Light Returns to a KensingtonTextile Mill

Arizona Street Arts Building

Progress! Our East Kensington Textile Mill renovation takes a giant step forward toward its debut as The Arizona Street Arts Building (working name, not official). Five years ago, we restored the window openings by first removing cracked glass block and reinforced concrete sills from a 1980's renovation, and then installed Indiana Limestone sills (well, all limestone stocked at the local mason's supply yard is from Indiana, but we like how it sounds). We then installed two windows on each floor to test how the unprotected glass would be received on a street where all commercial buildings had their windows removed and blocked up decades ago, and the drug and prostitution trades flourished. Eventually, one window out of the six was smashed by a vandal. Then, with minimal resources at our disposal, we boarded up the windows and waited until we could afford to complete the project. Last winter, watching helplessly in the crowd as a tragic fire destroyed a much larger historic textile mill complex around the corner, we learned some things that pushed us to move faster on our window installation project. For one, firefighters can't get water where it will be most effective if there are blocked-up window openings (although in all fairness to our safety measures, our building does have a working fire sprinkler system, which the other mill did not).

So today, we are celebrating an important milestone with the installation of beautiful seven foot windows on the second floor fronting Arizona Street. Nine windows now flood the interior space with light for the first time in over 30 years. While the original wood arch top12/12 sash would have been the correct historical choice for replacements, they are so costly we never considered them for the project. But we stepped up the design a notch with the new heavy aluminum replacements by adding center muntins to the top and bottom sash to create a more pleasing 2/2 format. And instead of the standard black, brown or white finish color, we specified a dark green, close to the color of the original exterior wood trim. The limestone sills are also much more functional and attractive than the 19th century originals, which were wood.

We are planning artist work space on the second floor, which features 12 ft. ceilings and maple floors. Already completed is a 1200sf live/work/exhibit space on the ground floor.  In the works for September is an Art Gallery in the former loading dock. We held two successful back-to-back Painting Exhibits in January and February in a temporary gallery space here, and look forward to making this a permanent feature of the Arts Building.

Crew from Emerald Windows hard at work.