Wheeling Law Firm Makes a Case for Adaptive Reuse - Wheeling Intelligencer
Photo by Nora Edinger - The revamped Hartley Law Group building behind Vance Memorial Presbyterian Church may look like new construction, but a 1920s-era red brick structure is tucked inside, according to attorney Dean Hartley. He said reusing instead of building new provided a cost-lowering construction base for a renovation intended to complement the historic Woodsdale neighborhood — some of whose homes are reflected in the windows of the new exterior.
WHEELING — That a mammoth conference table required halving in order to get it out of its downtown digs and into Hartley Law Group’s new quarters in Woodsdale feels like a project visual.
Outside the meeting space it now graces — and inside a building that is tucked behind Vance Memorial Presbyterian Church — other signs of the extreme makeover the relocation entailed are everywhere.
Indeed, the red, brick box of a building that once provided winter storage for specialty cars on its top floor and housed a business dedicated to the tinting of car windows at ground level, is unrecognizable. A facade accented with gray steel, a two-story glass entry and freshly paved parking areas that face Pine Avenue suggest the 1920s structure was either replaced or greatly expanded.
Neither is the case, according to Dean Hartley, one of the firm’s founders.
“This is the footprint,” Hartley said of opting to renovate a site that he and wife Charlene Hartley already owned. “We had to shore it up a little bit with some steel in the basement and we had to add an escape stairway on the National Road side.
“(But) it’s exactly the same, which is kind of strange if you’re thinking about it,” he added, noting the only part of the original structure that remains visible is a water pipe on the ground floor. “It looks like it is way taller than it actually is.”
Hartley said architects Dennis Madama and Rick Rafferty of Shaeffer & Madama Inc. of Wheeling and city-based contractors Michael Leo and Don Teichman at JD&E Construction Co. planned for a building that would begin and end with revamping.
Keeping the structure and footprint intact moderated costs, Hartley said. It was also a style fit to the business district that runs along National Road and kept in mind that the firm’s entrance is in full view of Woodsdale Elementary, Vance church and multiple residences.
“We wanted to blend in rather than just be some brand new steel and glass building,” Hartley said of using computer animation to look at how the new facade complemented its surroundings from every angle.
Betsy Sweeny, an architectural historian who works with Wheeling Heritage, said that type of project is sometimes what makes the most sense as certain structures evolve.
While Wheeling is loaded with architecturally significant structures — many of which have been meticulously restored and maintained — she said there are also some buildings that were utilitarian from the get-go and have additionally been altered over time.
“It’s just a good example of reuse in the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ sense,” Sweeny said of the choice of being green even when a historic renovation is not in play. “This is a great example of building off what was already existing. … It is nice when you see things like that.”
LONG STORY
Not to say that Hartley doesn’t know a bit about the building that’s now tucked entirely inside the fresh exterior.
“I’ve always heard the story, when they built Tally Ho (Apartments) back in the ’20s, they started to build another group of apartments,” Hartley said. Noting the couple also owns the adjacent Tally Ho building, he wonders if the Great Depression may have stalled the expansion effort and left behind an unusually plain building so short its back barely peeped above National Road.
He has a history of that kind of inquisitiveness. When the firm launched in 1993, he was part of restoring the former Red Cross building on Main Street near Fort Henry Bridge as its headquarters.
That was a true restoration, he noted of the 1800s building. The firm even brought in a designer who installed such things as period-appropriate wall coverings and lights that mimicked the structure’s original gas-fed ones.
Such history affinity continued, he said, when the firm moved a few blocks down Main Street to the fully renovated Wagner Building several years later. Originally a wholesale grocery warehouse, that building was converted into high-end office space by McKinley Architecture and Engineering. (Hartley suspects the conference table came in through an empty elevator shaft while reconstruction was ongoing.)
The space was great but, over time, Hartley said the firm needed to right-size.
“We had the entire floor at the Wagner Building and we have an office down in Charleston,” Hartley said of staff now being divided between the two sites. “We didn’t need a space that big … (but) we looked close to a year for space and we couldn’t find anything.”
Charlene Hartley was the one to suggest the firm build around the Pine Avenue site. And, this time, given the modern office and meeting spaces that now fill the top floor and industrial-style document storage that fills the second, she did the decorating.
The move feels right, Hartley said, noting glass will soon cover the tidy seam that runs across the conference table’s middle. If it comes to look like the table has always been there, he said, that would be fitting given that the building has.
“It’s quieter, much quieter,” Hartley said of his new neighborhood office, excepting a moment when Woodsdale students stopped by to carol not long after workers moved in. “The only thing I miss is the view of the river.”
source: https://www.theintelligencer.net/news/top-headlines/2022/01/wheeling-law-firm-makes-a-case-for-adaptive-reuse/
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