The city has issued a stop-work order on a construction project at Broadway Village while officials try to figure out whether the historic 1939 buildings have been damaged.
The buildings, at the southwest corner of Broadway and South Country Club Road recently received a City Historic Landmark designation as a condition for allowing the owners to demolish the Americana Apartments to make way for a new parking lot.
Besides parking, the construction project will add new tenants Natural Grocers and Bisbee Breakfast Club to the mix of restaurants and shops.
Over the past few weeks, part of the facade of Broadway Village was demolished and boarded up and original pavers and roof tiles were torn off and thrown away.
“It’s really a disgrace,” Demion Clinco, executive director of the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation, told a shocked Tucson City Council Tuesday.
“Significant damage is being done,” he said. “Irreversible damage is being done to a historic landmark. And what makes it particularly egregious is that it’s really in the face of an agreement with the city that these buildings would be protected, they would be treated with the utmost care, and instead they are really being damaged.”
City staff members met with the owners, property managers and their contractor on Tuesday and they agreed to a stop-work order, said Councilman Steve Kozachik.
He said it’s not yet clear whether the changes are allowed under the agreement.
Mayor Jonathan Rothschild asked an attorney to be assigned to the case.
“In my four years here nothing like that has occurred, and whatever the remedy is, we need to let all future folks know that it is going to be dealt with in the strictest terms,” he said Tuesday.
City historic preservation officer Jonathan Mabry briefed the Tucson-Pima County Historical Commission on the issue Wednesday.
That group’s plan-review subcommittee — which previously approved changes to the building, including one change to the facade — will meet Friday to determine whether the work complies with city codes for projects in historic buildings.
Mabry said the work done so far is “not going to cause a loss of integrity of the historic building to any degree that would endanger its historic designation.”
The stop-work order freezes work on most of the building’s exterior but allows workers to finish tarring the roof of a non-historic part of the building, he said. It also allows all interior work to continue.
Typically when changes to a historic building are approved, the builder must use materials that replicate or fit the period of the building. In the case of the pavers at Broadway Village, new pavers were installed.
The City Council approved a planned-area development agreement for the property in 2011.
The council then amended that agreement when it rezoned the apartment property as a parking area. One condition was the historic landmark designation for the buildings designed by famed architect Josias Joesler.
Last month, the City Council approved new zoning, which included an additional condition for the owners to contribute $10,000 toward the Broadmoor-Broadway Village neighborhood’s application for historic status.
That meeting got heated, with some neighbors supporting the Broadway Village project and others making accusations about backroom deals.
It was a long, time-consuming and trying process for the property owners, Craig Finfrock, from the center’s leasing company, told the council at the time.
He said the owners and their representatives spent about two years and more than $100,000 “to try and do the right thing” for an architectural icon.
