Globe Miami Times Connecting you to the Pulse of Globe Miami
Talmage and Rachel Hansen are a couple of civil engineers with a dream — to live and work in a small town where they can walk to the store and their four children can bike to school. They’ve chosen downtown Globe to pursue it.
“It’s got the layout and it has the architecture going for it,” Rachel says, “and with a green belt, Globe could attract more young families.”
Their business, TallyHo Engineering, started as a side gig six months before the Hansens moved to Globe in Dec. 2018. They serve private and public clients and design everything below and outside of the buildings. For one private client, Talmage produced plans for a mini-golf course. For the City of Globe, he’s the on-call engineer.
“No one else would do it,” he laughs. “Actually, it’s an ideal situation. We want to help the city. They need help. We’re living here locally, so when they call, I can go there within a few minutes.”
Rachel does mostly ‘behind the scene’ work; her favorite is design. She did the redesign of Mesquite and helped to redesign the Maple and 9th intersection .
“I like adding green space of any sort to areas,” Rachel says, “especially when it calls for it.“
Rachel has also been successful in prior businesses — home organization, architecture, home design — that always grew by word of mouth.
“I was looking for something little on the side but it kept getting bigger,” she says. “That’s a repetitive theme in my life.”
“For me, it’s a matter of learning to say No,” says Rachel, co-owner, civil engineer, and mother of four.
Building a Home in Globe
Talmage Hansen is a 2003 graduate of Globe High School, a good student, 3-sport athlete, and quarterback for the championship football team of 2002. He grew up in a house on 10th Street where his mother still lives. When the house next door came up for sale the month they planned to move back, it felt like the “stars were aligned.”
They didn’t buy the house.
“I was concerned that it would delay, too much, this dream,” Rachel says, nodding toward the building that would soon be their downtown home. “I felt more compelled to invest here.”
They chose the 120 year-old building on Broad Street for its size– large enough for their family, small enough to renovate within their means. They were also drawn by the existing neighbors and room in the back for parking and play space. They enclosed the backyard with a block wall and a fence of wood from the building’s original floor.
Next up is the facade. Many nieces and nephews have already helped with the demolition. The first interior work will be front offices. The upstairs will be converted to living quarters for the family of six. Talmage smiles with glint of his eye at the end date; he expects it’ll be at least a year.
Talmage and Rachel each have seven siblings and they are happy that their kids have cousins nearby with extended family in Snowflake, Flagstaff, and the valley. They are happy with the schools. Despite the big hills, their 12-year twins have ridden to Desert High Middle School and the younger ones, 10 and 7, all the way to Copper Rim.
“School is about what you put in,” Rachel says, “that’s what you get out.”
The Early Days
The couple met at church in Mesa. Then again at Mesa Community College. They both transferred to ASU to complete bachelor degrees in Civil Engineering, then moved east to Blacksburg, VA where Talmage earned his masters at Virginia Tech. By then they had three children and no car. Grocery shopping was a “fun adventure” on bikes.
“That really influenced me architecturally,” says Rachel. “the quaint beautiful historic towns. They had trails.”
“It taught me a lot about cities,” says Talmage. “What makes it social. What gives it that IT factor and what draws people together.“
Eight years in the Dallas area showed them another side of urban living. Train rides to work and bike rides to school. Talmage gained experience in the private sector working on a subdivision and a fast food lot and spent 1 ½ years with the city of Dallas. He learned a lot about water and sewer storm systems. That experience now serves the city of Globe where there are 55 miles of sewer line and 100 miles of water line, and 883 manholes to maintain.
BUILDING THE CONTAINER
“If anyone said you are going to buy a historic building in downtown Globe I would have said … what?”
Yet early last year Trina and her husband Doug became the owners of the 1901 building at 598 Broad Street. They’re not yet sure what it’s going to be, but they’re clearing the space and preparing for something good.
“We just want the right company that will be sustainable and will be of service,” says Trina. “Something that brings people downtown.”
Doug, who is real estate, and was inspired to explore the Globe area when he sat next to a man on a plane who works for Resolution Mine. Trina is intrigued by the building’s history — bank by day, brothel upstairs and an underground tunnel somewhere. They bought the historic building in disrepair from Glen Wilt in Feb, 2020. Wilt owns many properties in Globe that have been left neglected and empty for years.
“It cost about $10K to get rid of the junk that he had in there,” Trina says, “It was just horrible.”
She wants to bring it up to its natural glory, working with people from Globe. The city has been great, she says, though finding local contractors is challenging. The overall renovation will be a two-year job according to their estimates. Already there are new windows, and soon, apartments upstairs. One will be their local residence.
“I do like Globe… there’s a cool vibe, a very spiritual vibe,” Trina says, “even though there is poverty and homelessness and drugs and crime.”
She brought in some folks from Prescott to ceremonially clear the building, which she believes lifts the energy of the entire community. Trina sees great potential in the beauty of the area and says Globe could be another healing mecca.
“We know it’s a conservative place, but I think this energy medicine and ancient healing is the future,” she says, “along with some new technologies that are out there.”
Trina currently lives in Cave Creek and is founder of CloudNine Marketing,Inc. Doug sold a successful in-home theatre and home automation business 10 years ago and now works in real estate. He has been doing much of the work on the building.
“He’s an electronic genius,” says his wife. “He wants things to be nice and perfect.”
They’re in no rush to fill the space and prefer to wait for the right business plan to come forth. In the meantime, they’re pouring “a lot of love and money” into the building.
“I do think it’s going to be a crown jewel,” says Trina, “when we’re ready to hand it over to the new stewards.”
DREAMS DIE HARD
Barb Holtzen, a Payson resident, purchased the YMCA building at 155 N Miami Street in January 2004 with a vision of turning it into the Copper Country Community Center. She imagined her real estate business operating downstairs, her family upstairs and the building’s big spaces used for social and cultural events.
“We knew that it would be very expensive to fix,” says Barb, “but decided just to bite it off one bit at a time.”
A divorce put a halt to Barb’s grant plan so she rented the space for a year, learning a hard lesson of long-distance landlording. The tenants tore up the floors and left holes in the walls. Barb was heartbroken.
The first renovation project was to replace the roof. The high-ceilinged room adjacent to the lobby has been painted and Barb plans to open a mercantile with consignment goods and art.
“Then we were going to move to the lobby so that we could get it going for my real estate business and community uses that could generate some income that could eventually fix the rest of the building.”
Though her eyes alight as conjures up the possibilities, Barb, 69, doesn’t move around a job site like she once did. She’s looking for a buyer with a dream of their own to take over. In the meantime, she has acquired non-profit status for the venture and seeks volunteers to work on the building, help in the mercantile and apply for grants to further the renovation. In short she hopes the community will heed the advice that Rachel Hansen gives her children:
“Use your strengths to help those around you. That’s what true living is about.”
A traveler, Patti Daley came to Globe in 2016 to face the heat, follow love, and find desert treasure. She writes in many formats and records travel scraps and other musings at daleywriting.com.
