One more post on Salem’s Winter Island, where (in addition to Fort Pickering) there are two historical resources that have long been the focus of discussion and concern:  the former Coast Guard seaplane hangar and barracks/administration building, shown in “then (1938) and now” photographs below.

As you can see, these building have deteriorated dramatically following the closure of Air Station Salem in 1970.  Still, the new master plan for Winter Island proposes their rehabilitation and adaptive reuse.  I hope I am wrong, but it looks like it’s a little late for the Barracks Building, but a template for what could happen with the hangar is provided by the redevelopment of its twin in Miami.  The hangar at the former Coast Guard Air Station Miami at Dinner Key, built in the same year (1935) as the Salem hangar with identical plans, has been transformed into an adaptive aquatic center by the Shake-a-Leg Foundation in cooperation with the City of Miami. One possibility for a site with lots of potential.

Musters in Salem and Miami, from the Coast Guard Historian’s Office.  The Shake-a-Leg Aquatic Center in Miami with its rehabilitated hangar.

Another possibility, perhaps even more attractive as it involves year-round use, would be to convert the hangar into an indoor recreational facility.  The best example I could find of a pre-World War II hangar turned into a sports arena was in Seattle, where a private company transformed the historic Sand Point Seaplane Hangar #27 (built in 1938) into a sports club.  I think that the terms of the conveyance of the Winter Island site from the Federal government to the city of Salem would mandate a public venture, but hangars do seem to be well-suited to this particular use.

The former Sand Point Naval Air Hangar #27 in Seattle and the present Arena Sports Magnuson.  Architectural Design by Clark Design Group, Seattle.

Salem has been the scene of almost-continuous construction projects since I’ve lived here; some have changed the streetscape for the better, some for the worse (in my humble opinion).  One of the largest is nearing completion this summer:  the construction of a brand new “Judicial Center” on Federal Street adjacent to the previous courthouses, all sadly decommissioned.  This location is certainly appropriate, as this stretch of Federal Street is judicial Salem’s legal row, but it begs comparisons between the new center and the older courthouses.  Probably the architects (Goody Clancy) knew this, and certainly they received pressure from the preservationist community to retain something of what was on the site, especially as three nineteenth-century domestic buildings were taken down to make way for the HUGE boxy central building.  Consequently one building was retained and moved to serve as a link between old and new and a reminder of those days when architectural proportion ruled:  the former First Baptist Church of Salem.  Here is the church (now reconfigured as a law library) on the corner with the new complex behind and beside it.

The original location of the church was to the right and back a bit, where you see the large curtain wall now.  When it was moved several years ago (there’s a picture in an earlier post), it was not only moved forward but repositioned on a slight angle, following the lines of Federal Street.  This is one of the few concessions the entire project has made to the pre-existing streetscape.  Though the jury is still out for me on the entire complex, I think that  church/library is an important component, not only filling a gap but softening the transition between old and new, human-scaled and HUGE.  Below is the current streetscape on a recent rainy day.

From the foreground to the background we have the church/library, the new judicial center, which is comprised of the huge building behind the curtain wall (very imposing as you come into Salem along Route 114; I’m going to spare you a view for now) and the adjacent building with glass and columns, which (I guess) is supposed to effect another transition to the former Colonial Revival Probate Court, and then the Romanesque and Greek Revival court houses beyond. Below are some century-old shots of these court houses from the Library of Congress.  I’ve always found the Greek Revival one in the second picture to be really beautiful, and its the Romanesque neighbor has an amazing interior, including (of course) a law library.  I worry about these buildings’ fates.

It’s quite a succession of architectural styles, and then you get to the new complex, anchored by the old church/library.  The contractors not only repositioned the building, they repointed it and repaired its trim, revealing some beautiful details that I had never noticed before.  When I did look at this building before its big move, it did not strike me as particularly church-like, which is understandable given that it was stripped of its impressive steeple some time ago (in 1926, according to Bryant Tolles, Architecture in Salem).  Fortunately there are lots of accessible images of the church in its earlier form, making it all to obvious that this is a structure that has gone through several transformations in its two-hundred-year lifetime.

Photography credits:  a beautiful Frank Cousins photograph in the Urban Landscape collection at the Duke University Library, two undated postcards which I believe are from around the turn of the twentieth century, and two nineteenth-century stereoscopic cards from the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

Historic preservation has been an ongoing effort in Salem since at least the second World War, when the seventeenth-century Jonathan Corwin house (later, unfortunately, labelled the “Witch House”, was threatened by a street-widening project and Historic Salem, Inc. (HSI) was formed by a group of citizens determined to save the house.  They were successful, and HSI (along with other individual passionate preservationists) has gone on to fight urban renewal, save a succession of historic structures, and advocate for both individual restoration and adaptive reuse projects as well as a more general planning policy encompassing historic preservation.  There have been losses and gains over the past half century or so, both of which have had a dramatic effect on Salem’s streetscape.

Two projects of the last decade represent the dynamic of gain and loss in the continuum of preservation advocacy very well.  Most recently the very shabby Elks Lodge was transformed into the stately One Eaton Place Condominiums, a rehabilitation that is even more impressive given the building’s prominent place along one of Salem’s entrance corridors, North Street.  When HSI, which had a vested interest because its headquarters are immediately adjacent to this building as well as a more general preservation concern, informed the developers that their newly-purchased building had somehow lost its third story at some point in the twentieth century, they were more than eager to put it back and gain additional units at the same time.  This was a win-win for everyone, and (in a tough real estate market) the condominiums sold out within months of completion of the project.

In the loss column goes one of the most hard-fought preservation efforts in Salem’s history:  the effort to secure the redevelopment of the 1908 Salem Armory after its partial destruction by fire in 1982.  The imposing (many architectural adjectives come to mind:  fortress-like, castle-esque, Romanesque/Gothic/medieval revival) structure, long home to the Second Corps of Cadets of the Massachusetts National Guard, dominated several blocks of central Essex Street right up to its demolition in 2000, even after the 1982 fire, as these before and after images illustrate.

A Frank Cousins photograph of the Armory Billiards Room, c. 1910. Duke University Library Special Collections

HABS, Library of Congress

Ten years after the fire, 1992

At about the time of this last photograph, the newly-formed and adjacent Peabody Essex Museum (a merger of the Peabody Museum and Essex Institute) entered into a memorandum of agreement with the Massachusetts Historical Commission and other parties to incorporate the street-fronting “head house” into its expansion plans while the National Park Service proceeded to transform the rear “drill shed” into a Visitor’s Center.  Throughout the 1990s, the Museum delayed and eventually reneged on its agreement, transferring its expansion focus to the present Moshe Safdie-designed atrium addition across the street.  HSI initiated a legal action to save the head house but to no avail:  it came down in 2000.  In its place, the Museum left only the Tudor arch entryway standing (presumably to maintain some semblance of streetscape) and promised a “world-class” Armory Park to honor the Second Corps of Cadets.

I’ve always found the stand-alone entry a bit ghostly; it’s an architectural memento mori.  Amory Park is not really a place, but simply a pass-through path to the Salem Visitor’s Center beyond, which is a great resource for both Salem’s residents and visitors.  May is Preservation Month, a time to look around and remember both what has been saved and what has been lost.