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Houses behind Wright’s Westcott at center of long debate

The homes were part of the original setting, but now they are boarded-up eyesores noticed by visitors

Barbara J. Perenic Westcott House.

ENLARGE PHOTO

A fixer-upper? One of the houses behind Westcott along Greenmount Avenue.

File photo Frank Lloyd Wright designed Fallingwater in Pennsylvania in 1935, 29 years after the Westcott House was designed in Springfield.

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By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer Updated 2:47 PM Monday, January 11, 2010

SPRINGFIELD — It’s like Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s amazing creation in Pennsylvania surrounded by Allegheny timber.

Only not.

Wright’s Westcott House, designed for a Springfield family 29 years before his PA masterpiece, also retains its original setting to this day.

That’s enough to make a preservationist, history buff or even a Wright aficionado drool.

“There are a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright house-museums,” said Kevin Rose, president of the Springfield Preservation Alliance. “But what makes our house-museum more desirable to support? In Springfield, one of the things that separates Westcott is the contextual site.

“The site is very similar to what it was when the Westcotts lived there.”

But there’s a slight difference in comparing the Westcott site with Fallingwater — virgin timber and a mountain stream aren’t eyesores.

Now that the downtown hospital is under construction, the original homes behind Westcott along Greenmount Avenue are the most famous boarded-up houses in town.

Sure, they predate the Westcott House.

Sure, they provide an intriguing look at the city’s working-class legacy — the have-nots nestled in the shadow of the ultimate have, someone who could splurge to have the era’s leading avant-garde mind design their residence.

But look at them.

What to do about those vacant houses has pit local preservationists against the foundation that operates the 101-year-old Westcott, Wright’s only Prairie-style house in Ohio, as a museum.

“Is it possible to save them and reuse them? Always. It’s only money,” said Springfield architect Craig Dillon, the new board chairman of the Westcott House Foundation. “Does it make sense in the grand scheme of the design of the space? Those things we weren’t sure of.”

In 2005, it was announced that famed Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa was going to design a tea house and garden for the space, with a series of structures behind that by master architect Stanley Tigerman and three teams of young designers.

That led the National Park Service to step in, threatening to snatch back a $197,000 grant if the seven Greenmount houses in question were torn down without a review of their historical status.

A 2007 federal study later ruled the houses on their own wouldn’t merit a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.

“That didn’t change our view at all,” Rose said.

The preservation alliance listed the 19th century houses — along with the 1830s cemetery across the street — on its 2008 list of endangered historic sites.

So here we are.

Kurokawa is now dead.

The economy is now in the tank.

And the chain-link fence around the Greenmount houses is now the property of the Westcott House Foundation.

“We started renting it,” Dillon said. “We ended up buying it.”

But in less than a month at the helm, Dillon seems eager to tackle the Greenmount issue.

The state this year offered a $3,000 matching grant to conduct a crucial feasibility study of the site, which would enable the Westcott foundation to come up with a real plan for the space.

“We want to use this feasibility study as a decision-maker,” Dillon said.

The preservation alliance has promised to kick in $1,500 to make the match.

“We’re on baby steps right now,” Dillon said, “but I want to make steps forward.”

The foundation expects to start talks with a consultant in January.

“We hope it’s a solid first step,” he said.

The foundation, which initially requested $10,000 from the state, hopes to finally have some of its lingering questions answered with the study.

The Westcott’s for-profit subsidiary, 1340 Corp., bought the seven houses, Dillon said, not only to take control of the neighborhood, but to turn the space into something that would generate cash.

“As it is right now,” Dillon explained, “we have not found a use or a combination of uses that will make the property sustain itself. We have enough trouble trying to generate revenue for the house.”

Despite a $5.8 million restoration that saved the Westcott House from the dumps earlier this decade, ongoing maintenance costs have prevented the foundation from creating an endowment, he said.

The foundation always looked north, to Greenmount, to make money.

At last check, Kurokawa’s sons still were interested in designing a tea house, Dillon said, and that’s still a desired component.

“I just don’t want to plop it somewhere and work around it,” he said.

Earlier this year, architecture students from Miami University kicked around some ideas for what to do with the space. Dillon called their four concepts “thought provoking.”

The student plans — two kept some of the Greenmount houses, two obliterated them entirely — envisioned a campus behind Westcott featuring the tea house, a conference center, cafe and more.

“We don’t want to change the experience from a residential neighborhood to Disneyland,” Dillon cautioned.

No matter what, he worried, “we’re not going to please everybody.”

But in its current state, the fenced-off, boarded-up space is constantly the subject of visitors’ questions, said Westcott curator Marta Wojcik.

“It is the first thing they see,” she said. “There’s no way around it.”

Since opening in the fall of 2005, the museum has received about 13,000 visitors a year — 85 percent of whom are from outside Clark County, Wojcik said.

“We all agree we want something positive to happen,” she said.

The local preservation community just wants due diligence.

“We want to see Greenmount beautiful,” Rose said. “We want to see those houses saved, but we just want to see it examined.”

And if the numbers come back and it’s not feasible to save them?

So be it.

“We’re not crazy,” Rose said.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.

Should they stay or should they go?

The Westcott House Foundation wants your input for what to do with the space along Greenmount Avenue. Visit westcotthouse.org and put in your two cents.

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