Lakewood is a city with great bones. Our streets are filled with impressive century homes and the fabric of our main corridors is lined with charming historic commercial buildings. We all value the character and beauty these structures provide amidst the walkable scale of our historic streetcar suburb. The City of Lakewood is always exploring ways to partner with owners and community partners to maintain and enhance our historic stock of buildings. One current initiative underway is the effort to create an official Madison Avenue Historic District that is formally recognized at the federal level.
The vision is for the new historic district to run on Madison Avenue from Cohassett Avenue to Riverside Drive. This new district would complement and expand on the historic district established for the Birdtown neighborhood in 2007. Introducing a new historic district has numerous benefits. These range from generating community pride and adding new tools to protect our history, to encouraging continued investment and opening new avenues for financial support to building owners. That support can take the form of grants and especially pave the way for state and federal tax credit eligibility. Having a building that was built at least 50 years ago that sits in a historic district makes it automatically eligible to be considered for historic tax credits.
The City of Lakewood is currently engaging Madison Avenue stakeholders for input into the proposed designation. If completed and approved by the National Register of Historic Places, the new historic district would continue a strong tradition in Lakewood of preserving and adaptively reusing historic buildings. Some recent examples of success in private developers adaptively reusing buildings include Jim Miketo’s redevelopment of the former Bi-Rite on Madison and Robin into a mix of first floor retail with office and business space above and Oster Services’ transformation of the St. James School and Rectory into its headquarters and office space for other tenants…