Historical Alliance

An interview with Dennis and Connie McCullah

Tell me about this project you’re doing in Nebraska.

Connie: Dennis and I were both born in the same home town (Alliance, Nebraska), graduated in the same class, and have been really good friends since junior high school. At the time Alliance had three public grade schools, a middle school, and a high school. It was a real boom period for the town. They have about the same number of people today, but there’s been a huge economic change in that part of the country. It’s not the population that changed. They just kind of got stuck. Actually, they got stuck in between a K Mart and a discount store on both ends of town, so the downtown just went the way of all these beautiful downtowns did when big box stores come in.

Dennis: Recently, Connie and I purchased a couple of the downtown stores in Alliance that were starting to fail and crumble away, and we’ve begun remodeling these buildings. Our goal is to change some of the economics of the town, to take it from a slight dip to a positive upward swing. And it seems to be working quite well. It’s a little hard dealing with a project 1200 miles away, but we have a good crew back there, and they work well with our people here in Berkeley who are designing the project.

What inspired this project?

Dennis: We left Alliance in 1965, and over the years a number of buyers from both coasts have come into town, bought historic buildings, stripped out the hardware and lumber, and then just left them. The buildings were completely destroyed by the time these people took everything out of them, and the town just tore them down. We watched this happening to three or four wonderful buildings, until finally it was happening to our favorite building. We decided that we weren’t going to let it happen. We called the owner, told him we were dissatisfied with his motives, and that he must have a price for selling. He did and we bought that building. That carried over to another building, which has carried over to a third building. People are asking us to invest in a lot of additional buildings, but I think we’re finished for now and will focus on the three we own. They’re rather large buildings with a tremendous history, so we’re renovating them, keeping the historic characteristics but with all modern heating and cooling systems and modern windows, so they’ll be very energy efficient. We’re planning on these buildings eventually having a zero energy foot print. They might actually make more energy than they use. And we’re hoping that other people in town who own commercial buildings and residences can use some of the ideas we’re bringing to the area on their own buildings and homes to make them healthier and more energy efficient.

Have you encountered any interesting challenges?

Connie: It’s a challenge to take a 100-year old building that was built with an original purpose — say a retail hardware store — and try to repurpose it for what the community needs today. We’ve held a couple of town hall meetings to listen to what the community would like to see in our buildings. There were so many ideas that it became a struggle with the one building we had trying to figure out how this could happen. So being able to acquire two other buildings a half block away, that are still within the historic district of the downtown allows us to better meet the community’s needs. In those cases we’ve been able to take the two buildings and use them in ways similar to what they were 100 years ago with apartments upstairs and retail downstairs. It’s been interesting to see how this develops, and how excited people are getting.

One of the ideas for the first 4-story building is putting in a microbrewery that takes up about three floors. Then we’re planning on providing space for local artists who are interested in forming an art coop. The local state college, which is 60 miles to the north, has also said that they’ll bring their art and performing arts department down and offer extension classes.

Dennis: It’s interesting, Alliance has historically been a center for the railroad with lines going both north/south and east/west, but when people come into town they don’t see any railroad memorabilia. So people have asked us to put in a place where we can have those items. They would also like a place where there’s Native American art. There’s a lot of history with the Cheyenne, and the Sioux and the Plains Indians, and they’re asking for that.

Connie: Another idea we’re working on is called the Panhandle Pantry. This will be a place where people could come in and make jams and jellies, or, say, bake wedding cakes. There’s no place where they can do this now. We’d have a place in the store where tourists could come in and buy these items, and we also thought we’d develop a virtual Panhandle Pantry web site where people could sell the wares – quilts, knitting, jams, jellies, and syrups — that they make there. It’s a place where local farmers and ranchers, as well as townspeople, could make a little additional money.

Dennis: The Chamber of Commerce is going to move in to one of our buildings. And we’d like to put housing in the old apartments upstairs. A hundred years ago the entire downtown was commercial downstairs and housing upstairs. Connie and I believe in having housing near jobs, and we’re going to redo the apartments to show the people in Alliance that it still can work.

What has been the response to your projects?

Dennis: Momentum is building. In the last three months we’ve had two people from town come up and say, ‘Boy Dennis and Connie have come back to Alliance and look at what they’re doing to this place. I’m going to do this to my place.’ So, we’ve already got a little momentum going and we plan to keep it going.

Connie: One of the things that ties the whole Alliance Project back to Odin’s Hammer is the green aspect, the healthy aspect, and being able to take advantage of solar panels and wind turbines for energy, things like that. A huge part of our vision is bringing the concept of green construction and sustainable buildings back into our community. A lot of this is happening in California right now, and Odin’s Hammer is part of that movement, so it’s only natural for us to take these concepts back into the community where we grew up

Dennis: Naturally, some of the locals tell us that our ideas are crazy, but I think because we are from there they’ll at least listen to us the first time. They may not agree with us but at least we can get an audience and if we say the right thing it might make a difference. All of the farmers and ranchers in western Nebraska had windmills. They’ve used the wind for years, but the idea of doing a big wind turbine in town and actually using wind power to run the electrical needs for a building is something they didn’t consider was a good idea. So we’re going to change their minds a little bit by using the wind and the sun.

Tell me more about your green vision for this project.

Dennis: We actually have three buildings. In one building we plan on using geothermal to heat and cool it. In the second one we plan on using the wind and the sun. And in the third one we plan on just using the sun, both with solar photovoltaic cells and with solar water heating. So we’ll actually demonstrate three different ways of powering these buildings hoping to show people it’s a good idea. By using the sun, wind, and geothermal our buildings can actually have a zero footprint or even contribute energy to the grid.

How will you make this vision last over time?

Connie: We set up a non-profit that will support the performing arts and media arts so that any money that comes in through that foundation, or is generated by buildings owned by the foundation, will actually stay in the community and have that same purpose long after we’re gone. That’s part of ourgive back to the sustainability of the community, ensuring that once this is developed it will stay. One thing that often happens in communities that have been really successful and all of the sudden are not anymore, is that the earlier generation didn’t mentor the next generation on how to be successful. This foundation will provide the mentoring to make the project sustainable.

Dennis: One of the first things the Foundation will do is develop an Art Depot. Art programs in the schools are one of the first things to go when districts start cutting budgets. And then teachers have to buy art supplies — pencils, paper, and crayons — for the students out of their own pocket. So we’re going to set up an Art Depot in one of our buildings where teachers can come in and get all the supplies they need, and not have to pay for it themselves. We’re hoping that the paper manufacturers, others like that will donate their off-cuts and their discontinued items, so it can be used not only by Alliance but by the surrounding areas and the small country schools, everywhere out there. Chadron State College has said they’ll help us set this up. We have setup Classroom 7 in Central School as the center for this exchange.

Connie: We’re also getting help on the Classroom 7 project from a local non-profit group called Keep Alliance Beautiful. They recycle a lot of things they find when estates clean out homes. In the past all the arts and crafts and hobby materials went into the trash. Keep Alliance Beautiful will now pick these materials up, inventory them, and make them available through the Classroom 7. That’s our first baby steps in trying to set up a sustainable foundation for the community.

Dennis: We also have a stage in one of our buildings. Chadron State College has expressed an interest in coming down to start a performing arts program in Alliance, using the local performing artists but also bringing their students down and possibly setting up a few other programs that draw on local talents – the cowboy poets, young high school bands, any sorts of performing artists, and giving them a place to perform on Friday and Saturday nights, to be part of the community and have something to do rather than just hanging out.

Connie: We’re really getting involved in the entire community and learning how to navigate through city politics. It’s been really great. Everybody is on board with what’s going on. We go back every couple of months to meet with people. In the meantime, we have our green team working on the buildings — a mechanical engineer, an architectural firm, and a local contractor.

Dennis: Locally, here one of the structural engineers we use got so excited by the project that he got his license to do work with us in Nebraska. The people working for us back there are very open to green ideas. A while back, I sent them a copy of Alameda County’s (CA) Waste Management Authority’s Green Building Guidelines home remodeling guideline. One of the guys called back a week later to say these are the coolest guidelines he’d ever seen and that he’d already changed the way he worked. They want to know more and more. Altogether we have four people working for us in Alliance. They’re having a lot of fun and we really appreciate their hard work.

Connie: And word is spreading through town. The buildings are right downtown and the crew often leaves the doors open. People are always coming in to find out what’s going on, asking them what they’re doing and why they’re doing things certain ways. A lady four doors down wants to remodel her building. She asked if the two designers from Berkeley we had working there last week, had time to design her place. And a guy two doors down wants to talk to us about tapping into the photovoltaic system so his building will be a little more energy efficient. So people are coming around. All it takes is for someone to do it, and prove that it works. Then it’s going to take off.

Dennis: The architects we’re working with back there are another great example. They want to become more sustainable, but they don’t know a lot of these issues. So we made a deal with them that we would teach them more about sustainability and energy efficiency. In return they agreed to go through our plans and make sure they meet all the Nebraska codes. So we formed a team with those guys. We had the head inspector from the city come over and say, “You guys are doing things just on your own that most people won’t do. You’re changing out the electrical lines to make them safer. You’re changing out the old plumbing and putting new materials in. It’s so exciting to see someone come into our city and do this.”

Connie: We actually sent him copies of Title 24, California’s energy efficiency codes that are the standards here and that we’re using in our work back there.

Dennis: They’re the toughest energy standards in the country.

Connie: With these codes and ideas we don't have to reinvent the wheel. So we're getting a lot of buy in from different levels on this. We have a community that is getting very excited about what's going on in their town.

Dennis: Things like this make it interesting to come into work every day. We’re keeping good records of what’s going on, and when this becomes a success we’ll document the process with a book and perhaps even a video that will show other small towns across the United States how they can address local economic and housing issues.

 

 

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