Landmark project to aid downtown revival

TEXARKANA — A $250,000 renovation is planned as the latest improvement of one of the city’s oldest buildings, as well as another piece in the downtown redevelopment puzzle.

Owner David Potter is adding the Landmark Building to the list of structures being spruced up. The plan is for a new facade on the building’s northeast wall, as well as new air-conditioning equipment and elevator repair, to keep the building at East Broad Street and North State Line Avenue a significant Texarkana fixture.

Built in 1903 as a bank, the Landmark has survived fire, vacancy, multiple changes in ownership and the general exodus from downtown now being reversed by major projects such as the rehabilitation of the Hotel Grim a block away and the restoration of the former Texarkana National Bank across the street. It now houses the offices and newsroom of the Texarkana Gazette, among other tenants.

Central to the building’s resilience is its steel-reinforced concrete construction. It was the first Texarkana building put up using the method, an improvement over the masonry exteriors and woodframe interiors typical at the time, Potter said.

That superstructure is likely what prevented the building’s destruction in 1980, when a fire gutted its fifth floor. Water used to put out the fire made the rest of the building unusable.

By 1997, when Potter bought the building, its owners had done a basic rescue of the interior, adding new elevators and bathrooms on each floor. But it was otherwise open and empty.

“Nothing but concrete ceilings and concrete floors,” Potter said.

“We were probably the first to make any serious effort at restoring downtown or rebuilding downtown,” he said. “We just started working toward redeveloping it without any purpose, without any tenant, without any expectations or knowing which way we were going, except I just bought a building I thought was a good buy.”

A stroke of luck gave Potter the financial boost he needed to fully bring the building back to life. A $1 billion federal lawsuit involving a subsidiary of AT&T would be tried in Texarkana, and a horde of lawyers needed office space fast.

Potter approached the city for help with financing and eventually secured a $70,000 loan from federal Community

Development Block Grant funds — all such money the city had available at the time — to pay for finishing out two of the building’s floors.

“I drew out the floor plans myself on my kitchen table,” Potter said.

Two framing contractors on each floor, along with crews working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, finished the job in 60 days. Then the new tenants asked for a third floor, prompting another 30 days of nonstop work.

The suit was eventually settled, and another took its place. Texas had filed a massive federal lawsuit against the tobacco industry that also would be tried in Texarkana. More attorneys became the new tenants of the Landmark as soon as it was available, and they eventually leased the whole building for $54,000 a month.

Potter never looked back, leveraging the leases into the building’s long-term financial stability. But there would be another challenge.

When the adjacent building burned to the ground, the heat melted carpet in the Landmark through 16-inch brick walls. In the fire’s aftermath, the empty lot became “a big hole in the ground, and it was filling up with water” that seeped into the Landmark’s basement, Potter said.

The odor of the ashes permeated the Landmark, and something had to be done about the debris.

Eventually, the burned building’s owner deeded the property to Potter, who cleaned it up, filled it in and first tried making it a grassy park space. Drainage issues nixed that plan, and Potter paved over the spot and built a retaining wall fronting Broad.

The fire damage to the Landmark’s northeast wall has been at least partially visible ever since, but now that is changing. Work has begun on a new facade that will match that on the triangular building’s other two sides. The lot will get new lighting and electrical outlets, and Potter plans to eventually refinish the wall across the lot, too.

Along with repair of elevator wiring and an overhaul of the building’s air-conditioning system, Potter hopes the upgrade will make the Landmark a vital part of downtown for another century-plus.

He has been around long enough to see how completely — though gradually — Texarkana’s once-desolate downtown has changed.

“It’s just so slow you’d hardly notice it,” he said. “But if you two took two photos, then to now, it’s a dramatic difference.”