Preservation Magazine sees how Covington's Shotgun Row fosters a sense of community

Preservation Magazine's Spring issue includes a glowing feature story on how Covington is bringing back its West Side neighborhood, centered around rehabs of old shotgun homes on Orchard Street.

Soapbox profiled several "neighborhood heroes" in 2015 who helped lead that revitalization effort, particularly around reducing crime. We also covered the Shotgun Row concept as it geared up in 2014 and homes were put on the market in 2015 as work/living spaces for artists.

Preservation Magazine — published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation — interviews Sarah Allan, program director for the nonprofit Center for Great Neighborhoods, about its ongoing efforts to acquire, rehabilitate and sell derelict or seriously dilapidated historic buildings on Covington's West Side, "a working-class enclave across the Ohio River from Cincinnati."

"The Center has completed more than 30 projects in Covington in recent years, but Shotgun Row, for which it received a state historic preservation award, might be its crown jewel," the story says.

"These houses were so far gone, people questioned why we would even want to save them," Allan tells the magazine. "But with this project we were leveraging so much more than just a single building. We basically took the worst block and helped transform it. People look at Shotgun Row now and don’t even see the (individual) houses. It's like its own beautiful entity. It was definitely the most transformative project we've ever done."

Read the full Preservation Magazine story here.