Susie's Beauty Shop - Insider Tour
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- Join us on a tour of this building located in Appalachia, Virginia which most recently served as the location for Susie's Beauty Shop. We at Appalachian Rising Ventures recently acquired this building and are currently working tirelessly to prepare it for living as soon as possible.
I just love that you're trying to fix up these old buildings rather than just tearing them down. There's so many buildings all around the country that are just left to rot.
Thank you for sharing your mission to preserve these irreplaceable structures, and especially to find a use for them so they can survive.
I have spent the last two hours looking at the Appalachia, Virginia, Sanborn maps from 1908, 1913, and 1922, from the Library of Congress website, and comparing them to current Google map images. Wow! Where the highway is now, that was a wild curve Main Street once had , with a curved row of several brick buildings, to include the post office, a bank, and hardware stores, not the mention the enormous "fireproof" stone, columned First National Bank across the street! A three-story, all-brick building labelled "drugs," appears to have been west of your beauty shop building location.
Will anyone save the train depot? ☺
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I'm not from Appalachia but next door in Lee Co and have had family that live up in Wise, VA as well as going up there so much thru my childhood in the 80s and Appalachia is one of the few places that kept their train depot and didn't tear it down like Pennington Gap and seemingly everywhere else did. That being said the Depot has sat basically untouched since I was a kid in the 80s and it would be nice to finally see it restored and perhaps turned into a visitors center, or a small event gathering place because the depots these towns had were unique and of such architecture that we will never see again.
I'm just grateful even being the next county over after having traveled thru there before the 4 lane from Big Stone to Norton/Wise took traffic away from the town that people are finally stepping up to buy and fix these buildings instead of tearing them down. I can't stand this modern building of everything is cheap and quick to stick up all metal buildings, it makes all the stores and businesses look alike and it creates no living space above them like the truly unique old store buildings with apartments on top. I'll have to look up those maps you talked about, and I wonder if there's any for my hometown of Pennington Gap as I heard so many stories from my now 80 yr old mom and grandma of what the towns used to be like and it's hard to imagine. In the 80s these places I do know still had life and businesses/living going on in them but it seems like around the 90s things started going downhill fast and a lot was lost or left to ruin.
This is so fascinating! I have never been to Virginia, although I have ancestors from there. It looks so beautiful. I am truly enjoying your channel. Please keep posting these wonderful videos
Glass wax! I worked for a neighbor when I was 11 doing housework in the 1960's and she used glass wax on all of her mirrors and windows. It was a challenge to use. Just like car wax. Brings back memories.
Interesting!
I bet after all the hard work those mirrors and windows were spotless and not a streak anywhere on them. Never have I heard of glass wax, so you learn something new every day. I wonder if the stuff would hold up on vehicle windows better than the streaking mess the cleaners we have today leaves behind.
@@appalachianwoman561 It was also used to make Christmas decorations on windows. Google "glass wax stencils"
I’m enjoying your tour and plans for these buildings. Figuring out the history definitely helps guide your work. That’s exciting to hear you’ve been approved for grants for the two buildings.
When I was a little kid in the very early 1980s I remember their being a fortune teller that my mom and many other people would go to up in Appalachia. She lived somewhere close to the old gas station in an apartment, it would have been as you're coming into Appy from Big Stone on the left side of the road before you got to the Peake building and all those larger buildings with apartments. I remember even in the 80s most of those places had businesses in them, and people living in the apartments, which this was before the 4 lane from Big Stone to Norton/Wise went in and so all that traffic would go right thru main street there. I'm glad that there's people buying the buildings and restoring them because this is so much better than tearing them down and building back those cheap and quick to put up metal buildings that I don't think will last as long or as good as these solid brick buildings. Best of luck in your ventures!
A lot of the paneling reminds me of what my dad put up in my childhood bedroom. That would date it to 1974. I'd love to come and see in person sometime. (I get into the hills there every few years.) I wasn't raised in the area, but my ancestors were in Russell County 150+ years ago,
Awesome
I used to live in the front upstairs apartment above the beauty shop as a teenager. 1997 I think. It was very different back then. There were at least 2, if not 3 apartments.
If you find any tiny rodent skeletons behind the walls when you open them up, I had a hamster and 12 babies get loose and disappear through a crack in the bedroom wall. I never saw them again.
Glad to see these old buildings being renovated!
I will make sure to tell John, though it wouldn't be the first skeleton they ran across!
Even without the water damage that is in the other buildings, I can see that there is quite a bit of work to be done in the beauty shop. I have no idea what the layout of the upstairs apartment is. With the extra walls added, and doorways blocked off, it seemed like a maze. I'm sure that you will get it all straightened out. I hope that you will be able to restore all the building. It will be a great place to visit when you are all finished. I've been interested in moving south for years. I don't have any plans yet.
We hope someday you’ll come visit and love Appalachia VA!
You give us a tour when u buy, but are you ever going to post tours showing your work on the buildings? Those are the videos I really am interested in.
We just started taking possession of buildings in February of this year. So right now it is mostly demo and clean up work. This current building is in better shape though, so we have tenants moving into the upstairs apartment very soon, and we hope to have the commercial space ready in a few months as well. And maybe one other building occupied by a commercial tenant by the first of the year. However, many of these restoration will take us several years to complete. They are extensive, and in some cases, just in the nick of time before they became unsalvageable.
I love that you are actively getting this small main street back to life ..do you all have a master plan ? How did this project come to life? I would love to see a video of your goals and how the project started
OMG ANOTHER ARV VIDEO! Haven't watched yet but already excited!
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Love what you are doing! One question though. Where will the people who will live in these apartments park? Seems to me that some of the old empty buildings are better off being torn down to create parking and downtown park/ recreational spaces. This would enhance and support those who live downtown.
There is a park actually just to the left of our Dairy Building across the road, and some green spaces downtown already where older holdings were previously demolished. There is also a good sized municipal parking lot directly in the middle of town to the left of the Peake Building.
However, we do plan to one day work on the back cliff side of these buildings on this side of Main to create outdoor spaces and possibly more parking. Currently, anybody living here can park on the street, but we hope someday that Main Street is busy enough that parking is a problem again. 🤞
Love these old buildings! Was there any mining near this area?
Yes, Appalachia is a railroad town that was surrounded by many coal camps. The underground mining goes every which direction. When I was a kid, less than a mile from downtown methane gas escaped from prior mines and filled an empty building and then exploded on Christmas Eve morning. We had just woke up for church, and I remember feeling our house shake. Amazingly, no one died.
@@AppalachianRisingVentures You might want to have that ground water checked to see if any of it is coming from or redirected by previous old mining works. If it is, you can have the Abandoned Mine lands program see is it qualifies for abatement funds.
@@JPW-qm6xewe are! They already tested it for chlorine, so we know it isn’t coming from broken public water sources. They are coming out to test it for minerals etc in a week or so. I lied on the mountain above these buildings, and I know above my house there was also a prior strip mine in addition to the underground mines, so it’s a possibility!
@@AppalachianRisingVentures Good deal. I worked for the AML program here in Ky for 15 years.
@@AppalachianRisingVentures Wow. Scary.