Spokane7
50°
June 30, 2011 in Business
Courting solar energy at U.S. Bankruptcy Court building
Mark Campbell, superintendent with MTM Contractors, left, and Brian Durheim, with Krueger Sheet Metal, work on a restored skylight on top of the U.S. post office building in downtown Spokane on Wednesday.
(Full-size photo)
Spokane’s downtown U.S. Bankruptcy Court has turned back the clock, and the result is a courtroom that looks much brighter than it has been the past 60 years.
Thanks to a restoration of the original skylight sitting on the roof, the court’s main courtroom will have a dose of sunshine.
The rooftop restoration at the post office, at the corner of Lincoln Street and Riverside Avenue, is part of a $2.3 million energy upgrade paid for through the federal stimulus package.
As part of the skylight project, 24 fluorescent lights were removed from inside the third-floor courtroom, said General Services Administration spokeswoman Chelsea Turnbull.
Work crews, under the direction of MTM Contractors, Inc., used a crane to drop the new skylight into place this week, finishing the job Wednesday. The skylight weighs about 450 pounds and measures 12 by 8 by 3 feet tall.
The building dates from 1909 and the skylight erected on the northern half of the roof sat directly over the original courtroom.
Turnbull said no one could find documents that explain why the original skylight was removed and its opening covered with a metal shield. Spokane historians and renovation buffs suggest the glass was removed as an air-raid precaution during World War II. No one knows where the original skylight ended up.
Once the renovation project was approved, the GSA used a historic preservation officer to help design a skylight matching the original one, said Shadd Soth, a GSA property manager for the downtown federal post office building.
“It turned out as close to the original as we could get it, considering requirements we had for efficiency,” Soth said.
Spokane firms Krueger Sheet Metal and Valley Glass were hired to construct the skylight. The glass for the skylight comes from pieces salvaged from the large light well on the post office roof, which shines daylight onto the post office’s main floor.
When GSA renovated those light-well skylights in 2002, “We harvested and saved glass from that project, and the leftover pieces were used in the new skylight,” Soth said.
The skylight’s energy contribution will be substantial, he added. The major savings come from the removal of the 1960s-vintage fluorescent light panels that hung on the courtroom ceiling.
During normal daylight, the skylight should completely illuminate the courtroom. On dark days or in the evening, the skylight has a single LED light that shines light directly into the courtroom. That single LED light consumes just 5 percent of the energy used by one of the replaced fluorescent bulbs, Soth said.
Other improvements include a new heat-deflecting roof surface and energy-efficient chillers, Turnbull said.
Garco awarded $35.8 million Joint Base Lewis-McChord contract 
polistra on June 30 at 6:03 a.m.
Perfect combination.
Ninch on June 30 at 6:46 a.m.
The Davenport Hotel skylight (now restored) was blacked out and covered during WWII.
Natural daylighting sans ancient inefficient fluorescent lighting is a win-win.
BTW: Stimulus money? Why not upgrade federal buildings to use less energy based on cost-benefit analysis (new roof covering, new chillers, natural daylighting)? Do not need to use make-work money, when the feds should already be investing in maintaining and upgrading its buildings.
DickAdams on June 30 at 7:24 a.m.
Make work at the taxpayers expense.
RedCedar on June 30 at 8:49 a.m.
Granted it was a bit of a boondoggle in terms of “economic stimulus” and “energy savings”, but it’s better than the those “economic stimulus” wheelchair ramp replacements I’ve been seeing all over the place where they tore out perfectly good existing wheelchair ramps and replaced them with new ones that have yellow bumps on them. Restoring the old skylight will probably never pay for itself in terms of energy savings or carbon footprint, if you consider the resources expended in replacing it, but combined with the aesthetic value, which is important in a public building, I think it’s worth the relatively modest cost.
There are a great many fine old buildings where the original skylights have been removed and boarded over, or covered over on the inside. It seems to have been a very popular “modernization” in the 1960s. Most pre-war public buildings were built to take advantage of as much natural light and natural ventilation as possible. They had skylights, tall windows, and on the larger buildings light wells down the middle. The windows were almost all openable for ventilation, including transom windows over the doors, usually including office doors to the hallways. The buildings were what we would now call “green” designs. Then over the years (the post-war years when energy was cheap), owners decided to “modernize” them by replacing the double-hung windows with sealed plate glass windows and installing central air conditioning, and removing the often-leaky or broken skylights and putting in “modern” fluorescent lighting. At the time, people thought this was an “improvement”, and now we’re stuck with it. Few private building owners have the millions of dollars it takes to undo the architectural vandalism of the 1960s and 1970s.
Teseract on June 30 at 3:00 p.m.
The 60’s were a horrible, horrible time for anything “aesthetic” in Spokane.
We had I-90 come through and wipe out most of Liberty Park, which used to rival Manito Park and was designed by Kirtland Cutter. This park was the destination for ice skaters in Spokane as there was a shelter with a fireplace near the small lake that was there. It was beautiful enough that postcards were made featuring the park that were sold alongside those for Manito. There were a number of large basalt picnic structures and other amenities on site, and it was a popular destination as Manito and Riverfront Park are today:
http://www.historicspokane.org/HeritageTours/east_central/liberty_park.html
The city sold 19 of the 21 acres to the department of Transportation in the ‘60’s for the I-90 project and it was bulldozed. In place of the park we got a hideous cloverleaf that is now the I-90/Hamilton interchange. The ruins of the only remaining basalt picnic structure can be seen buried in weeds at the corner of Arthur and 3rd across the street from an office supply store and a used car lot. East Central got split in half by I-90 and went into sharp decline.
Natorium Park on the West side was shut down in the 60’s as well. This historical park had been open since the 1890’s, and was the original location of the the carousel that now graces Riverfront Park. It was the location of the first heated swimming pool in Washington state in the late 19th century. They had a small zoo, lots of rides, and at one point they had baseball fields where Babe Ruth played once.
In 1967 the park went broke. The land was purchased by the Shriners of all people. They bulldozed the site, the ponds and pools were filled in, the roller coaster torn down and burned in a heap on-site, and it was changed into a *trailer park*. West Central went into decline soon after. It’s not always been known as “Felony Flats” as it is today.
Then you have the dismantlement of the trolley system in favor of diesel buses, the paving over of brick streets with asphalt, the ripping up of granite curbs to be replaced with cement, etc. etc. etc.
Spokane has never been very bright about preserving it’s history or aesthetics. Just drive along Division or down Sprague and you’ll see plenty of proof of this.