It might be a challenging fixer-upper, but there are people in Boulder who think preserving the boarded-up house at 800 Arapahoe Ave. will also preserve a part of the city's history.

Susan Osborne, co-president of the local nonprofit Historic Boulder (HB), gave a presentation Friday to the citizen group PLAN-Boulder County about the "Endangered Buildings" still standing in Boulder and surrounding areas, and the Arapahoe home - also known as the Hannah Barker House - was on the list.

Barker once owned the meadow near Nederland where Barker Dam and Barker Reservoir - the body of water that holds a large percentage of Boulder's raw water supply - currently lie. Also, Barker and Mary Davidson traveled together to Colorado in the 1860s, and the Davidson Mesa southeast of Boulder was named after the Davidson family.

Barker was one of Boulder's first female schoolteachers and a philanthropist who also served as director of the Boulder National Bank, while her husband Ezra was a wealthy landowner with extensive mining interests.

Fast-forward to 2007 - Historic Boulder has initiated the city process for designating the house as an individual landmark. Property co-owner Chris Maurer said Sunday that his partnership has no current formal plans on the table to demolish or renovate the house, although it once examined turning it into a bed and breakfast.

Historic Boulder has volunteered to assist with a potential historic rehabilitation - but why would it go through the trouble?

Osborne, who worked in the city's Planning Department for 22 years, said Friday that it is possible and even desirable to connect historic preservation with good local planning. She said she frequently noticed, while doing work on her doctorate in the early part of this decade, that historic structures were important components of places that promote a sense of community.

Osborne also used the words of the late 19th and early 20th-century American philosopher Josiah Royce to describe "community" as people who have common goals but also a common past.

And to date, the City of Boulder has approved landmarking of more than 130 individual structures in Boulder alone, and they're not all houses.

For example, Osborne showed a picture of the landmarked Holiday Drive-In movie marquee on north 28th St. in Boulder. She said the sign, which was recently restored to its original condition, will help residents living in the Holiday Neighborhood remember that the site of the housing development was the home of a drive-in theater in decades past. But organizations win some and lose some in the preservation game, and Osborne said HB and the city's Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board (LPAB) opposed the recent demolition of one of Boulder's oldest brick houses that was located at 1802 Canyon Blvd.

Canyon runs parallel to the Boulder Creek that comes down from the mountains at relatively steep grades, and the boulevard was once known as "Water Street." Osborne said the brick home was built in 1895; just one year after a major flood washed away buildings and bridges in Boulder along with sections of roads and railways.

City Council recently voted to allow the demolition, in part because the building was damaged before it could be landmarked during a process to move it about 20 feet closer to the street corner, and the most recent HB newsletter said the historic home was demolished in "less than 40 minutes."

"The history of buildings in Boulder is not something we can rest easy about," said Osborne.

She also said Historic Boulder believes locals should hold "at least a discussion" about renovating Casey Middle School at 2410 13th St. instead of tearing it down and building a new school.

Osborne said the original building, named after the long-time superintendent of schools William Casey, was built in 1924 with financing from a 1921 bond issue and was the first intermediate school in Boulder.

Voters approved a 2006 Boulder Valley School District bond issue as well, and the BVSD listed $31 million for a Casey re-build as part of the bond issue information. Also, the City of Boulder is considering using money from its Education Excise Tax (EET) fund to help the Casey project meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards. Friday's meeting attendees discussed whether disassembly and building a new "green" school would really be more efficient than renovation.

Preservationists often use the term "embodied energy" to describe the energy required to produce a building such as Casey - including what was spent to extract raw materials, transport the materials, manufacture the building and disassemble it - and Casey is a large structure.

"There is no more green building than an existing building," said Osborne.

But meeting attendee and former council member Matt Appelbaum said it might be a "tough sell" to say Casey's embodied energy would outweigh the benefits of a new energy-efficient building that should last at least 50 years.

On the historic side, Osborne said the original building has "wonderful" exterior architecture, although she wasn't as kind in describing a 1970s-era addition, and meeting attendee Oakleigh Thorne of Thorne Ecological Institute said CU-Boulder has done successful renovations at its Old Main, Macky Auditorium and Woodbury buildings.

The BVSD has said parts of Casey's interior are in poor condition, and the district is using a "visioning" team to evaluate the options at Casey. But Osborne said Historic Boulder will continue to watch Casey and other local processes - including the fates of Mapleton Elementary and the Boulder Depot currently located in the Crossroads Commons shopping center - to try to help preserve the names and character of the past.