February 11, 2008
Fixer-uppers | Bay State firm Consigli Construction finds steady work renovating and preserving Maine buildings
By Whit Richardson
Maine, like its New England neighbors, traces the history of the construction business back to the earliest days of this country. Around the state, one can find structures that have for centuries, in some cases, weathered the daily rain, sleet, snow and wind that Mother Nature offers up. As a result, these historic buildings often suffer the signs of age, from cracking mortar between bricks to leaky roofs. Not so long ago, conventional wisdom shouted to tear them down. But these days, preserving historic structures is a concept that's been gaining momentum.
Historic preservation and restoration has become another tool in the economic developer's toolbox.
However, helping preserve these buildings requires special skills and expertise. One company operating in Maine, Consigli Construction, has identified historic restoration as one of its core focuses. The Milford, Mass.-based company, which has an office in Portland, has been involved in some of the most high-profile historic restoration jobs in the state, from restoring Bowdoin College's 152-year-old campus chapel to giving a facelift to Portland's Victoria Mansion, considered the country's finest example of an Italian villa-style home.
Mainebiz sat down with Matt Tonello, general manager of Consigli's Portland office and one of the company's restoration gurus, to speak about the restoration business, what historic preservation means to Maine's economy, and just how many stones Consigli workers had to replace on Bowdoin's historic chapel. An edited transcript follows.
Mainebiz: To begin, tell me what constitutes historic preservation.
Matt Tonello: Historic preservation is the rehabilitation, the repair, the preservation of existing building fabric. There are a couple different definitions that the National Park Service defines: there's conservation, which is conserving exactly what's there; there's preservation; and then there's restoration, and the restoration tends to be most of what we do.
We've done conservation techniques on Victoria Mansion in Portland where we've done micro-pinning and micro-grouting of very fine cracks to conserve in place existing building fabric. We've done restoration work, which is more removal of existing building fabric and replacing it with materials consistent with what was originally there. So there are different levels of it. The conservation tends to be more museum-quality stuff, preservation stuff can span many different building types, and restoration is really what you primarily see for instructional work. Academic institutions are usually doing restoration work.
How long has Consigli been involved in restoration work, and how long has it been a focus for the company?
We call it one of our specialties. We started in 1905 as a masonry contractor, and I'm not sure we were doing a lot of preservation work back then. Usually that was about the time they were building all that stuff. As far as I know, back into the 80s we've been doing restoration work. We've always had our own masons, our own carpenters, our own laborers who are experienced, qualified and passionate about this type of stuff. We also have the relationships ˆ which is another hugely important thing ˆ with a lot of the restoration subcontractors in the market.
We're known in a lot of places for our restoration work. The funny thing is, in some areas that's the only thing people think we do. In reality, it's about 15% of our volume by revenue. However, I would say it probably gets about 85% of our press. It tends to get the press because it tends to be on buildings that people gravitate towards and are passionate about. The scaffolding goes up on a historic building, everyone wants to know what you're doing. You're taking a weathervane down. You're removing these beautiful old windows. People get interested and want to know what's going on. People don't want their buildings to change.
Talk to me about the process behind these projects. From what I've read they are fairly complicated, like having to source stone from the quarry that was originally used to build the building.
At Bowdoin College we opened up a quarry [Grant's Quarry in Brunswick] that originally was the source for the original Upjohn building [the chapel].
The quarry had been closed for a long time?
Yep. There were no roads into it anymore. We traipsed through the woods and cut a swath through and removed some granite and sent it to a fabricator out of state to cut into shapes and bring back.
The key to these restoration projects is the planning of them. We work with some plaster conservation subcontractors that you might not get them this summer at this point unless you really talked to them ahead of time. At Bowdoin, we spent a year and a half with the engineer and Bowdoin College planning the restoration of their bell towers. We took the stone out of the quarry eight months before we actually needed it on site.
So it's the planning. It's the knowing to buy stone 18 months in advance. It's knowing that the window restoration contractor you're going to deal with really books up around November and December for the following year.
It seems a lot of the restoration jobs Consigli has done are academic or government buildings. Is that the bulk of your work, or do you ever work on commercial projects?
We do some commercial work. But most is with academic institutions, with nonprofits, museums. They tend to be the type of clients or building owners who understand what they've got. They understand the stature and the fact that what they've got is an asset that will never be reproduced. They invest in those buildings because they know they're such an important, integral piece to the community and their institution. We're talking about Victoria Mansion; we're talking about Maine Historical Society, we're doing a restoration over there on their existing library; Portland City Hall; Bowdoin College.
We don't see as much in the commercial market because things are ˆ you don't always get a return on your investment in a restoration project. It's not always as long a view. And I don't want to put business people down in the way they deal with their buildings, but that's the nature of the market.
One of the things I'm involved in is LD 262. It's a historic tax credit bill that's going in front of the Legislature this session and it's something that could allow the state of Maine to invest more easily ˆ get businesses to be able to invest, developers able to invest ˆ in historic buildings, historic mills that are abandoned, and convert them to viable working pieces of the economy again. It's a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. That could spur a lot more restoration work in the commercial market.
It seems that historic preservation is now often used as an economic development tool. How long has that been around? Is that a new trend?
How long has it been around? I don't know. I don't know if I'm old enough. It probably happened in the 1970s. I know we've lost some buildings in the late 70s. I mean, Union Station [in Portland]. You could say that might have been one of the turning points. People started saying, "Hey, what the heck are we doing here? We're tearing down our heritage." I'm on the board of Maine Preservation and they always use that as something that was a travesty when it happened and really opened people's eyes. So I don't know when it started, but it's always been a part of my thinking as a contractor.
But that's the idea of historic preservation in general. What about the idea of historic preservation as an economic development tool?
Preserving and putting a building back onto the tax rolls that is abandoned and not being used and has graffiti on it, is, by nature, a financial engine that will turn downtowns around. I don't know if there's been studies quantifying how much it returns and puts back into the economy, but imagine the abutting properties. What happens to the values of those when a building between them that might have been abandoned and not restored is beautified and brought back to life? That's one of the fundamental arguments behind LD 262, the historic tax credit program.
What's the larger value of historic preservation?
It's preserving and keeping in place our heritage. Buildings are no longer mass masonry structures. You can't afford to put into them the detail that we used to get out of the craftsmen. Drive by Victoria Mansion and look at the hand-carved components all over that. That's never going to be done again. Not by anyone I know. If it's done again it will be done on fiberglass or some kind of material they can punch or stamp. It's incredibly important for the communities and the neighborhoods and us as a population in Maine. There's a lot of beautiful buildings in Maine that are a good candidates for restoration projects.
That flows nicely into my next question: Is Maine a good place to be in the historic restoration business?
We've been doing work up here for five years now and we've always had at least one or two restoration projects going on. There's not a ton of work in Maine that's restoration. We have a smaller population. I don't know if we have fewer historic buildings than adjacent states, but there are definitely fewer being restored if you look at the straight numbers.
Is there much competition in Maine in the restoration niche?
Because there are fewer restoration jobs going on, there tend to be fewer people doing it. If you go to, say, Massachusetts, where there's a lot of restoration work going on, there's a lot of subcontractors and qualified people. Like I said before, there's not a ton of work up here.
What does the future hold for the restoration business in Maine?
If LD 262 happens and it gets funded, it is definitely is going to spur more work. In the absence of LD 262 passing, there's still a lot of old buildings in Maine. There's still a lot of buildings owned by private institutions that know they have to keep them up, and if they start leaking they have to maintain them. So I don't see a boom in any sense of the word to really ever happen.
What's been the most complicated restoration project you've done?
Definitely the Bowdoin chapel bell towers. Bowdoin, by far, was the longest planned, most stressful in terms of figuring out how it would work, but probably one of the most satisfying projects we as a company have ever done. We disassembled 7,200 stones, numbered them, put them in a field and then reassembled them. At the same time we replaced about 25% of them with replicas. We opened up the old quarry. We had to measure every stone [because each one was a] different size, and shape.
The most complicated things about these projects is access. It took us probably five months to finally plan out how we were going to get people 125 feet up in the air disassembling stones that essentially weigh more than they do. It's a combination of scaffolding; a combination of climbing units that mechanically climb up the building and are working platforms; it's a combination of tower cranes. It's setting up your workers to be efficient and safe that is the most challenging, the most nerve-wracking and the riskiest piece of the work. Once you figure that out and you figure out how they can safely lift things and they can safely work around a building, you just let your guys do the work they know how to do.
Historic preservation and restoration has become another tool in the economic developer's toolbox.
However, helping preserve these buildings requires special skills and expertise. One company operating in Maine, Consigli Construction, has identified historic restoration as one of its core focuses. The Milford, Mass.-based company, which has an office in Portland, has been involved in some of the most high-profile historic restoration jobs in the state, from restoring Bowdoin College's 152-year-old campus chapel to giving a facelift to Portland's Victoria Mansion, considered the country's finest example of an Italian villa-style home.
Mainebiz sat down with Matt Tonello, general manager of Consigli's Portland office and one of the company's restoration gurus, to speak about the restoration business, what historic preservation means to Maine's economy, and just how many stones Consigli workers had to replace on Bowdoin's historic chapel. An edited transcript follows.
Mainebiz: To begin, tell me what constitutes historic preservation.
Matt Tonello: Historic preservation is the rehabilitation, the repair, the preservation of existing building fabric. There are a couple different definitions that the National Park Service defines: there's conservation, which is conserving exactly what's there; there's preservation; and then there's restoration, and the restoration tends to be most of what we do.
We've done conservation techniques on Victoria Mansion in Portland where we've done micro-pinning and micro-grouting of very fine cracks to conserve in place existing building fabric. We've done restoration work, which is more removal of existing building fabric and replacing it with materials consistent with what was originally there. So there are different levels of it. The conservation tends to be more museum-quality stuff, preservation stuff can span many different building types, and restoration is really what you primarily see for instructional work. Academic institutions are usually doing restoration work.
How long has Consigli been involved in restoration work, and how long has it been a focus for the company?
We call it one of our specialties. We started in 1905 as a masonry contractor, and I'm not sure we were doing a lot of preservation work back then. Usually that was about the time they were building all that stuff. As far as I know, back into the 80s we've been doing restoration work. We've always had our own masons, our own carpenters, our own laborers who are experienced, qualified and passionate about this type of stuff. We also have the relationships ˆ which is another hugely important thing ˆ with a lot of the restoration subcontractors in the market.
We're known in a lot of places for our restoration work. The funny thing is, in some areas that's the only thing people think we do. In reality, it's about 15% of our volume by revenue. However, I would say it probably gets about 85% of our press. It tends to get the press because it tends to be on buildings that people gravitate towards and are passionate about. The scaffolding goes up on a historic building, everyone wants to know what you're doing. You're taking a weathervane down. You're removing these beautiful old windows. People get interested and want to know what's going on. People don't want their buildings to change.
Talk to me about the process behind these projects. From what I've read they are fairly complicated, like having to source stone from the quarry that was originally used to build the building.
At Bowdoin College we opened up a quarry [Grant's Quarry in Brunswick] that originally was the source for the original Upjohn building [the chapel].
The quarry had been closed for a long time?
Yep. There were no roads into it anymore. We traipsed through the woods and cut a swath through and removed some granite and sent it to a fabricator out of state to cut into shapes and bring back.
The key to these restoration projects is the planning of them. We work with some plaster conservation subcontractors that you might not get them this summer at this point unless you really talked to them ahead of time. At Bowdoin, we spent a year and a half with the engineer and Bowdoin College planning the restoration of their bell towers. We took the stone out of the quarry eight months before we actually needed it on site.
So it's the planning. It's the knowing to buy stone 18 months in advance. It's knowing that the window restoration contractor you're going to deal with really books up around November and December for the following year.
It seems a lot of the restoration jobs Consigli has done are academic or government buildings. Is that the bulk of your work, or do you ever work on commercial projects?
We do some commercial work. But most is with academic institutions, with nonprofits, museums. They tend to be the type of clients or building owners who understand what they've got. They understand the stature and the fact that what they've got is an asset that will never be reproduced. They invest in those buildings because they know they're such an important, integral piece to the community and their institution. We're talking about Victoria Mansion; we're talking about Maine Historical Society, we're doing a restoration over there on their existing library; Portland City Hall; Bowdoin College.
We don't see as much in the commercial market because things are ˆ you don't always get a return on your investment in a restoration project. It's not always as long a view. And I don't want to put business people down in the way they deal with their buildings, but that's the nature of the market.
One of the things I'm involved in is LD 262. It's a historic tax credit bill that's going in front of the Legislature this session and it's something that could allow the state of Maine to invest more easily ˆ get businesses to be able to invest, developers able to invest ˆ in historic buildings, historic mills that are abandoned, and convert them to viable working pieces of the economy again. It's a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. That could spur a lot more restoration work in the commercial market.
It seems that historic preservation is now often used as an economic development tool. How long has that been around? Is that a new trend?
How long has it been around? I don't know. I don't know if I'm old enough. It probably happened in the 1970s. I know we've lost some buildings in the late 70s. I mean, Union Station [in Portland]. You could say that might have been one of the turning points. People started saying, "Hey, what the heck are we doing here? We're tearing down our heritage." I'm on the board of Maine Preservation and they always use that as something that was a travesty when it happened and really opened people's eyes. So I don't know when it started, but it's always been a part of my thinking as a contractor.
But that's the idea of historic preservation in general. What about the idea of historic preservation as an economic development tool?
Preserving and putting a building back onto the tax rolls that is abandoned and not being used and has graffiti on it, is, by nature, a financial engine that will turn downtowns around. I don't know if there's been studies quantifying how much it returns and puts back into the economy, but imagine the abutting properties. What happens to the values of those when a building between them that might have been abandoned and not restored is beautified and brought back to life? That's one of the fundamental arguments behind LD 262, the historic tax credit program.
What's the larger value of historic preservation?
It's preserving and keeping in place our heritage. Buildings are no longer mass masonry structures. You can't afford to put into them the detail that we used to get out of the craftsmen. Drive by Victoria Mansion and look at the hand-carved components all over that. That's never going to be done again. Not by anyone I know. If it's done again it will be done on fiberglass or some kind of material they can punch or stamp. It's incredibly important for the communities and the neighborhoods and us as a population in Maine. There's a lot of beautiful buildings in Maine that are a good candidates for restoration projects.
That flows nicely into my next question: Is Maine a good place to be in the historic restoration business?
We've been doing work up here for five years now and we've always had at least one or two restoration projects going on. There's not a ton of work in Maine that's restoration. We have a smaller population. I don't know if we have fewer historic buildings than adjacent states, but there are definitely fewer being restored if you look at the straight numbers.
Is there much competition in Maine in the restoration niche?
Because there are fewer restoration jobs going on, there tend to be fewer people doing it. If you go to, say, Massachusetts, where there's a lot of restoration work going on, there's a lot of subcontractors and qualified people. Like I said before, there's not a ton of work up here.
What does the future hold for the restoration business in Maine?
If LD 262 happens and it gets funded, it is definitely is going to spur more work. In the absence of LD 262 passing, there's still a lot of old buildings in Maine. There's still a lot of buildings owned by private institutions that know they have to keep them up, and if they start leaking they have to maintain them. So I don't see a boom in any sense of the word to really ever happen.
What's been the most complicated restoration project you've done?
Definitely the Bowdoin chapel bell towers. Bowdoin, by far, was the longest planned, most stressful in terms of figuring out how it would work, but probably one of the most satisfying projects we as a company have ever done. We disassembled 7,200 stones, numbered them, put them in a field and then reassembled them. At the same time we replaced about 25% of them with replicas. We opened up the old quarry. We had to measure every stone [because each one was a] different size, and shape.
The most complicated things about these projects is access. It took us probably five months to finally plan out how we were going to get people 125 feet up in the air disassembling stones that essentially weigh more than they do. It's a combination of scaffolding; a combination of climbing units that mechanically climb up the building and are working platforms; it's a combination of tower cranes. It's setting up your workers to be efficient and safe that is the most challenging, the most nerve-wracking and the riskiest piece of the work. Once you figure that out and you figure out how they can safely lift things and they can safely work around a building, you just let your guys do the work they know how to do.
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