BRATTLEBORO-U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes slept in one of its bedrooms in 1877. Writer Rudyard Kipling drank lager in its basement bar and played poker in its penthouse suite from 1892 to 1896. Broadcaster Lowell Thomas presented his NBC radio newscast live from its ballroom in 1946.
And if current owners have their way, someone new will buy this town's cornerstone Brooks House and soon make their own history.
The five-story Main Street landmark - built in 1871, ravaged by fire in 2011 and restored in 2014 - has been placed on the market "on an 'as-is' basis and is being offered without a formal asking price," according to an online listing that notes potential purchasers must sign a confidentiality agreement to receive more specifics.
"Although we have listed the property for sale with a broker, the Brooks House team members, all of whom continue to work at our businesses downtown, remain committed to Brattleboro," its five local owners - engineer Bob Stevens, lawyer Craig Miskovich, financial-planner brothers Pete and Drew Richards, and their colleague cousin, Ben Taggard - said in a written statement to VTDigger.
When the late businessman George Brooks fashioned his namesake block in 1871, he spent $150,000 on 1 million bricks and 500,000 feet of lumber. A century and a half later, the local quintet scraped up $23 million more to rebuild the structure after a gutting blaze April 17, 2011.
Stevens had known the Brooks House as the view from his engineering office when he was hired to assess the fire damage and draw up restoration plans, not knowing he'd soon join four friends in buying the 88,000-square-foot building with six retail spaces, three office units, and 23 apartments.
The team, reopening the block in 2014, won the Brattleboro Area Chamber of Commerce's Citizens of Year award. Vermont Life magazine, for its part, chronicled the restoration in a 2015 cover story headlined "Miracle on Main Street."
"Boarding up a wet, moldy, vacant building that inhabits a quarter of the downtown was not an option if we wanted Brattleboro to thrive," Stevens said in the Vermont Life piece.
With the block finished and fully occupied, the five now want to relinquish their duties as landlords and return to their day jobs.
"We formed the development team with a few goals in mind: renovate the building, recruit great new commercial and residential tenants, and restore the Brooks House to its rightful place as the cornerstone of downtown Brattleboro," they wrote in their statement. "Now that the building is full of life and every space has been filled, it is time for us to hand the building over to its next generation of owners."
Asked to elaborate, the owners said they would limit their comments to the statement. But they stress they're not leaving the community or, in one case, the construction field.
In addition to his engineering office, Stevens will continue to operate M&S Development, a firm he founded with Miskovich (whose law office is a Brooks House tenant) to support other New England projects, including the $56 million renovation of Bennington's Putnam Block.
The potential sale comes as downtown Brattleboro is stabilizing after the Covid-19 pandemic, several longtime business closures, and public complaints about a rise in police calls.
"Bigger changes are coming to downtown Brattleboro as we look ahead," Kate Trzaskos, executive director of the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance, wrote in a recent newsletter that noted several new businesses and the current construction of a $7.4 million Amtrak train station.
This News item by Kevin O'Connor originally appeared in VTDigger and was republished in The Commons with permission.