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Something old becomes something new: how a behavioral health center helped revitalize a historic downtown.

Article Excerpt
In 2002 LifeSpring, a community behavioral health center serving southern Indiana, was looking for new corporate headquarters after outgrowing its home for the past 30 years. The board of directors had a lot to consider.

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LifeSpring's main center consisted of a few small buildings and leased space at the county hospital in Jeffersonville, Indiana (Many community behavioral centers that began with hospital affiliations have such arrangements). LifeSpring lacked a separate community identity on the hospital's campus, and clients often had problems discriminating LifeSpring's services and programs from those of the hospital.

A few years earlier, consultants had developed a comprehensive building plan recommending LifeSpring build a large flagship office to consolidate several administrative and clinical programs. Such a building would have required purchasing several acres and moving away from the population center where most of our consumers lived and worked.

At this time Jeffersonville was revitalizing its historic riverfront and downtown business district, but several deteriorated buildings remained empty and were attractive targets for vandals. Among these buildings was a classic Federalist limestone bank built in 1908, which originally housed the local Citizen Trust Bank and a series of successor banks. This was one of three land mark Jeffersonville buildings designed by a prominent Louisville architect around...

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