Best Historic Restoration
STAFF PICK: El Presidio Bed and Breakfast Inn, 297 N. Main Ave. This beautiful old building at the corner of Main Avenue and Franklin Street got its historic honors in the late '80s--a Drachman's Award on the Arizona Opera House Tour, and a nomination for the Governor's Award--but it deserves 1996 praise for its steadfast contribution to one of the city's loveliest historic neighborhoods. Patti and Jerry Toci bought the property in 1979 and spent 12, count 'em, 12 years restoring it. The heart of the building is a four-square adobe built sometime before 1880, when the railroad came in. After that pivotal year, with fashionable materials now more readily available, it was converted to an elegant manse more to the Victorian taste, given a hip roof and a wraparound veranda. The Tocis restored it to this Victorian-era style, embellishing it with the typical extravagant colors of the time: gray-blue, nut, pumpkin and brown. These days Patti runs the bed and breakfast, which found its way into a seven-page spread in Norma Burba's book, The Desert Southwest. All we know is the place always gives us a much-needed lift when we drive by, weary as our eyes are of all those strip malls and fast-food joints and mass-produced, cheap pink houses now cluttering greater Tucson's streetscape.
Arts & Culture |
Cafés |
Chow |
City Life |
Kids |
Media Blitz
Music |
Outdoors |
Shopping |
Spirits