Columbia won’t let ‘polka dot’ house owner tear it down. He took city to court
In 2017, builder Allen Rutter purchased a 1940s-era duplex on Rosewood Drive and Walker Street in Columbia, one of the gateways to the upscale Shandon neighborhood in the Capital City.
The Columbia builder intended to tear down the structure and build a single-family home to sell. But a year after the purchase, a city design commission said no.
It deemed the structure at 140-142 Walker St. historic and said tearing it down would erode the character of the neighborhood. So with the help of his daughters and a professional painter, Rutter covered the structure with giant pink polka dots.
“It’s not my proudest moment,” Rutter said at the time. “But I wanted to draw attention to the situation. And I wanted to do something that wasn’t too offensive to the surrounding neighborhood. So polka dots seemed like the way.”
Now, Rutter has kicked his protest up a notch.
He hung a banner on the front porch that says, “Do you think this duplex is architecturally significant? The city of Columbia does and refuses to issue a demo permit.”
And on March 29, his attorney argued in circuit court that the city acted improperly by denying the permit.
“The rules are poorly written,” attorney Ben Bruner said. “It lets the (design commission) construe them for the outcome they desire. It is arbitrary and capricious.”
The city’s Design Development Review Commission was able to block the demolition because Shandon residents years ago voted to install a “community character” zoning overlay, which requires all demolition permits to be approved by the commission.
The city deemed the structure was part of the “character” of Shandon and one of the few original duplexes built when the neighborhood was developed, even though 12 Shandon neighbors signed a petition in support of the permit.
They preferred the new single-family home to the old duplex, they said.
Now the city is considering additional preservation rules that would target buildings outside of existing historic and community character overlays.
The effort was spurred by the demolition of a Gervais Street storefront significant to the civil rights movement that was torn down just days after a historical marker was put up, and the sudden razing of the historic Women’s Club of Columbia building on Blossom Street despite the presence of an agreement with neighbors that would have slowed the process.
The buildings were torn down by the First Nazareth Baptist Church, and the Catholic Diocese of Charleston, respectively.
When the Design Development Review Commission denied Rutters’ demolition permit, members said they couldn’t make exceptions for some qualifying buildings without setting a legal precedent for others.
“A community votes to create a historic district overlay for their neighborhood, so everybody is duty-bound to comply,” then-chairman Tom Savory said at the time. “And if a commission makes individual concessions . . . where do you stop?
“You have to look at it in the aggregate,” he said. The duplex and other structures threatened with demolition “have to be taken as part of a whole. They are the threads in a tapestry.”
Still, Rutter is continuing to up his protest and his court action in which a decision is pending.
“The city of Columbia is looking at adopting new zoning regulations and I thought they were excessive in enforcing the existing rules,” he said. ““I thought I was being too quiet.”
This story was originally published April 30, 2019 at 5:00 AM.