Fall 2020 - 1736 Magazine

ABOVE: The James Brown statue on the median
of the 800 block of Broad Street, a popular photo
spot for tourists, is flanked by the gutted former
Kress department store building, a structure that
has been vacant for 30 years.
RIGHT: The newly renovated 901 Broad St.
building, right, sits next to the long-vacant
and dilapidated former WAGT-TV office at 905
Broad St. The renovated building will house the
new Laziza Mediterranean Grill and nine loft
apartments.
Over the next years, his for-profit
cooperative would go on to purchase
and redevelop seven other vacant
buildings in downtown Perry. Hauser
was elected the town’s mayor in 2013.
“There’s an expression that a picture
is worth 1,000 words,” McMahon
said. “But a project – a real project – is
worth 1,000 pictures. Sometimes it
takes somebody to do something different
from the same-old same-old to
wake people up.”
Somebody to do something different.
Perhaps that is what downtown
Augusta needs most – different people
and different ideas.
It’s obvious from the more than halfa-million
square feet of vacant space in
Augusta’s central business district – a
majority of which is in some form of
decay – that many of the stakeholders
are lacking something. Money. Time.
Know-how. Vision.
Or perhaps just the heart.
Ramshackle and chronically vacant
buildings in our central business
district are merely manifestations
of the larger problem – the owners
themselves.
8 | 1736magazine.com