In each Transitions section of Preservation magazine, we highlight places of local and national importance that have recently been restored, are currently threatened, have been saved from demolition or neglect, or have been lost. Here are five from Winter 2025.

Restored: Webb Building

For the past 50 years, the historic Webb Building in downtown Kirkland, Washington, was a revolving door for restaurants and bars. A dozen different establishments tried to make it on the ground-floor level of the waterfront property, and the upper floor, once rented out as apartments, sat vacant since 1990. But there’s new hope following a 2024 rehabilitation led by Chesmore | Buck Architecture. The Webb Building, today owned by local developer Stuart McLeod, was constructed in 1930 and named for its original owner, former Kirkland city councilmember George Webb. The Pastime Pool Hall and Café was the building’s first and longest commercial occupant, serving as a central meeting place for civic leaders and Kirkland residents in its heyday and closing in the 1950s. Following the recent rehabilitation, the Webb Building is once again brimming with local energy: RockCreek Seafood & Spirits, a popular Seattle-based restaurant, has opened its second location there, in a space renovated by Charlie Hellstern Interior Design and contractor BMDC Services. The building’s remodeled second floor will house office tenants. The rehabilitation team completed a structural seismic retrofit and restored the north facade, which included repointing the original masonry veneer and replacing exterior windows and door frames with in-kind versions that meet current energy codes. “People recognize this building. It’s been there since 1930,” says principal-in-charge Rick Chesmore. “There’s a real emotional connection ... to see it repurposed into an active space again.”

Restored: Isaac Bell House

The exterior of a house in Newport, Rhode Island, that is considered a precursor to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright was recently restored to its Gilded Age glory. Isaac Bell House was designed by noted architecture firm McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1883 for its first owner, Isaac Bell Jr., a cotton broker and investor. Over the decades, the house passed through several private owners until The Preservation Society of Newport County purchased it in 1994 and later opened it to the public for tours. “The Shingle Style was really an emergence of American designers in copying English aesthetics,” as well as Japanese and French design elements, says Leslie Jones, director of museum affairs and chief curator at the Preservation Society. “You are going to be seeing things like curvature, gable roofs, and turrets.” The $3.3 million restoration was funded by the Preservation Society and completed by Rhode Island–based firms Kirby Perkins Construction and Malone Studio. The team replaced the cedar shingles, restored the shutters, re-glazed the windows, and repointed the masonry. With the work completed in July 2024, Isaac Bell House reopened to the public. The unfurnished space allows visitors to get up close to the details. “The house is in itself a work of art,” Jones says.

Lost: Gresham Building

In 1969, an Atlanta building that once housed an almshouse for elderly and impoverished residents was vacant and on the brink of demolition. But educator Elliott Galloway saw opportunity in the Neoclassical Revival–style edifice, completed in 1911 and designed by architectural firm Morgan and Dillon. In it he founded The Galloway School, a private day school that notably enrolled Martin Luther King Jr.’s two sons in its first year of operation. Called the Gresham Building after a friend and mentor of Galloway’s, the building remained a focal point on campus through the decades. Its four Tuscan columns at the entryway, topped by a triangular pediment with a decorative oval window, are depicted in The Galloway School’s logo. But in 2023, the school announced plans to raze the building, citing structural and safety concerns as well as accessibility challenges. “It was our original intent to save the building,” a spokesperson for The Galloway School told Preservation. “Because of the numerous issues, it would not have been cost effective.” Multiple local preservation groups, including the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation, advocated against demolition. “We advocated, as a fallback position, that the facade of the building be saved,” says Georgia Trust President and CEO Wright Mitchell. In August 2024, the Gresham Building was demolished, facade and all. “It was a significant loss of the historic fabric of the city of Atlanta,” Mitchell says.

Restored: H.A. Moyer Factory complex

The five-story redbrick structure on the southwest corner of the former H.A. Moyer factory complex in Syracuse, New York, is a typical turn-of-the-century industrial building, save for one eye-popping detail: There’s a house on the roof. In reality, “the proportions of it would never work for a house,” says Brad Everdyke, senior historic preservation architect at Carmina Wood Design. “It’s a lot smaller than it appears to be.” The false dwelling was used to house elevator mechanisms for the building, where Harvey A. Moyer and his employees produced luxury carriages and later automobiles. This building and the three other main structures that made up the factory, built in stages between 1881 and 1909, were recently rehabilitated by a team that included Carmina Wood Design and Hueber-Breuer Construction Co. The adaptive reuse project, codeveloped by Housing Visions and Redev CNY, provides 128 units of affordable housing and three commercial spaces. Construction on the roughly $57 million development, which received state and federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits as well as state and federal historic tax credits, was completed in June 2024. Now called the Moyer Carriage Lofts, it represents “a great historic piece of the fabric of our industrial past in Syracuse,” says Housing Visions CEO and President Ben Lockwood.

Saved: B'nai Zion Temple

With its stately Corinthian columns and other Beaux-Arts characteristics, the B’nai Zion Temple in Shreveport, Louisiana, looks much like a civic building one might have found on any number of American main streets in the early 20th century. But it was not designed to be a city hall or courthouse—it was a synagogue. Classically detailed synagogues were not out of the ordinary for Reform Jewish congregations of this era, says Samuel Gruber, an architectural historian who researches historic Jewish sites. Particularly in the South, he believes, these congregations “wanted their synagogues to look like civic buildings and to associate themselves with American civic culture.” The B’nai Zion Temple, dedicated in 1915, has not served as a synagogue since the 1950s, and for the past 30-plus years it sat vacant.