Greenwood’s original City Hall, a large, square brick building built in 1904, sits at 103 E. Market St. near the corner of Main.
In its early days, it served as the center of city government, near Front Street where cotton barges loaded and unloaded.
At one time it was a jail, and then it was a Masonic lodge.
As the century advanced, the building became less and less its original self, converted to an office building with drywall covering the brick walls and dropped ceilings concealing the cavernous height of its original ceilings.
It became home to Kimmel Aviation Insurance, now located at the airport.
In November 2016, Greenwood resident Cyndi Long bought it from the Kimmel family.
Now it is her dream home.
Downstairs, Long has taken out walls to open up large rooms, and has furnished those rooms with a mix of family furniture and estate sale pieces to create a warm event space for groups wanting to rent it.
Upstairs, she has created a spacious apartment, awash in natural light from the large windows on every wall.
“I always wanted to live downtown,” Long said.
Restoring, renovating and repurposing a very old building is right up Long’s alley. A lover of old things, she frequents yard sales and Facebook Marketplace looking for just the right rug or lamp or hardware or accent piece at the right price.
“For someone who wants to do this economically, hitting yard sales and estate sales is the only way to do it,” she said. She makes many of her purchases on the second day when prices are slashed by half to move merchandise.
Her dad’s family owned a construction company in Knoxville, Tennessee, where Long grew up, and she became handy with tools as a natural part of her upbringing.
The business operation she oversees at the Greenwood Leflore Airport, General Electric Capital Aviation Services’ aircraft disassembly plant, has prepared her as well, to think critically about taking something substantial apart — such as an old 747 — and salvaging the parts that are still useful or, in some cases, beautiful.
Take the curved, corrugated tin ceilings on the first floor.
Long said the ripple shape was designed to disperse the weight of concrete floors poured overhead when the place was a jail. Now, uncovered after hiding behind dropped acoustic tile for many years, they lend shape and motion to a sturdy, square room.
Long worked with Barlow Construction to strip the building back to its basics and then rewire and replumb it to meet modern standards.
“We wanted to keep as much as we could original or repurpose it in a way that highlights the original look of the building,” Long said.
“When we pulled up the flooring, we found this underneath.” She points to vintage 9-inch-by-9-inch block linoleum in a brown and gold checkerboard pattern. Cleaned and polished, it warms the large rooms.
Overhead, a hodgepodge of chandeliers and vintage light fixtures illuminate all the rooms — some of them, like one from the old Antoon house on Dewey Street, rescued before their buildings met the wrecking ball.
In one of the downstairs bathrooms, an old oak barrel, a gift from a friend, has been converted into a sink pedestal and storage cabinet.
On one wall, a rough plank about 9 feet long is hung across the wall, with a row of vintage doorknobs — some brass, some glass, some dented and rusted, some delicately engraved — mounted to make a coat rack.
Long said she got a lot of her ideas from HGTV and by just being a student of repurposing and reusing old things.
Slowly, once she had the basic bones of the place uncovered and some furniture in place — most of it purchased at estate sales, or gifts from her grandmother or mother — she began adding artwork.
“I wanted it to mean something to me,” she said, running her hand over the glass of a framed drawing. In neat pen and ink, her grandfather, Dr. Raymond Woods, a Knoxville dentist, made the piece, a map of all the places in Europe where he served during World War II, labeled with dates and place names.
“He made it to show my grandmother, my mother and aunt all the places he’d been in the war,” Long said. “Our family has made copies of it, but this is the original.”
In one of the downstairs rooms, a wavy textured floor looks like painted concrete but is actually what Long calls a “paper bag floor,” made in a similar way as papier mache, with torn pieces of brown paper, glued in multiple layers with a starchy paste to make a durable flooring, painted to a high gloss.
Long said most of her projects were pulled together through tutorials on YouTube, mixed with imagination and ingenuity and plenty of elbow grease.
“You can learn to do anything on YouTube,” she said. “I like to teach myself how to do stuff.”
Outside, a bricked-in patio that used to be a room tacked on to the back of the building now looks like a New Orleans courtyard — warm, urban and gritty but comfortable.
Long’s first guests in the downstairs event area were a group from the Yazoo City Mayor’s Office, there for a planning retreat. A big table in the front room accommodates 12, and there’s a well-outfitted kitchen area, plenty of seating areas and two modern bathrooms, as well as the patio, for renters to enjoy.
Along the far eastern wall, a moved and completely rebuilt staircase leads to the upstairs living quarters. On first glance, it looks like a traditional wooden staircase. But a closer look reveals that the vertical spindles are actually pieces of metal rebar. Long made curtain rods with rebar too, mounted above each of the newly replaced windows, their wood frames hand stained.
Dennis Barlow, who oversaw the construction aspects of stripping out the new to reveal the old and then making the building livable, said Long was a joy to work with.
“Cyndi was fantastic. She had a good idea of what she wanted when we started, and as we went on with the demo, we uncovered things that she wanted to leave exposed,” Barlow said. “The plans changed a couple of times, but it all grew from her original goal of restoring the building to more of what it had been originally.”
Construction lasted for about a year, adhering to the requirements of a building that resides on the National Historic Register, as 103 E. Market St. does.
“I enjoyed every minute of it, especially seeing Cyndi get excited about how it was turning out,” Barlow said.
Long’s next project will be an exterior one, in cooperation with Main Street Greenwood, the Greenwood Convention and Visitors Bureau and the City of Greenwood. Those entities are all chipping in to cover part of the cost of commissioning a “Welcome to Historic Downtown Greenwood” mural to be painted on the east-facing outside wall.
“When somebody comes into town from Grenada Boulevard, it will be one of the first downtown things they see,” Long said.
Celebrating the old, maintaining Greenwood’s historic legacy and using imagination to repurpose a national treasure of a place — that’s what Cyndi Long’s up to, and this energetic handywoman is up to the task.
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
