The Patient Walls- Shelter Magazine Winter 2024

The rugged sandstone walls of the Telluride Transfer Warehouse have withstood the test of time and are now getting all the TLC they need to last for future generations. When restoration work is completed, the historic building will be reborn as a multifaceted arts and cultural hub and events space. Funding comes through a mix of private and public sources, including grants from the State of Colorado, the State Historic Trust, and others. (Photo by Samantha Tisdel Wright)

42

The Patient Walls

After Years of Delays, Telluride Transfer Warehouse Project Takes Shape

BY SAMANTHA TISDEL WRIGHT

W

hen Telluride Arts began pursuing its vision to buy the Transfer Warehouse almost a decade ago, the idea was to preserve the rambling roofless ruin as a community cultural center and venue for the arts.

It was a simple concept.

Then came grueling Historic Architectural Review Committee meetings. A global pandemic. An awkward breakup with the project’s original architect, and a radical revisioning of the design.

A multi-pronged attack from neighboring property owners who tried to take a legal and regulatory wrecking ball to the project.

Embittered appeals. More HARC and P&Z meetings. More, and more, delays.

Telluride Arts persevered through it all, making incremental progress on its vision.

The scrappy nonprofit local arts council purchased the building from neighboring developers for $1.5 million and oversaw the painstaking preliminary restoration of its unprotected masonry in 2017, repointing the grout, pinning the inner and outer layers of masonry together, rebuilding the parapet, and bracing the walls for temporary stabilization.

The long-abandoned building came into its own during the pandemic when it became a cherished open-air gathering place for the community.

Two civil lawsuits that stymied progress on the $20 million restoration project for over a year have recently been dropped.

Things are now speeding ahead full throttle, with an estimated completion date of October 2027.

“It’s been quite a wild ride,” said Telluride Arts Executive Director Kate Jones, the quiet force of nature behind the nonprofit and its flagship project. “That is all behind us now. And things are happening, which is exciting.”

TURNING THE PAGE Stroll past the southwest corner of South Fir Street and West Pacific Avenue, and you’ll see what she means. The chapter of delays is done, and the chapter of construction has begun.

While the interior space has been closed to events since last year, there is plenty of activity going on inside the walls. “We’ve been in testing mode, digging holes, exposing the bottom of the walls,” Jones said.

Turns out, the bones of the building have all kinds of hidden tales to tell. These mysteries are now being revealed as structural forensic work at the site gets underway.

Last summer’s exploratory digs uncovered—Surprise!—an underground sandstone wall delineating a full basement in the first third of the building closest to Fir Street. The basement was likely filled in sometime in the 1930s, around the time that the Warehouse morphed from its livery stable days into a filling station and garage.

Sophisticated radar and LiDAR imaging technology mapped the exterior and interior layers of the sandstone walls, and the loose rubble fill and empty spaces within, confirming the existence of the building’s original ventilation system. Vertical vents ran along the walls from the historic basement, up into what was once the hayloft, to pull cold air in and circulate it throughout the building.

The system was considered to be quite cutting edge at the time.

Now, a new generation of state-of-the-art construction methods will protect the old walls by bringing them up to modern engineering standards.

THE BIG DRILL Folks around Telluride are used to seeing historic houses plucked off the ground like Monopoly board game pieces and temporarily >>>

43

44

parked out in the yard or road while new basements are dug and new foundations poured.

The historic unreinforced stone masonry walls of the Transfer Warehouse can’t be lifted up and moved around like that. So project engineers have recently been testing a specialized method called jet grouting to build the Warehouse a new foundation.

The method involves drilling deep holes in the earth, then injecting these holes with highly pressurized watery cement that mixes with the surrounding sands and gravels underground and sets up into solid concrete columns.

Jet grouting as a restoration technique has been around for a while, but the process looked pretty high tech when crews with various engineering firms arrived to test it out at the Transfer Warehouse in mid-October. They set up towering drill rigs, silos, and mixers, and sluiced batches of soft-serve cement slurry up and over the elderly Warehouse walls, via a truck-mounted boom pump, to feed a pressurized pumping machine parked in the middle of the Warehouse. The operator of this contraption expertly injected seven six-foot-diameter grout columns 30 feet deep into the testing zone at pressures of up to 4,000 psi.

The affable Transfer Warehouse manager Jereb Carter captured the spectacle in a series of video clips.

Arvid Veidmark IV, a bright-eyed underground construction staff engineer with the Denver-based firm Kilduff Underground Engineering, monitored the situation with a complex system of prisms, lasers, seismic monitors, and vibration sensors to detect any dangerous wall tremors. (The walls did just fine, thank you very much.)

Romeo Thomas, foreman with historic preservation firm Masonry Solutions International, came by later to drill core holes into the concrete at carefully measured depths of 15 to 27 feet. He inserted stainless steel rods into those holes, and fastened them with epoxy cement. After allowing the rods to cure in place for 28 days, engineers would return to the site to load test each column and run pull tests to determine how well the jet grouting had worked, and which depth of steel reinforcement would work best for the upcoming project.

If the jet grouting method proves successful in this test zone, it will be deployed this spring beneath the entire perimeter of the building, creating a brand new foundation. Picture an army of underground Parthenon columns, standing shoulder to shoulder, upholding the roots of the Transfer Warehouse walls.

Perfectly intact antique bottles emerged from the rubble during exploratory digs. Mysterious details reflect the construction technology of the era when the walls were built.

(Photos by Samantha Tisdel Wright)

The Warehouse today serves as a historic cornerstone of the Telluride Transfer mixed use development, completed in 2019.

(Photo by Draper White. Inset site plan: courtesy CCY)

Graffiti speaks to the four decades when the Warehouse sat in ruin and decay. The building is architecturally significant for the fine craftsmanship shown in its masonry walls and window openings.

(Photos by Samantha Tisdel Wright)

Before the walls can be stabilized from below, though, they will need to be fortified from within. This will be done by “tying” the inner and outer walls together with specialized parts, then drilling holes in the mortar joints, and pumping the rubble-filled wall innards full of very runny grout (engineers call this stuff “compatible injected fill” or CIF). The liquid mixture will slowly set up and glue together the inner and outer layers of the walls to make them strong and solid (think: cementand-rubble-filled ice cream sandwich).

UNDER PRESSURE In preparation for this next step, Carlo Citto, an engineer from the Boulder-based structural engineering firm Atkinson-Noland & Associates (ANA), and colleagues from Silman Engineering, were on site last September to do a little compression testing on the stone walls.

It looked like open-wall surgery. As Citto described the process in a video, they cut two slots in a wall in the back of the building, and stuck some hydraulic devices into the slots to pressurize the masonry in between them.

Pressure transducers and displacement transducers were attached to the “patient” walls like a tangled mess of blood pressure cuffs and heart rate monitors. The engineers applied high pressure to portions of the stone and mortar, while monitoring the deformation between the two slots, and collected data to analyze their strength.

Good news again: the walls held up well.

In a final, fortifying step, crews will revisit the site after the CIF sets up. They’ll vertically core the walls, and insert rows of stainless steel reinforcing bars all the way from the parapet deep down into the jet grout columns, essentially pinning the walls to the earth and giving them invisible, steel strength inside.

And after that, Nicolas (aka Nico) Mainier will come in with his four-wheeled spider excavator to start the basement excavation, moving down in layers, five feet at a time.

Mainier learned his craft from his uncle in the French Alps, and has found a niche in Telluride working on historic restoration projects such as the Lewis Mill, Matterhorn Mill, and Bridal Veil Powerhouse. He worked on the first phase of stabilization at the Transfer Warehouse back in 2017, putting up the braces and wire mesh to make sure the building didn’t collapse while neighboring construction projects were underway. >>>

45

46

Working on centuries-old structures in Europe has given Mainier some perspective on historic buildings around Telluride.

“People are like, ‘This one is really old, it’s like 150 years old,’ and you’re like, ‘No man, it’s not old.’”

But he has a lot of appreciation for the Transfer Warehouse and the craftsmanship that went into building it. “It’s a beautiful building,” he said. “It needs a new chapter.”

The wall stabilization and excavation phase will take two years. (As Jones put it, “You can’t hurry up concrete work.”) Then comes the really fun part as Seattle-based architectural firm Olson Kundig’s minimalist, kinetic steel-and-glass design for the building’s interior takes shape.

In just three short years, the newly fortified walls of the Transfer Warehouse will hold a versatile, partially covered indooroutdoor venue with big, beautiful, bright spaces for exhibits and events, radiant-style in-floor heating, a spectacular rooftop café/ bar with 360-degree mountain views, and a fully enclosed basement with gender-neutral restrooms, a climate-controlled white-box gallery space, a green room for performing artists, and a catering prep area.

“There will be a constant flow of activity into the space,” Jones predicted, just as there was when the building housed the heartbeat of Telluride’s mining-and-railroad-based economy over a century ago.

THE ERAS TOUR Perhaps most interesting in its current state as a roofless ruin, the Transfer Warehouse received one of Telluride’s first historic landmark designations, and speaks to several different eras of the town’s history.

The cavernous, 50'x117' two-story light tan sandstone building rose from the ashes of a previous warehouse over a five-month period from July to November, 1906. It was “built to withstand a San Fransisco earthquake,” or so the local newspaper said.

The Warehouse was hugely important during the mining era as the Telluride Transfer Company’s headquarters and livery stable, when it served as the region’s central shipping and receiving point for mining and construction equipment, coal, agricultural products, and any and all other supplies that came into town on the railroad.

Inside, it boasted stalls for 100 horses, and a hand crank elevator to store buggies on the second floor. The utilitarian structure was the

An artist’s rendering of the Olson Kundig design for the revitalized Telluride Arts Transfer Warehouse.

Moveable, kinetic elements will allow the new venue to seamlessly adapt to different uses. Engineered soundproofing will reduce the impact of outdoor events on the adjacent residential neighborhood.

(Courtesy Olson Kundig)

At right: The quonset hut that served as a temporary stage during Covid times has recently been dismantled and removed. (Photo by Jereb Carter)

nerve center of the Telluride Transfer Company’s sprawling complex that extended all the way down to what is now known as the Strong House. It was attractive in its own rugged way, with sandstone lug sills and lintels on the window openings, and a large wagon door opening onto Fir Street, spanned by a segmental sandstone arch.

As the mining and railroad era receded, the Transfer Company converted the structure into a filling station and auto repair shop.

It was always a favorite community gathering spot. Telluride native son Johnnie Stevens, who worked there as a kid pumping gas, shoveling coal, and patching tires in the 1950s, remembers the salty old miners who used to congregate there.

“There was this big bench, and sometimes there could be eight or 10 old guys on a Saturday morning sitting on that bench. They were always ribbing us,” he said.

Telluride Ski Area founder Joe Zoline purchased the building and surrounding land, and used the PUC license associated with the Telluride Transfer Company to

“transfer” skiers in snow cats up the mountain. The Warehouse continued to be used for office space, snow cat storage and more until the roof caved in under a heavy snow load during the winter of 1979—the first time in the building’s history that it had not been heated through the winter.

Lack of development pressure, along with the structure’s inherent sturdiness and its eventual designation as a National Historic Landmark, helped preserve the Transfer Warehouse over the years. After the roof collapsed, the Zoline family protected the exposed, ragged parapet with tarps. And there the building remained, like a stoic time traveler, while the Town of Telluride continued to develop and thrive all around it.

Going forward, the plan is to allow those soulful stone walls, in essence, to speak for themselves.

“Our design approach embraces the historic character, spirit of openness and community focus of the existing building,” said Tom Kundig, Owner and Design Principal at Olson Kundig. “We want to respect and celebrate

LIMINAL SPACE

elements of the Warehouse that people love, interweaving past and present to position the venue for a long and active future.”

The design features a 1,600 square foot open-air courtyard and a flexible covered space that can either be open-air or enclosed, thanks to a giant hand-crank-operated glassand-steel door (a design feature Kundig calls a Gizmo) that can pivot like a tent flap to expose the area to the elements.

Alternatively, it can pivot closed to keep the space warm, dry, and perhaps must importantly, soundproof.

THE SOUND OF SILENCE The neighbors objected to the noise.

“We call it music, not noise,” Jones said.

But the complaints kept coming, loud and clear. So sound mitigation is a key component of Olson Kundig’s design. A recent acoustic engineering study conducted in Seattle by the global sound and mechanical engineering firm Arup showed that the venue will be 100 percent soundproof (with

the Gizmo door closed) when it is complete.

According to its website, Arup has worked with some of the world’s favorite cultural institutions, including the Sydney Opera House. Jones was in the lab where the study took place. “They recreated the Transfer Warehouse in this super-high-tech digital studio,” she said. “It actually is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.”

In one of the simulations, Jones perched virtually on the porch of the offended neighbors’ condo. The acoustic engineers cranked up the bass inside the digitally recreated Transfer Warehouse to KOTO Halloween Bash levels, “and I couldn’t even hear it,” she marveled.

Jones was so relieved she almost cried.

After all the years of struggles, delays, and controversies, the inherent worthiness of the project rushed back into her heart, and she felt herself fully opening again to all the possibilities the Transfer Warehouse holds.

“I had this warm wash of emotion,” she said. “Like, ‘This is going to be so beautiful.

This is going to be so special.’”

In the meantime, there is work to be done. Jereb Carter stands in the messy middle of it all.

Above him: sky. Below him: raw and rumpled earth that will soon be excavated.

Not far below that: an underground river that flows through the valley like time’s cold passage. (“If you dig down deep enough, you can hear it,” Carter said.) And all around him: the Warehouse walls.

Over on the shady side of things, there is already a little drift of snow, but it’s warm enough on the sunny side of the Transfer Warehouse on this mild November morning for us to take our jackets off and chat for a while about the project.

“It’s a very feminine structure,” Carter said.

“She’s very strong, very stout. It’s a place that can nurture. She’s holding space.”

The temporary quonset hut stage that held space within this space for hundreds of outdoor events during and after the pandemic is now gone, a cool little piece of the longtoothed life span of the ruin.

It’s a weird optical illusion, but somehow the space feels smaller without the quonset hut inside. It’s like the Room of Requirement at Hogwarts Castle in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, magically morphing to manifest and contain whatever it is that the current inhabitants require.

“As fragile as the engineers think it is, I really think that the Transfer Warehouse is a lot stronger than anybody’s giving it credit for,” Carter said. “Because the roof caved in on it. It sat in ruins for 42 years. And the walls are still straight. They’re very robust.

The people that built this thing knew what they were doing.”

A fifth-generation Telluridian, Carter dug into the town’s historic newspaper archives >>>

47

after Telluride Arts hired him to be the Transfer Warehouse manager in the midst of the pandemic, while his career as a sound technician and event producer was on pause.

“And I found out that my great-great-grandfather and my great-great-uncle, Henry and Guy Stanley, both worked here when it was the Transfer Warehouse in the days of the railroad,” he said. Henry had been badly injured in a mining accident up at the Pandora Mine.

When he came down to work at the Transfer, his brother Guy was kicked by a horse the same day. “It was a rough time to live in Telluride.”

A ghostly whiff of manure, hay, and horse sweat hangs in the thin November air. “Imagine what this place was like with 100 horses in here,” Carter said. Standing in the liminal space, he can clearly picture what these old walls once held, and what they will hold three years from now when the construction project is complete.

Spray-painted graffiti tags the old stone walls in the rear corner where the new elevator shaft will go. “Anarchy,” it says, a tribute to all those years after the roof caved in when the Warehouse became a mysterious

From Warehouse District to Arts District, the design and materials chosen for the contemporary Telluride Transfer mixed use development form a conversation between old and new, while preserving view corridors and historic pedestrian movement through the neighborhood.

(Photos by Draper White)

48

Welcome to the Neighborhood A Closer Look at the Award-Winning Telluride Transfer Development

T

he Transfer Warehouse has always existed within the context of its surrounding neighborhood.

In the early days of the Telluride Transfer Company, the owners acquired the entire east half of the block between Pacific Avenue and San Juan Avenue on the west side of South Fir Street in a fire sale. In addition to the Transfer Warehouse on the southwest corner of Pacific and Fir, the sprawling complex also included a blacksmith shop, a wagon shed, a hay shed, corrals, and a smaller grain and produce warehouse adjacent to the old railroad yard that is now known as the Strong House.

This part of town was called the Warehouse District.

These days, the Transfer Warehouse and the Strong House form the historic cornerstones of a brand new award-winning development called Telluride Transfer in the heart of the Warehouse District that was completed on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic.

The development can be traced back to the Zoline family, who bought the land in the late ’60s, and their vision that the intersection of Pacific Avenue and Fir Street should be an arts district of sorts. The Town of Telluride eventually incorporated this vision into its master plan.

Pamela and John Lifton-Zoline, the daughter and son-in-law of the Telluride Ski Resort’s founder, Joe Zoline, partnered with a development group based out of Boulder and LA by the name of Meriwether Companies, and bequeathed the venerable Telluride Transfer Company name and legacy to the venture.

Known as Four Corners, the project was eventually separated into a few distinct developments, including Telluride Transfer. The .7-acre mixed-use development combines 2,400 SF of commercial space with three affordable housing units, 11 luxury condo-

minium units, and two preserved buildings on the National Historic Register that helped the developers meet the Town’s requirement of providing a public benefit on the site of the old Transfer Company’s sprawling operation.

After some false starts, project design was ultimately awarded to CCY Architects based in Basalt, Colo., a design firm that has done a lot of projects in and around Telluride and the Mountain West, and globally.

The group is known for its multi-faceted approach to design that aims to create connections between built environments, people and the natural world. This approach is evident in how Telluride Transfer turned out.

While construction took place under a single building permit, the design is cleverly broken down into five smaller structures to soften the impact of its mass and scale and help it fit into the surrounding neighborhood.

The larger two buildings reflect the scale of the historic Transfer Warehouse; by contrast, three alley units, with their gabled rooflines, reflect the character of neighboring residences.

The liminal space between these buildings preserves historic pedestrian routes that used to cut through the building site when it was an empty lot, creating views of the town and

ruin, holding space for all kinds of experimental (mis)behavior.

“All the kids that grew up here used to come in here and, you know, do things that they shouldn’t have,” Carter said with a crooked grin.

The part of the project Carter is most excited about is the outdoor courtyard, which will preserve the open-air feeling of the space that everyone grew to love so much during the pandemic.

He’s also stoked about the state-of-theart light array and sound system, and the LED screen or projection screen, that will equip this space to host anything and everything the musically and artistically charged local culture has to offer, from Mountainfilm screenings to Blues and Brews juke joints to avant garde art installations to DJ dance parties.

Carter is ready for the big dig to get underway. He’s already found some cool stuff in the rubble.

“There are so many mysteries about this place. We don’t know what’s down there,” he >>>

49

mountains, while giving the nearby historic structures some space to breathe and shine.

The design conception process for this unique venture kicked off in 2015 with a three-day intensive onsite visioning session called a charrette. The challenge for the stakeholders was to come up with a design that felt authentic and eclectic and respectful of the historic neighborhood, without replicating the past, which can be tricky to do, CCY Partner Rich Carr noted. “Projects that are literally copying the past run the risk of feeling a little fake.”

The big aha moment came with figuring out a way to “break down the buildings,” from one into five, said Carr. This created a viable project that could both work for the developers, and also work for the town. An additional advantage to this design approach was that it created the opportunity for almost every residential unit to have a front door that opens to the Telluride streetscape.

Entitlements on the project took about a year. In true Telluride fashion, the proposal went before packed meetings of the town’s Historic and Architectural Review Commission and faced withering critiques in hours-long public comment sessions from local residents

who worried about the project’s scale, arguing that it would create a big, blocky “dead zone” that blocked out sunlight in the middle of the dynamic Transfer District.

One doozy of a meeting wrapped at 1:00 a.m.

While it was challenging and at times controversial, “I do think the HARC process made the project better,” CCY Partner Todd Kennedy acknowledged. “It helped it fit in more, and right-sized it in terms of how much it steps down to the historic assets and how it relates to town. I think it made for a better result at the end of the day.”

The collaboration with Telluride Arts, which soldiered through many of the same HARC meetings as it advanced the Transfer Warehouse portion of the project, was essential to the development’s ultimate approval from the town, Kennedy said.

Building got underway in 2018 under Finbro Construction and finished just before Covid hit in 2020.

Wander through the neighborhood alleys today, and you get the feeling that the new buildings are having a conversation with the historic ones, rather than emulating or dominating them. Design features of the new structures subtly defer to the Transfer

Warehouse. For example, the roofline of the large new mixed-use structure that faces Fir Street tucks just underneath the Warehouse’s stone parapet, instead of looming above it.

The project takes inspiration from the surrounding natural environment. The dark grayish iron-spot brick on some portions of the building exteriors evokes rock formations at the head of the box canyon, up near Ingram Falls and Bridal Veil Falls. “The rock up there has this dark purple, almost iridescent quality,” Kennedy said.

The brick detailing is a reinterpretation of historic ornamental brick masonry, evoking the same level of detail and quality, but with a modern twist.

“We’re not trying to copy the past,” Carr emphasized. “Our intent is to pair with it; to speak to it in some way. It actually makes the Transfer Warehouse more powerful. It lets it stand alone and be more of a community asset.”

CCY recently won an Award of Merit from the American Institute of Architects’ Colorado Chapter for its Telluride Transfer design.

Carr was named Architect of the Year.

“We are very proud of the project,” said Carr. “I think it will stand the test of time.”

said. “The sonar picked up something big in the front area. They think it’s a water tank.

But my theory is it’s an old car. When we start digging, we’re gonna find out what it is.”

THE WALL WHISPERER

50

Donald W. Harvey, Jr. has worked on some fascinating projects over the course of his career.

His work spans the globe and runs the gamut from a major renovation of the exterior stone masonry at the United Nations headquarters in New York City to the stabilization and preservation of an 18th century British “slave castle” in Sierra Leone, West Africa.

Now, he’s heading up the structural engineering work at the Telluride Transfer Warehouse.

Harvey is a structural forensic engineer and Principal with ANA. Part historian, part detective, part engineer, part chemist and geologist, he specializes in the investigation of historic masonry structures.

“When people say ‘They don’t build ‘em like they used to,’ that’s true,” Harvey said.

“But that’s not always a good thing. There are some things they didn’t do a great job on.”

Even at the Transfer Warehouse.

“The exterior faces are built very, very well and very solidly and a lot of care and craftsmanship went into them,” he said. But the interior of the walls, not so much.

Harvey doesn’t mean to speak disparagingly of the masons that built the Transfer Warehouse. Rubble-filled walls and roughhewn interiors “were pretty conventional construction at the time,” he said.

Nor is he one to wax poetic about the structure. “It’s right there in the name that it was a warehouse,” he points out. “It was a pretty simple and utilitarian building. For the most part, it’s not a very sophisticated structure in terms of kind of the nuances of the masonry construction.”

Still, he’s found much to admire in how well the Transfer Warehouse has withstood the ravages of the elements and time.

One thing that has helped the Transfer Warehouse hold up so well over the years is the fact that the walls are so thick, with their inner and outer layers and rubble fill. Also, “The stone itself is a relatively durable material,” Harvey added.

According to the Oct. 6, 1906 issue of the San Miguel Examiner, the structure was “built of the white sand stone found in abundance on the new road to the Smuggler.”

Unlike the orangish-red Manitou sand-

The restoration of the Transfer Warehouse is a dream child of Telluride Arts, a nonprofit organization that has incubated Telluride’s vibrant culture of the arts ever since 1971. In 2018, Telluride Arts kicked off Forever Telluride, the capital campaign for the Telluride Arts Transfer Warehouse restoration project. Contributions can be made at www.telluridearts.org

stone that’s a popular building material in other parts of Colorado (which Harvey dismisses as “very porous and absorptive stone that deteriorates relatively quickly,”) the stone that the Transfer Warehouse is made of is “less absorptive, harder, less porous, more durable stone material.”

This makes it less susceptible to the dreaded freeze-thaw damage that is the bane of historic stone masonry.

“They picked durable rock and then they probably got some really good stonemasons that knew how to do that kind of work,” Harvey said. “So it all fit together really well.”

In spite of its stoutness, the building will still be quite vulnerable during the upcoming construction process, which is why it’s so important to add all those reinforcing elements to the old stone walls.

“It is modern technology applied to a relatively simple historic structure, but the things that are being done structurally and architecturally for the final product are not simple and mundane,” Harvey said. “It’ll really be something people will be proud of.”

THE DREAM CATCHER These kinds of design concepts, materials, and construction techniques don’t come cheap, but the $20 million price tag for the Transfer Warehouse renovation was gen-

erously offset when local contractor Cory Fortenberry volunteered to work pro bono as owner’s rep for Telluride Arts, because he loves the project so much.

Fortenberry, who is highly regarded in Telluride, “brings a lot of street cred to the project,” Jones said.

Telluride Arts’ Forever Telluride capital campaign to fund the Transfer Warehouse project is well underway. The funds raised go directly toward the remodel and restoration of the National Historic Landmark.

“The Transfer Warehouse is like a dream catcher,” Jones said. “Everyone has ideas about what to do with it. And now we’re moving forward. There’s no stopping us.

We’re gonna keep going forward. So we’re hoping people will see that and feel the excitement and the confidence and want to be a part of it.”

Jones checks in with Carter morning and night to see how things are coming along.

Hey, how’ d it go? Did everything go to plan?

Any issues? Any upset neighbors?

“So far, so good,” he reassures her.

Jones breathes a sigh of relief.

These past few years have been leavened with such sighs.

Turns out, the folks at Telluride Arts have a lot in common with the Transfer Warehouse.

They can hold up under pressure. They can hold space for art.