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PROJECT PROFILE:
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Tuttle Building, Rutland
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Resident Martha Crilly uses a wheelchair and has found an
accessible, affordable apartment at the Tuttle Building. Bob Eddy photo.
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On Center Street in Rutland, it’s hard not to notice the renewed handsomeness of the old Tuttle building. Reclaimed from near ruin in 2005 through an ambitious partnership led by the Rutland County Community Land Trust (RCCLT), with funding provided by VHCB and other sources, the circa 1906 edifice stands out today like a polished antique. Once home to the Tuttle Printing and Engraving Company, the building now houses 13 affordable apartments, along with ground floor commercial space, and the RCCLT offices.
“The building really has jump-started enthusiasm in the community,” said RCCLT’s director, Elizabeth Kulas. “I get comments all the time about how beautiful it looks.”
Good looks, in this case, go deeper than the façade. RCCLT renovated the Tuttle building in partnership with Housing Vermont and Key Bank, proving that a downtown restoration project with a return on investment that would be insufficient for a private developer, can—with patience and determination—be accomplished as a private/public/nonprofit collaboration.
One happy beneficiary of the collaboration was Martha Crilly, a wheelchair-confined woman who had been renting an apartment in a building that had been sold; she was close to homelessness, unable to find an affordable, accessible rental, when she learned of the project. Now she is in a spacious, accessible, Tuttle building apartment.
“God bless the person who designed this, because I love it,” she said.
- adapted by Ethan Parke from an article written by Doug Wilhelm
The Tuttle Building, at left foreground, on Center Street in Rutland. Andrew Kline photo.
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