When Phillip Carr discovered that the drab, 1950s ex-pawnshop he’d bought to house his management company was actually an ornate historic building dating from the 1880s, his renovation plans changed. Instead of simply gutting the structure and constructing plain-vanilla office space, he decided to try to restore the building’s original grandeur. However, little more than the bones of the structure could be salvaged. In a labor of love, he redesigned the interior in a style that honored the building’s 19th-century origins, brought in a specialty mason to recreate the original brick façade, found an expert to rebuild the 1901 freight elevator and discovered a perfect replacement for the stamped-metal ceilings – Ceilume thermoformed ceiling tiles.
The building at 400 Broad Street in Gadsden, Alabama, was constructed shortly after the 1883 fire that burnt out the downtown area. It was built by a Prussian immigrant, Herman Herzberg, who had fought in the Civil War and then went into the mercantile business. His store operated on the site until 1944 as Herzberg-Loveman Drygoods. The building was eventually sold in 1979 and became a large pawnshop. The decorative brick front was covered by a flat metal façade, the side and back exterior brick were coated with an inch of concrete and painted white. Half of the interior was closed off for storage of abandoned, unsold pawns, and the building was allowed to deteriorate slowly over the ensuing decades.