Saving historic Fort Lowell

The long-term Historic Fort Lowell Master Plan also includes revamping the park's sports and recreation areas and building a new historical museum, ideally within the next eight years at a total cost of about $15.7 million.

The Tucson City Council and Pima County Board of Supervisors approved the master plan in separate votes this month, allowing the funded portions to move ahead. Everything beyond the rehabilitation of three historic buildings will have to wait until they figure out where the money will come from.

Funding for the rest of the plan may depend on a future bond election, said Loy Neff, a project manager with the county cultural resources and historic preservation office. No bond election is now scheduled, although the county has been considering for two years when to hold one and what should be included.

There's a proposed $5 million recommendation for this project, but that is far less than is needed, so "there will be definite funding issues," Neff said.

Right now, $1.2 million is available from county's 2004 bond program. The money was set aside to buy a 5.2-acre swath of land west of North Craycroft Road, across the street from the park on Fort Lowell Road. The park marks the spot where the army fort stood in the late 1800s, away from the Tucson city center. It was an army operations base during the Apache wars, said Jonathan Mabry, Tucson's historic preservation officer.

The west end of the park, west of Craycroft Road, is a site chock-full of history, dating back to a Hohokam settlement from 800 to 1,200 years ago.

"This end of the park, we expect, is going to be a major heritage attraction," Mabry said.

The acreage has remnants of three officers' quarters buildings from the old fort, plus military parade grounds and historical buildings used by a family for business and residential purposes after the fort was no longer in service.

Instead of using the money to buy the land, the city got it through a land swap with a local developer. That left the money available for rehabilitating the three buildings in various states of deterioration.

It will also be spent demolishing two other buildings on the site, which were built after the 1930s.

The three officers' quarters buildings west of Craycroft were built in 1873, said Simon Herbert, one of the county's project managers.

Later, the site became a tuberculosis sanitarium, and then the Adkins family bought it. The family lived there, manufactured steel tanks and ran various businesses on the land until 2006, when the city acquired the land for preservation.

A key component of the rehabilitation and preservation of the site is a plan to cover the remains of two of the three officers' quarters west of Craycroft.

One of the buildings is in good enough condition to remain standing with some adobe preservation. It still has original windows and doors, and may be opened to limited public tours in the future.

"Part of the beauty of this building is that it is largely original," said Neff.

Two other officers' quarters no longer have roofs, and the adobe wall deterioration from decades exposure to the elements is visible.

Those two will be protected with a structure built over and around the ruins. The structures will be the same height, width and length as the original buildings to relay a sense of space. These "ghost buildings" were designed by Poster Frost Associates and are similar to protective structures elsewhere, including one at the Casa Grande Ruins.

"We're proposing to reconstruct or recreate the physical character of parade grounds and buildings that surrounded it, but use protective buildings over the ruins," architect Corky Poster said at a Pima County Board of Supervisors meeting last week.

These "spatial recreations" allow people to see how the buildings were arranged and where they stood, Poster said.

"A person walking by them can very clearly see this was what the form of the building looked like, and this is what's left," Herbert said. "We want people to experience this building as the soldiers did."