Gathering Showcases Potential Of Rehabbing Historic Homes
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Joe Vadnay will tell you he found Wheeling by accident.
Living in McMinnville, Oregon, with his family, he and wife Mandy were looking for a new place to live. A YouTube video of Wheeling happened to pop into Mandy’s suggested list.
She watched it, showed it to Joe, and they ultimately moved to the Friendly City. What amazed him, he said, was not only the amount of history jam-packed into the city, but how little he knew about it.
“You hear about Savannah, Georgia, and Chattanooga, Tennessee,” he said. “But you look into the history of Wheeling, it’s just crazy. The historical buildings and amount of culture and historical significance, it’s incredible that this isn’t the most famous city in America.”
So gatherings like the one he attended Friday evening at the former Carlito’s Soul Kitchen are important to him. Hosted by the Friends of Wheeling, it served as an opportunity for newer residents restoring historic homes to network, either to find contractors or advice or to offer advice and their services to help restore those homes.
Historical preservation — always a popular subject in Wheeling, where such homes are plentiful — climbed higher into the public consciousness recently when Friends of Wheeling President Jeanne Finstein approached Wheeling City Council to suggest a different way to discern which homes and other historic buildings should be torn down and which should get a new life through restoration.
“As I’ve said before, if we tear everything down and build all new, we’re just going to be like every other city around Wheeling,” she said.
Finstein welcomed dozens of guests to the former Carlito’s, which is currently being renovated by Lisa Hrutkay and Tom Fledderus. The two are still working on the main floor, which should soon house Hangover BBQ’s new location, but they have finished three upstairs apartments. Two already are occupied and a third soon will be.
There are plenty more plans where that came from, Fledderus said. The couple will be pouring a concrete slab in the back of the building that could possibly house two more small businesses, and they’re working on another building on the same block that will become solely apartments.
“Our start was basically Lisa’s love for older structures,” he said. “And I just like to work. I can’t sit down, so it’s easy to get in here and start on a project.”
Finstein said Hrutkay and Fledderus’ progress is a shining example of what can be done with historic homes, and why city officials should consider a new process when deciding which ones would meet a wrecking ball and which get the chance for some TLC from an industrious owner. She invited council members to the gathering and said Councilman Tony Assaro had planned to come, but had to decline due to illness.
Finstein hopes city officials will be able to see some of the transformations in buildings like the old Carlito’s to realize how important such structures are to the DNA of Wheeling.
“We have something we were left by our ancestors that we should not waste,” she said. “And by tearing it down piece by piece, we are wasting it.”