A national roofing company is working this week to fix the leaky roof on the west half of Transportation Depot while preserving its historical character.
The project calls for reusing as many of the roof's distinctive red Spanish Mission-style tiles, some of which date back to the building's original construction in 1917, as possible, according to the city, which owns the building, and one of the project architects.
The former Missouri-Pacific Railroad Depot, located where Broadway Street, Broadway Terrace and Market Street intersect, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992.
Hot Springs Public Works Director Denny McPhate said Wednesday the work is being done under a $150,000 contract with CMR Roofing and Construction, which was the lowest bidder on the project. The work started Wednesday, and the company anticipates being completed by Monday, weather permitting, McPhate said in an email.
CMR has headquarters in a half-dozen U.S. cities, and Hot Springs has been working with its Haltom City, Texas, office, with a project supervisor from its Missouri office, he said.
McPhate said the roof has missing tiles and has leaked in the past couple of years. Repairs have not been successful in stopping the leaks.
"We elected to go back with the Spanish tile roof to protect the building placement on the National Historic Register," McPhate said.
"Many years ago, we turned the Sawmill Depot, the restaurant, into Transportation Depot, and we did phase one of Greenway and the bus shed and all that. And the building itself's listed on the National Register, so obviously you need to replace historic materials with like materials, so the clay Spanish Mission tiles are the roofing material," Anthony Taylor of Taylor Kempkes Architects of Hot Springs, which prepared the bid documents for the project, said Thursday.
"Those roof tiles are always installed with a waterproof membrane below them, so once some of the tiles got damaged it was necessary to remove sections of the tiles, install the new roof membrane and put the tiles back on," Taylor said.
"The specifications called for reusing all the tile that could be reused and then supplementing with new, matching tiles where the original couldn't be reused," he said.
"Those tiles are still manufactured today; there are, I think, two companies, that manufacture them. ... The problem comes in the coloration, not in the shape. Matching the coloration can be an issue."
Taylor said the roof was rehabilitated once before, in 1995, but at that time tiles were also reused.
"So there are still some original tiles on the roof," he said.
The depot was constructed after the Missouri-Pacific Railroad acquired the old St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern line that ran between Missouri and Texas as part of its ambitious campaign to expand its network of rail lines all over the country, and to establish the railroad's corporate identity through the exclusive use of the Italiante/Mediterranean style of architecture for its passenger and freight depots, according to the National Register of Historic Places registration form from 1992.
At the time, alterations to the single-story brick masonry building, "designed in a distinctly Italian interpretation of the Mediterranean style," were limited to the removal of the original tall red brick chimney from the western roof slope and new construction on the southern or rear elevation of the building to accommodate the restaurant that had operated within the building since the early 1970s, it said.
Local on 07/27/2018