Tony Johnson plays an important role in Cache Valley history — even the parts he wasn’t around for.
The developer — or, more accurately, redeveloper — has had a hand in bringing several old and at least somewhat dilapidated buildings back to life, getting them listed on the National Register of Historic Places and finding tenants to fill them.
“I’ve always liked old stuff,” he said. “I’ve been drawn to that type of a thing, and memorabilia.”
Born and raised in Cache Valley, he said he went to law school in California before returning home and working with Utah businessman and philanthropist Dell Loy Hansen’s Wasatch Property Management, helping to develop properties around the West.
Before he went out on his own sometime just before the Great Recession, Johnson worked on the Washington Federal Building in Salt Lake City.
That helped set the stage for the redevelopment projects he would go on to tackle.
“We used historic tax credits on that project,” he said. “The historic preservation piece of that, I thought it was interesting.”
In Cache Valley, he has used or is in the process of using historic tax credits to restore about a dozen old buildings that contain modern businesses, including two decades-old Sinclair gas stations, Chef D’s Philly’s in Wellsville, The Owl, Lucky Slice Pizza, Prodigy Brewing and Fairway Bagels and Donuts.
These walls can talk
In his office — located in the River Heights Sinclair station he restored — are shelves of random relics he said he’s found at restoration sites. Many, he said, came from The Owl.
Among them are Prince Albert tobacco (yes, trapped in a can), aged bottles of booze, fire grenades, unsmoked cigars, and a canister of Benjamin Airguns pellets, still in an old-timey tin.
Amid yesteryear’s keepsakes, something else stands out: Resting on a bookstand is “A Pirate Looks at Fifty,” by Jimmy Buffett. The book, taken from The Owl building, fits with Johnson’s Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts, which he wore despite the chilly, early May weather.
Korral Broschinsky, an architectural historian and preservation consultant who has worked with Johnson on many of his projects, said she has never seen him wear anything different.
“And I have walked through two feet of snow with him,” she added.
Broschinsky, who calls Johnson her “Cache County Collector,” said he is constantly texting her, excited about historic buildings that he finds on the market.
She first met Johnson after he bought the Borden Lofts building on 290 S. 400 West in Logan. Working with a previous owner, she prepared paperwork to submit the structure to the national register before the owner decided not to take on the project. Then came Johnson.
“Borden Lofts is probably up there at the top of, I just feel like, great accomplishments,” she said. "I think demolition was proposed more than once, but just Tony had the vision to see it as something else. … It’s a pretty amazing building.”
Amazing enough, she added, that she has thought about moving to Logan to live in one of the units.
According to documents from the National Register of Historic Places, the lofts were first built as a milk plant in 1904. The plant would buy raw milk from regional dairies, publishing its daily prices in newspapers.
The national register documents say it survived the Great Depression and produced canned milk to help support the war effort during World War II before it closed in 1952, after Cache Valley’s dairy industry started to decline because fresh milk could be transported and stored with refrigeration.
“It becomes a story, almost,” Broschinsky said, referencing the historical importance of the dairy industry in Cache Valley. “The plant just kept growing and growing along as the dairy industry kept growing and growing.”
The building still holds its smokestack, Johnson pointed out during a tour, and it still says “Borden.”
“You’ve got to see the inside,” he said. “It really turned out kind of cool how we tried to keep the feel for the brick and the structure.”
Worth saving
Amber Anderson, the technical preservation manager with the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, said Johnson is the office’s “shining example up in northern Utah” of using historic tax credit programs.
“I think there’s a couple of things that are lost when buildings are torn down instead of repurposed,” Anderson said.
Some of those things, she explained, are the actual materials that make the building — old-growth wood, hand-made bricks and old-style windows.
“It’s also the people who were that involved in constructing the building in the first place,” she said. “The hands-on work that happened, the original owner, why they had that building built. … There’s a lot of tangible and intangible connections that I think that historic buildings provide for a community.”
Standing outside Fairway Bagels and Donuts — near the stairs where his mother would sit to eat penny candies at what used to be a market — Johnson talked about his history-laced strategy.
“At the end of the day, they’ll be here for another hundred years,” he said. “The building will be here, but we’ll be gone. So, I don’t know. I think it’s kind of fun to think about that.”