City moving forward with water works building

The City of St Augustine has received approval from the commission during last night’s regular business meeting to move forward with an application for a $50,000 matching grant to get the Flagler era city water works building at Davenport Park in condition to be returned to public service.

The $100,000 to be raised includes $50,000 in proceeds from the “2015 Small Matching Historic Preservation Grant”, $25,000 in cash from the City, and $25,000 in-kind from services and work to be performed by city employees.

The grant program is aimed for projects that include preservation, protection, restoration, rehabilitation and stabilization of historical and archaeological properties.

The public funding, if raised, would be used for research to document missing architectural elements, removal of non-historic features, and building program analysis to prepare it for a new use; putting it back into service for our community, City Manager John Regan told Historic City News local reporters.

Ideas for the building that first opened as a train depot serving the Jacksonville, St Augustine, and Halifax River Railroad in 1883, and has been substantially unused for the past five years, were aired at the recent Florida Trust for Historic Preservation annual conference. Henry M Flagler converted the building into a water works for the city around the turn of the century.