That’s 65 Phila Street in Saratoga Springs, an 1851 wood-frame house that had fallen on hard times. People at the Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation have been trying for a very long time to get the building repaired and re-occupied – the best way to ensure an old building’s continued life is to be sure it has a continued use – and it is now nearing completion of structural repairs. The Foundation bought the house in 2021 with the plan of taking responsibility for the repairs, and my understanding is that it will be for sale once all the work is done.
My involvement has been quite small, inspecting the structure of the house in 2017 to see if the structure was salvageable, and inspecting it again a couple of weeks ago to see that the repair work had addressed the damage I’d flagged in my report. This is a good example of a project where we are only tangentially involved, but the overall feeling is good, so it’s still welcome. The fact is that a small, ordinary-use, wood-frame house like this doesn’t need a great deal of engineering: it needs a good carpenter.
On the same theme, this is how you preserve a street, a neighborhood, a city. You save the individual buildings that make up the streetscape and you keep them in use. While this building is a designated landmark by virtue of being in a historic district, it’s not really that special when compared to other mid-1800s houses. But this is the history and the building that we have, so this is the one that we put an effort into saving.
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