The winners of this year’s Richard H. Driehaus Foundation National Preservation Awards demonstrate the power of persistence. Barton Academy in Mobile, Alabama, was empty for about 14 years; Hinchliffe Stadium in Paterson, New Jersey, remained shuttered for more than a quarter-century; and it took years to find a buyer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel buildings. Yet those who saw their value were determined not to give up.

As historic preservation consultant Flavia Alaya wrote in Hinchliffe Stadium’s National Register of Historic Places nomination form, “Nothing, of course, can take away the power in its remarkable weave of nationally significant history. Still to choose: whether to continue to interpret it as living history, or only in the dead pages of documents like these.” Thanks to preservation advocates, these beloved structures are part of living history and continue to benefit their communities today.

Barton Academy, Mobile, Alabama

Barton Academy in Mobile, Alabama, is a literal temple to education. A domed cupola featuring a colonnade of 28 Ionic columns tops the three-story Greek Revival building, constructed in the 1830s. As Alabama’s first public school, it highlighted the city’s early commitment to public education for white students. (The school did not allow Black students at the time.) After downtown Mobile lost residents in the 1960s, the county school district used the building as its main office for nearly four decades. But in 2007, the district also decamped to the suburbs and Barton Academy sat vacant.

In 2012, the nonprofit Barton Academy Foundation was formally established to support the county school system’s vision of resuscitating the neglected building. The goal was to turn it into the Barton Academy for Advanced World Studies, a new magnet school for grades 6 through 9 emphasizing project-based learning, a science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM) curriculum, and world languages. A school bond paved the way for a roughly $4 million exterior renovation, which was completed in 2016.

“The exterior renovation was a huge help, because it ended the conversation that the building was decrepit and falling down,” says Elizabeth P. Stevens, immediate past president of the foundation. The nonprofit then lined up the first $5 million for the interior rehabilitation from foundations and other private sources; once that money was in place, the $14 million project received federal and state historic tax credits and a New Markets Tax Credit, as well as a $2 million state loan for energy-efficient upgrades.

Sadly, neither Holmes had the chance to see Barton Academy come to life again. In 2019, the son died at age 67. “When I toured the project right before it was done, I literally walked out and looked up at the sky and said, ‘Thank you, Nick Holmes!’” says Stevens. “It’s been amazing to be part of giving new life to a building that is this important historically and architecturally and educating children to thrive in the 21st century.”

Hinchliffe Stadium, Paterson, New Jersey

After more than two decades of neglect, Hinchliffe Stadium in Paterson, New Jersey, was well on its way to becoming a ruin. The 1932 Art Deco/Moderne stadium closed in the late ’90s, and “nature was busy reclaiming it—there were trees growing through the seats,” says architect Michael Hanrahan of Clarke Caton Hintz.

But in the 1930s and ’40s, the municipal stadium was the pride of the city. It served as an important venue for baseball’s Negro Leagues, which formed for Black ballplayers in response to the sport’s segregation. Today, Hinchliffe is one of a handful of remaining stadiums that hosted Negro Leagues games.

In the years after Jackie Robinson broke the Major League Baseball (MLB) color barrier in 1947, the Negro Leagues declined. The stadium hosted motorcycle racing, along with boxing matches. The city school district took ownership of Hinchliffe in 1963, but financial difficulties and safety concerns led to the building’s closure. The National Trust highlighted its plight, putting it on the list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in 2010 and continuing to help with strategic planning, advocacy, marketing, and fundraising.

The nonprofit Friends of Hinchliffe Stadium spent years on advocacy and securing funding, including a $500,000 grant from the New Jersey Historic Trust. That money, along with a $300,000 grant from American Express through the National Trust, helped enable the city to begin a $1.5 million rehabilitation on part of the facade in 2017. This project restored the iron picket gates, decorative modillions depicting track and field events, and the ticket booths’ terra cotta tiles and Roman clay tile roofing. Between this rehabilitation work, architectural and engineering studies, and business planning, the city poured $3.6 million into Hinchliffe before private developers came on board for a larger rehabilitation project that would revive the entire stadium.

In partnership with the city, developers RPM Development Group and BAW Development led a more than $100 million rehabilitation and development project funded by federal historic tax credits, New Markets Tax Credits, Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, National Park Service (NPS) grants, state and city sources, and developer equity. The project included a new parking deck, an addition containing a Negro Leagues museum, and affordable senior housing on two publicly owned parcels next door. “The stadium is in a historic district that was established a generation ago, and the land there is dedicated to preservation, culture, and open space. Having those two public parcels to develop really helped make the case for the renovation,” says Gianfranco Archimede, director of the city’s division of historic preservation and executive director of the Paterson Historic Preservation Commission.

The architects at Clarke Caton Hintz submitted three huge volumes of plans to the state historic preservation office, detailing their efforts to modernize the stadium and bring it up to code while salvaging as much of the original structure as possible. “It was a massive project that was overwhelming at first, but it turned out to be one of the simpler projects to review,” says Jennifer Leynes, program specialist in the New Jersey Historic Preservation Office. “The architects did an amazing job. The conditions on the site were not great, and a lot of things had to be reconstructed.” The team excavated and rebuilt upper-level seating in order to tuck bathrooms underneath; integrated a ramp, elevator, and accessible seating areas; and renovated the locker rooms below the grandstands. They also created replica “Hinchliffe Stadium” signs after finding that the cast-in-place concrete originals were too fragile to be repaired in place.

The stadium reopened in the spring of 2023 and began hosting games for the New Jersey Jackals, a Frontier League baseball team. High-school seniors lined up for graduation, and on Thanksgiving, the traditional football game between rivals Eastside and Kennedy high schools took place. Once upon a time, Larry Doby, the second player to break the MLB color barrier, got his start here. Says his son, Larry Doby Jr., in a 2017 video produced for NPS about Hinchliffe, “Before my father and Mr. Robinson played baseball, kids of color couldn’t dream about playing in the big leagues. So dreams started here and continue to this day.”

Journal Square Block, Milwaukee

Built in 1924, the appropriately grand offices of the Milwaukee Journal occupied a prominent location downtown. Clad in pink limestone and designed in a mash-up of architectural styles including Renaissance Revival and Art Deco, the building had a marble-lined foyer and large, open floors where reporters sat together at long desks. The executive offices featured wood paneling and a mural depicting the history of communication. “Newspaper buildings were designed to reflect the civic importance of the newspaper—they were very much city landmarks,” says Cindy Hamilton, president of the preservation-focused Heritage Consulting Group.

But the newspaper business went into a steep decline beginning in the mid-2000s after losing ad revenue and readers to the Internet. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (the Journal acquired the Sentinel, another major local paper, in the 1960s) began reducing its staff, and the buildings went on the market in the 2010s.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel buildings were an architectural grab bag. The company was partly run out of a tan brick building that dated from 1918 but hadn’t been designed for the newspaper. And the 1924 Journal building next door had gotten a major Modernist addition in 1962 that more than doubled its square footage.

Local developer Joshua Jeffers decided to take a shot at getting the Journal Square Block listed on the National Register of Historic Places so that he could redevelop it using historic tax credits. He hired Heritage Consulting Group, which successfully made the case for the complex’s historical association with the newspaper business rather than its architectural significance. Jeffers also knew that Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC) wanted to provide student housing near its downtown campus. He learned that Tenor High School, a local charter school, wanted to open another location near MATC. The pieces of the puzzle came together: The 1962 addition would become housing for students at MATC and other schools; the 1918 building would house Tenor High School’s Journal Square campus; and the 1924 building would become Journal Commons, an apartment building with 141 market-rate units. The 1924 and 1962 pieces qualified for state and federal historic tax credits, and the school conversion of the 1918 building was a much less capital-intensive project ($9 million, compared to $35 million and $29 million, respectively).

“What stands out to me is how the project incorporates the different parts of an educational ecosystem through adaptive reuse,” says awards juror Melinda Gustin, a landscape historian and president of the Nevada State Board of Landscape Architecture. “It’s forward-thinking in how it includes housing that is more affordable, not just for the college students, but for those who are going from high school to the technical college to getting their first job in that neighborhood. It has the ability to really impact young people’s lives.”

Architecture firm EUA handled all three adaptive reuse projects and had the tricky task of converting the offices into housing. The deep floor plates worked for bringing office staff together but made it difficult to subdivide the building into apartments with access to natural light. The design team carved out two light wells to bring light into the darker areas. “It was quite a challenge to cut through a cast-in-place concrete structure with multiple stories to create those light wells,” says architect Mike Oates at EUA. The team also turned the voluminous triple-height basement space that once held enormous printing presses into a two-level parking garage.