The Saving of Woodside

All I knew of Woodside in 1999 was that it was very old and it was for sale.  Tim Dunn told me about it and having already done two houses in Maplewood I think my reply was something about not wanting to have anything to do with any more crispy pieces of wood covered with lead paint. But I went and looked anyway.

Woodside looked beautiful to me then and it does now.  It was handmade from a time when that really meant something.  The owner was a nice fellow with strong opinions.  He didn’t think Woodside was beautiful.  In fact he wanted it torn down.

I eventually managed to convince him that what he had was rare and beautiful or more likely he got tired of me showing up with back issues of the National Trust magazines packed with photos of homes similar to his. 

Meantime back home I had to persuade my wife to let me buy it.  This I did by convincing her that we wouldn’t spend a lot on it.  We would stabilize the house and offer it to the city for a museum and sculpture garden.  I’m not kidding.

At any rate the owner seemed genuinely pained when I showed up cash in hand and he had to tell me he had sold the property the previous week to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who wanted to raze it for a Kingdom Hall.

This set in motion a chain of events that is still reverberating.  First, at an informal meeting in my dining room, Councilmen Tim Dunn and Dan Mosby agreed to begin the process that created our Historic Preservation ordinance and Historic Preservation commission.  Without a doubt much of the credit for the eventual adoption of both goes to the council and staff at that time.  I think it’s important to note that they were adopted because of the threat to Woodside.

I’ll continue this story in the next post but I want to say that many of the members of the city council and the staff are my neighbors and friends.  The vote to demolish Woodside is not something any of them would take lightly.

Having ruffled feathers in the past I have tried not to ruffle any unnecessarily.  I said nothing as long as Woodside was standing.  The vote to demolish has jarred me from my complacency.  It seems to have had a similar effect on others as well.  This is good.

I’ll end this post by saying that the folks most responsible for saving Woodside thus far have been the Maplewood City Council and staff.