Historic Headaches
By Sarah Pounds
It can be easy to forget about a place’s significance when no one is taking care of it.
Especially when you don’t know who is supposed to care for it in the first place.
In the course of one year, Tremont Temple Baptist Church and the Charles Douglass House were demolished. Both were structures of significance in the African American history of Macon.
Both were empty for a long time.
Both came down to make way for development.
They weren’t the only vacant, historically significant structures in the city. The Roxy Theatre, a Quonset hut on Hazel Street, was once an entertainment hub in Macon’s Tybee neighborhood that initially hosted Hamp Swain’s Teenage Party music competition.
Now, it’s an abandoned church building with no obvious caretaker. Any sort of preservation efforts — for the Roxy Theatre and other dilapidated, historic spots around the city — depend largely on finding the owner.
In response to the demolition of Tremont and the Douglass House, the Historic Macon Foundation is focusing its efforts on recognizing and preserving the Cotton Avenue district, a place for Macon’s prominent black businesses in the twentieth century.
“It’s hard to quantify what [preservation] success will look like,” said Ethiel Garlington, the executive director of Historic Macon. “It’s a little nebulous.”
Garlington said that their first job is to determine what in the area is still standing. “We’ve done some surveys to map out which historic buildings are still there. Then, we want to look to see who owns those and what, if any, plans there are for those buildings,” he said.
The key step to that process is finding the owner of a property.
The question of ownership isn’t always an easy one to answer, but it’s a necessary one when blight and preservation are concerned. In order to do anything to a property, you have to have permission from an owner.
If an owner cannot be found, your hands are often tied.
Through exploring the history of the Roxy Theatre, our class had a lot of ideas for how we could potentially restore or reuse the building in a way that brought awareness to its former role as an entertainment hub in the Tybee neighborhood.
Kim Campbell, who is the Preservation and Education Coordinator for Historic Macon, shared the process for recognizing the Roxy as a historic site through the National Historic Register or through other preservation organizations. Some of the processes were complex while others were easier to attain. But in each, there was a fundamental requirement.
“You have to have the owner’s permission to do any of this,” Campbell said.
In attempting to contact the owners of The Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith — the last known occupant of the old Roxy Theatre’s space — members of our class left letters, posted flyers and knocked on neighbor’s doors.
Neighbors did not have much information. Neither did the family of the previous owner. Even when the church in Atlanta responded, the conversation didn’t always produce the best results.
“[Bishop Solomon] researched and reached out in the hopes of finding any information for me. However, though he was willing to help, he was unable to find anything or anyone that could help me find out more about the Roxy, when the church vacated the property and if someone affiliated with the church was still in charge of the property,” said Parker Van Riper, a student in our class.
The current owners of the building never were found. Despite combing through city directories and tax records, there are no names associated with the church’s Macon location aside from the organization’s title.
Those same records show that there’s been a tax lien on the property since 2012, when the area was surveyed and the property was found to be abandoned.
In talking to preservationists in the area, we found this particular roadblock isn’t uncommon, and not finding an owner for the theatre meant the chances are slim that the property will even be formally recognized.
There is always the potential that an owner will step forward someday. There is also the chance that they will not. Successes are not the only nebulous resolutions.
It’s enough to give anyone a headache.
Jenna Eason contributed information to this report.
