. The restraining order, requested by Schroeder, bought time.
After which, shortly after 2 p.m. that Wednesday, Kohler and Dalbec stood within the St. Paul City Council chamber on the third floor of City Hall, just down the hall from the mayor’s office, to make a special request. Neither of them were listed on the prearranged meeting agenda. City council member Rebecca Noecker, who represents the downtown area, introduced them under a suspension of the principles.
“There’s an urgent must deconstruct this constructing and move it to a brand new home,” Noecker told town council, which had convened as town’s Housing and Redevelopment Authority. She later acknowledged that she had never met Kohler or Dalbec before that date.
The 2 asked for $115,000 in city funds to disassemble, relocate, store after which reassemble the Justus Ramsey House on Kohler’s empty West Seventh Street lot south of Randolph. The cash would cover a large fraction of what might be a $400,000 project making the house live-in ready, they told the council.
Council members seemed shocked. The seemingly impromptu request flew against almost every guideline town council had only recently established for distributing money from a business assistance fund, which had $600,000 available. Spending a lot of it moving a personal home struck multiple council member as inappropriate.
Schroeder told the council that nobody was getting all the things they wanted — the constructing would not be listed as historic on state, local and national registers — “and yet the constructing can be saved.”
Kohler noted that the home would function his home office. Noecker urged the council to contemplate other pricey investments town had made in historic preservation for personal structures similar to the Hope Breakfast Bar. Still, she acknowledged, she could sense hesitancy.
Noecker beneficial reducing the quantity to $84,000 to cover disassembly and storage alone. The proposal was approved, after which reconsidered two weeks later as recent cost estimates rolled in. The town council on Feb. 8 reduced that quantity by $50,000, for a complete city spend of $34,000.
A streetcar to history
Kohler, in a Jan. 30 interview, said he expected reconstructing the property and prepping it to be live-in ready would take one other 18 months or so.
As for its future location, a longstanding proposal to bring a streetcar down West Seventh Street had piqued his interest.
“Rita’s a bit younger than me, however it can be great as we age to have public transport right out the front door, an actual sense of community living in town, and access to downtown and the airport, and Minneapolis, God forbid we should always ever be tempted to go over there,” he said on the time.
He added: “Each Rita and I are really ecologically concerned concerning the footprint (we leave). We are able to’t all live in houses with five bedrooms and three baths and have enough resources on this Earth to support everyone. We’re really looking forward to downsizing and having a life-style where we’ve the necessities of life, and hopefully turn into a part of the trend to make use of less resources.”
Dalbec, in the identical interview, said she could foresee adding a solarium for year-round vegetation. “We like to garden, each of us, and grow our own food,” she said. “We’ve already got design ideas of our own. We’ll meet with an architect.”
But a 170-year-old, 430-square-foot limestone home on a busy urban business corridor outside downtown?
“Just about everyone looks at us and says, ‘Are you two crazy?’” Dalbec acknowledged. “Well, when you don’t try something, you’re never going to know if it is going to work. It’s an adventure, and I’m up for this completely. … We’d live in it.”