6 minute read
An Acre of ACRE
ABOVE: Gary Goosman poses next to the Amesville Community Resources for Entrepreneurs in front of the ACRE building.
Abandoned elementary school gets fresh start as an asset to Amesville
STORY BY ZACH PAQUETTE | PHOTOS BY JOEY MADORE
Small business owners face a dizzying array of challenges. They have to hire workers, maintain a place of work, and sell a product or a service. This is where Mayor Gary Goosman of Amesville and the Amesville Community Resources for Entrepreneurs (ACRE) come in.
Located at 29 Franklin Street in Amesville, ACRE occupies the same building that was once the old Amesville Elementary School. After the school closed, the building was abandoned for almost a dozen years before the village of Amesville decided to hold an auction to sell the property. Goosman saw the nearly 60-year-old building as a resource.
“I didn’t want somebody to just tear it down and have a vacant lot. I just thought we have so little usable space in the village,” Goosman says. “If I get the building, I’ll figure out what to do with it later.”
$3,000 AND SOME MAINTENANCE LATER
On the day of the auction, Goosman and several other interested parties sat ready to bid. Everyone looked around and eventually the auctioneer started the bidding at $70,000.
When nobody bid, the auctioneer dropped the price to $60,000. When nobody bid on that, he dropped it to $50,000.
“It got down to $30,000, and then he said ‘just give me a number to start the bidding.’ So, I said $3,000,” Goosman says. “Nobody else bid and that was it.”
Now that he owned the building, Goosman had to figure out what to do with it. But first, there was a lot of cleaning up to do.
“The building was abandoned for 12 years so it was dirty, and the school district stored a lot of desks, tables, and supplies here. It was mostly clearing all of that out, giving it away or selling it then cleaning the building because it was in bad shape,” Goosman says.
The building consists of a lot of old single-paned windows and many of them were cracked. After the building closed and was abandoned, the boiler sat untouched. The lines were not flushed out and when they froze in the winter, thousands of feet of copper lines burst. The expense to repair the heating system was too great, so Goosman purchased big heaters that ran on propane.
A VISION FOR SMALL BUSINESSES
When it came time to figure out what to do with the building, Goosman weighed his options. He considered turning the rooms into living spaces, but it would have cost too much.
He even thought about turning the rooms into storage spaces for people to rent, but Goosman had his eye on an idea that would keep the community involved.
“I knew small businesspeople had a hard time starting up around here because you don’t have the capital. You’re working out of your home in a spare room and I think that the most likely scenario when I owned the building was to find artists and small businesspeople who need the space and charge well-below market rate.”
He knows he could get more, but to him, ACRE is not about making money. “It’s to allow beginning entrepreneurs to get their feet under them, develop a business model, get a product line going, and not have too much expense. At some point, if they want to build their own studio and move on, they can,” he says.
Goosman has seven rooms, each about 900 square feet that he rents out to his tenants. On top of the rent, he charges the tenants for water and electricity – an additional $6 or $7 a month.
A GREAT RESPONSE BY THE COMMUNITY
Once Goosman cleaned the building up, he created a website and Facebook page. From there, he scheduled an open house and invited people from around the area.
“On that first day, I rented two of the rooms. Then, from word to mouth, every room was rented in less than six months. That was faster than what I anticipated,” Goosman says.
That was 10 years ago. Now, Goosman says three people are waiting for one of the seven rooms to become available. Goosman added that much of his advertisement nowadays has been word of mouth.
Not only does ACRE cater to the needs of small business owners in the area, but it also offers a few amenities. One of these features is the community room.
“The community room is not rented to anybody. It’s available for workshops, seminars, parties, gatherings, and sometimes movies whenever we offer our movie night,” Goosman says.
On top of the community room events, ACRE offers a wide variety of amenities outside the building. A community garden run by Community Food Initiatives, planted at the facility nine years ago, includes trees that are still producing apples today.
“There are gardens that we have installed all around the space. (We have) apple trees, horseradish, and all kinds of stuff. There are plants all around, and people can come and be involved in the gardens,” Goosman says.
On the south side of the building there is a fenced-in area that Goosman has rented out to a dog trainer.
“I have a woman who does dog training, so it is like a dog park out there. She brings people in and does obedience training. She doesn’t technically have a room here, but she pays a little bit of rent to utilize that space,” Goosman says.
Goosman has also started a library from donated books.
“There were books left here when I bought the place, and then I started telling people that they could drop their books off if they wanted to get rid of them,” Goosman said.
“They took me up on that because I have 3,000 books here now which is way beyond a little free library. The whole hallway is crammed full of them.”
Goosman has set up small libraries not only at ACRE, but around town.
LOOKING AHEAD TO THE FUTURE
For some in rural Southeast Ohio, access to reliable internet can be a problem. Goosman wants to combat this issue.
“One thing that I have been thinking about lately is turning the community room into a remote workspace. In other words, I could have rolling workstations on wheels that could lock up,” Goosman says.
“You come here, and you could have your laptop, your printer, and you could have it all in a rolling station where you could lock up and keep it safe so it would be a smalltime office setup.”
With this plan, Goosman would turn the community room into more of a multi-purpose room. “Anything that we feel that the community needs and would be a benefit, we are willing to give it a try.”
– Gary Goosman
ABOVE: One of the many features of ACRE is a small pond next to the dog training area. BELOW: Pottery from Horvath Pottery at ACRE.
ACRE
www.amesvilleacre.weebly.com
