When one of Karl Braddick’s neighbors called to commiserate about the vagrants camping out in the abandoned, trashed-out cottage on Worth across from Lipscomb Elementary, he received a sympathetic ear, and a bit more.
“I told him: If you can find out who owns it, I’d be willing to buy it,” Braddick says.
The neighbor, an attorney, quickly obliged and before you could say ‘Hefty’, Karl and his wife, Jana, were gingerly hauling out chunks of the shoulder-high piles of debris.
Jana shudders: “When I saw it… this was the one house I said: I don’t want to buy it.” (In fairness, clearing a biological hazard wasn’t the most logical moonlighting job for a member of Bank of America’s audit management.)
But, their fate sealed, the couple went on to save the engaging circa 1910 cottage that turned out to have most of the original millwork, stained glass and hardware.
“That’s what you look for,” says Karl, who did decide to recreate the exterior rafter tails that had been shorn of their charm.
And for their decision to rescue a neighborhood home with historic significance – one that was almost certainly a breath away from the wrecking ball – the Braddicks received a Preservation Achievement Award from Preservation Dallas.
“I was afraid to walk into it at first,” Karl says. “I wasn’t sure whether or not I was going to be bitten by something or fall through the kitchen floor, which was half gone.”
The Worth cottage was the fifth Junius Heights home to be adopted by the Braddicks, who moved to the neighborhood 18 years ago in the midst of a real estate boom that promised urban renewal was just around the corner.
“When that didn’t quite happen, we had to decide how to protect the value of our home,” says Jana, who adds that she and Karl love the area and didn’t want to move, not to mention what it would mean to walk away from all the work and money they had already invested. “So we bought the worst house on our block and re-did it.”
Karl laughs: “Yes, we decided the only way to protect our investment was to re-do the neighborhood.”
“They know everybody here,” interjects Trish Vanhooser, a nurse at Baylor, who, along with husband Mike, snapped up the re-done cottage when it hit the market. “It’s a real neighborhood – this house reminded me of my grandma’s.”
The Vanhoosers were living in a Deep Ellum loft and, being big animal lovers, wanted a yard for cats and dogs… and they say they were ready for “the historic experience.”
Trish says Karl, a retired insurance audit manager, did such a meticulous restoration that she “can’t get up the nerve to hang any pictures yet… I don’t want to put holes in these walls.”
Mike concurs: “I’m an engineer – I can tell what went into this house.”
Co-residents Wolfie the Rotweiller, Serge the Russian Blue, and assorted other four-leggers seem equally at home, if not as impressed with historic craftsmanship. The Braddicks says all the Vanhoosers need now is to learn how to “hang out” on the front porch.
“This is such a ‘neighborhood,’ a community,” Jana says. “It’s a really close-knit group – and everybody looks out for one another. We have great friends… kind of like a small town.”
In other words, Junius Heights was, and is, a neighborhood worth saving, house by house.
“All you have to do is plant the seed,” Karl says.
