D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
July
2008
Gerald Lundeen
Page: 2He doubles back, continues down a long dark hallway, then leads the way up and down stairs, pointing out other jail cells — these still intact — and prisoner holding tanks, a series of small, dark rooms with very dark pasts.
"Here's your solitary confinement," Lundeen says of a scrunched and dismal barred area with a single stool bolted to the floor. "This is where prisoners were interrogated." He gestures to more squalid quarters down a hallway lined with bars upon bars: "Here's where they took their meals." He shows the larger "group rooms" where numerous prisoners were housed, and the austere concrete-block showers.
"Above this is one hellacious roof," he says. "I mean, it is a mess! My idea? Steel rebar and concrete and you've got a perfect parking garage. It'll be convenient to the shops, the restaurant, the hotel, whatever."
Up on the second floor, Lundeen points out some beautifully painted ceiling beams in the old courtroom, an impressive room some 40-by-60 feet. "Can you believe they had drop ceilings covering up all that?" he asks incredulously. Huge, old silver heating ducts hang down from above, along with wiring, looking like hanks of plastic-coated crazy spaghetti.
"Oh, we've already taken out miles of ductwork!" Lundeen exclaims. "They did the dropped ceiling treatment to hide everything and to make the space more efficient to heat. Shrinking your space and using all these ducts doesn't hold a candle to what we're going to do."
He describes the latest technology — in his mind, the best — of new Japanese heating/cooling units. "We'll open these windows all the way up," he says, noting that many have been boarded-over at the top. "You put the units right there, at the tops of the windows. It's unobtrusive, allowing the beauty of the windows to go unspoiled, and it's the most efficient type of heating and cooling there is."
He ventures down another dark hallway.
"Imagine a restaurant here — with a terrace," he adds excitedly. "I see full French doors here. . . and here. We're going to bring it back to real grandeur."
In another room, Lundeen pulls back heavy drapes, flooding the room with light. "This is going to be a very big challenge, a big part of what I need to do, to bring light into spaces like these. Some of these rooms have no windows at all, so the challenge is even greater."
Up on the third floor, Lundeen points out the jury room and a juror waiting area, where male and female jurors were kept separately. "These were the private jurors' bathrooms," he says. A stairway was dead-ended here to accommodate this small room. "There even was a place for them to sleep on the premises. Can you imagine? The horror!" he adds with a laugh.
In between the gender-segregated juror waiting areas is an odd, square cabinet with a hole in the center of its wooden top.
"It used to have a Plexiglas square in the middle, so you could look through, down at the stairway we just came up and see who was coming up the stairs," Lundeen explains. "Why would a person want to do this? I have no idea."
He leads the way back down the stairs, down another hallway, back up stairs to another part of the third floor.
"Think about it. A barber shop, a beauty shop, real estate offices," he says of potential tenants he sees on this floor of a renovated building. "Look at these little balconies outside all these spaces. All these tenants would have their own little balconies, so the employees, maybe their clients, could enjoy the outdoors."
Up on the fourth floor is the old juvenile jail. Lundeen points out a cramped room with a metal stool bolted to the floor and a phone on the wall. A Plexiglas window separates it from another room, just as cramped and unwelcoming.
"This is where you'd talk to your child in jail," Lundeen explains. With an exaggerated shudder, he asks, "Would you want to see your child here?"
He points out that throughout the area, metal ceiling tiles were welded in place. "Couldn't have the kiddies climbing out of jail through the attic. . ."
The tour continues past holding areas, a room euphemistically named "Daycare 1," where groups of juvenile offenders were held, a large prisoner admission area. "Oh, we can do all sorts of nifty things with all this," Lundeen says brightly.
Up just one more flight of stairs is the rooftop level. Turn right and there's a door leading to a defunct balcony-like space where pigeons have wreaked havoc, leaving their droppings and feathers for years. Lundeen turns left and passes by the hulking elevator machinery, the motors that once pulled the whole system of cars from floor to floor. He flings open a door to the rooftop. The morning's drizzle has cleared and the sunlight and brilliant blue sky are startling, eye-squinting.
"Can't you just see a restaurant up here?" Lundeen asks, throwing his arms wide. "Can't you imagine sitting here for breakfast in the morning, or drinks and dinner in the evening?" He rests his arms on the chest-high adobe wall and looks down on the city spread below, then gazes off to the Organ Mountains in the distance.
Lundeen points out the division on the roof between the original courthouse construction and the addition, marked by a broad white line of some kind of sealant. An odd stuccoed structure on one side of the roof looks like some kind of out-of-place bell tower.
"I imagine that's what it was planned to be, but now the stairway doesn't come all the way up here," he says, recalling how the stairway stopped on the jury floor level. "The stairway was dead-ended to add the jurors' bathrooms. We'll bring it all the way up when we renovate this part."
Lundeen says the odd and ugly collection of defunct heat system and air conditioning exhaust tubes will be removed. ''We won't need them because we're installing those Japanese units." The roof will be insulated, reinforced and brought up one foot higher, making it the level of the door and, thus, ADA-compliant.
Asked when all this might happen, Lundeen laughs.
"Oh, there's still a lot of work to be done," he allows. "Right now, we want to focus on a part of the project that will start bringing some money in, that building right over there." He points out another tan stucco building — similar to the big courthouse — on the same city block, sharing the same parking lot.
"That's the annex," Lundeen says — the other building Hoffman purchased in his $1.5 million deal. "He (Hoffman) also has first right of refusal on the third (courthouse-related) building over there," Lundeen adds, pointing to a small building even closer to the big courthouse, "and he's making an offer on that service station right there." The purchase would give the Texas developer pretty much the entire city block.
"Let's go look at that one," Lundeen invites.
On the way down from the roof, while walking over to show the annex building, Lundeen describes some of the plans for the other parts of the project. He says he's made contact with a couple of grocery stores he'd like as tenants in the space: Trader Joe's, the island-themed discount and gourmet grocery store many Las Crucens would like to see come to town, and also a similar England-based chain, "called Simple and Easy market, or something like that."
He opens the door to a space that appears to be not nearly in the rough shape of the old courthouse.