In these challenging financial times, money for Art Centers and Historic Preservation is really scarce. My project involves both. I am restoring a historic hotel to become the home for a center for the arts. I have been searching, without success, for grants and funds to help with this project that is of vital importance to the town I live in, not only because of the lack of creative outlets, but also because of the economic importance of the building I have taken on to restore. It is crucial to revitalizing a town square that was decimated by the introduction of a superstore that killed all the businesses on the square. But since the downturn in the economy many avenues for funding have just disappeared.

Trying to get the project to fruition I had sold off all my investments, including my home, and we now live behind the building in an old 86 model RV. I had run out of ideas for raising funds when I happened on Create-Space, the publishing system set up with Amazon.com. Before I got into this project I worked for several years at writing and had a few unpublished novels that I had not yet tried to get published. So I dusted off those novels, rewrote them, and have begun publishing them through Ozarts Center for the Arts - Novels for Charity with all profits to be directed towards this important project. You can read the first three chapters of The Four Trials of Satan online.

 

Currently we have restored the ground floor and have opened the 302 on the Square restaurant with the profits from that going toward the restoration of the hotel, but this is not bringing in enough revenue to move forward, so we’ve become stuck and we’re hoping that this new tack at fund raising will give us the money we need to get rolling again. People can either contribute $5 dollars to Ozarts Center for the Arts and receive a PDF version of the novel, The Four Trials of Satan, or they can order a print version from the website, or Amazon.com for $14.99 plus S&H. For more information on the project go to Ozarts.org, where there are pictures and links to our Facebook, and Youtube pages, as well as reviews of the restaurant and the book. On the Youtube site there are interviews with local civic leaders describing the importance of this project to the town and the county.

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About four years ago we reached a point where we were just running out of funds. The fact that I had good credit and tremendous amounts of equity meant nothing. It’s a small town and there wasn’t a great deal of confidence in the local economy. We opened a restaurant on the ground floor, to help support the project, four years ago. We cook and run the restaurant and while the restaurant has gotten great reviews, including having our Dang Good Pie named one of the top 15 pies in Arkansas (links to reviews on all about the 302) we don’t have the money to bring the restaurant to a level that would make it produce the income we need to move forward. It has kept us in limbo, because it doesn’t make enough money to hire contractors to continue work and with the minimum 80 hour weeks, it takes to run, it doesn’t leave any time to put my carpentry skills to use.

As anyone who’s ever done a renovation knows if you’re not moving forward you’re slipping backwards. It was something we’ve just lived with the last four years, but now time is no longer on our side. I was disabled as a commercial oil rig diver in the Gulf of Mexico in 1997. I was able to live with it for the first ten years, but in the last four years my unattended medical needs have increased in severity and I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to walk. On my last trip to the doctor he told me I could lose the ability to walk at any time. So I don't know how long I'll be able to keep up the pace and out of a wheel chair. I need two disks replaced in my neck, both my hips replaced, and at least one knee, probably both, replaced, just call me Steve Austin.

 

The strain of being on my feet, often 14 hours a day, puts me at a pain level that can keep me up most of the night, and I seldom sleep more than two consecutive hours, often not more than one before I wake up in pain and have to rearrange the pillows I use to brace my legs at night. A couple of years ago the VA made me special shoes to make up the difference in length between my right leg and left which due to hip deterioration is now an inch shorter than my left. If it hadn’t been for that I would have had to give up already. My pain medication does not really give me total relief, rather it takes me to a level of pain I can tolerate. While my prescription would allow me to increase the dosage I’m currently using, the added fatigue would be more than I could handle and keep working. I am covered under the VA, from my time in the Navy, but the project requires my presence every day. If I took the time off to get the multiple surgeries I need, I would have to sell the building and that would be the end of Ozarts Center for the Arts and the dream of a school for the arts in this small town that has little in the way of opportunity.

I bought the Grand View Hotel at the crest of the real estate tsunami that powered the economy at the beginning of the century. If you want to put a date on when the tide turned it was the summer of 2005. I had sold three properties in Florida for very good prices and those deals almost collapsed as my buyers must have felt the vibrations in the water. One of the houses did fail to close and it ended up taking six months to sell and sold for much less. I had followed my standard game plan when I got my initial financing on the hotel which was to get what I needed to get started and then get additional financing as the project progressed, so I wasn’t paying interest on money I didn’t need yet, but things were about to change.

With the end of the open credit that had powered the beginning of this century. I also learned something else, if you want to know where the credit market is heading, hotels are the first to not get funded. It started with hotels long before it hit the housing market. If I’d seen it as a sign of things to come I would have put everything I owned up for sale immediately. I just made it out of Florida before that bubble burst and covered everyone in chewing gum.

Basically I was standing on the housing market and it collapsed below my feet. My investments had shifted from the safer rental property market to the speculative with the purchase of the hotel and some other undeveloped land. With rental property you can at least have an income while you’re waiting for the market to recover, instead of being forced into selling your properties as it happened to me.

The sales of my investment properties took a long time and sold for less than they would have two years earlier. When the money finally came in it had little impact on our forward movement, because it was always just enough to keep us afloat, never enough to hire the contractors we needed to get the job done quickly. All through this process my hips continued to degenerate as I was often on my feet twelve hours a day, climbing scaffolding to do carpentry and painting.

We had to let our helper go and Sandra and I started doing everything. It wasn’t unusual for us to work fourteen hours a day, with me focusing on carpentry and her doing prep and cleaning. We tackled the painting together, her doing the trim and me using a power roller to do the broad areas. Instead of the year I had originally thought it would take to get open, it took us three years to get the ground floor open with the beginning of our restaurant. I still had plenty of equity at this point, but credit had really tightened up and we basically had to will ourselves open. Our menu fit on a pin head and we had no advertising. It took us three years to build our menu to the level we were happy with and due to the lack of financing we don’t have all the equipment we need to really have everything on the menu that we’d like, nor can we produce food fast enough for a full house.

We have been involved with this project for over 6 years now and have not been able to secure grants or loans to finish this important project and with the current economic climate, the forecast does not look good. If we don’t raise some funding by next spring we will be forced to sell the hotel and give up on the dream of opening a school for the arts in Berryville, something this small town could really use. Please help us bring creative opportunity to this rural community and restore this historic structure. If you really want to go the extra mile, please pass this information along to your friends and review the book on Amazon.com. If you know anyone, in any form of media who could do a story on us we would greatly appreciate help with that as well.

We have a tremendous amount of work accomplished and we’re trying to raise the capital to finish renovating the hotel and open the school for the arts. We would greatly appreciate you exploring our website at Ozarts.org and hope you might help spread the word, make a donation, and enjoy of copy of Alexander’s Book.