With a grant in hand, the city of Concord is preparing to apply for national historic registry status for its iconic gasholder building.
In April, the city sought a grant to pay for the application that could put the unstable 1888 building on the National Register of Historic Places.
It learned in May that it had won a $9,600 Certified Local Government grant from the New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources.
City councilors on Monday accepted the recommendation of the Concord Heritage Commission to use that sum to hire a consultant to prepare the application.
The National Register of Historic Places is an official National Park Service list of “places worthy of preservation.”
The gasholder was built on South Main Street to store gas made from coal in the days before natural gas was readily available. Although many similar buildings remain, Concord’s may be unique in the country because it still contains the inner mechanism that stored the gas under a massive floating cap.
The building is no longer safe to enter and it would cost at least $500,000 to stabilize it and much more to make it usable again, according to rough estimates previously made by building owner Liberty Utilities.
There is no local match required for the grant.
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @NickBReid.)