Business View Magazine | April 2020

182 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE APRIL 2020 Avenue. In the 1940s and ‘50s it was part of a bustling downtown. In the ‘40s, an Art Deco façade got put on – a bright white and blue vitrolite tile, which was a very specialized tile that’s not made in the U.S. anymore. So, it was very distinctive, architecturally. The store closed in the late ‘60s and caught on fire in ’84. That’s when the historic movement to designate Court Square and Dexter Avenue as an historic district of the National Park Service began. The City of Montgomery purchased what was left of that building, along with about a dozen other properties on Lower Dexter that were boarded up at that time, and we started selling those to private redevelopers.” However, Cortell shares that there were problems getting the adjacent buildings redeveloped because they were built side by side. “When you try to do mixed-use, you need to conform to modern international building codes that require multiple means of egress,” she explains. “And they were just too close together. So, we needed that area to become an egress for the adjacent buildings, which we had just sold for renovation and redevelopment. We were trying to figure that out; we were thinking we could keep the front of the building and take down the back, where it had burned. But we didn’t want to tear down the building and have the urban fabric broken. We hired an architect and we started doing community outreach. We gathered a group of historians and we explained the problem with egress and why the adjacent buildings couldn’t get redeveloped.” During one of the public meetings, Mary Ann Neeley, a local historian, prevailed upon the city Senior Development Manager, Lois Cortell