(Spirit Lake)– The Spirit Lake City Council Tuesday evening adopted an ordinance giving special status to a historic building in the city’s downtown area. City Attorney/Administrator Gregg Owens says it designates what’s known as the old First Bank and Trust building at the corner of Lake Street and Hill Avenue as a local landmark…
“This allows it to have the designation. It doesn’t create any burden on the taxpayers, if you want to call it that. There’s no cost involved to the city. But that mere fact of being an historic landmark as I said, allows them to pursue some grant opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise been able to pursue.”
The building has been undergoing an extensive restoration, bringing it back to its original luster…
“The plan is for retail spaces downstairs and that’s what they’ve been focusing on in the interior for now. Of course on the exterior they’re focusing on some of the old brick and I think you’ve seen they’re working on windows and trying to get those period appropriate in appearance, and I think there’s some talk that in the future the upstairs, where there’s an old ballroom, that a lot of people didn’t know about unless you worked at the bank or you happened to be there and got a special tour, it hadn’t been used for decades. There’s some idea that maybe that would be re-purposed into some sort of event venue. I’m really hoping to see that come to fruition if it does.”
Owens says that building is the core of the city’s downtown and that it will draw even more people and business to the downtown area…
“We had some misses from people out of town wanting to take advantage of some opportunities that just weren’t going to work there and didn’t make sense for the downtown area, and this has been a terrific idea that they have and it’s wonderful to see that coming from somebody local. And again, you see small cities like ours with downtowns that are two or three square blocks, buildings like that mean a lot and to have them sit empty sends the wrong message, and so they’re helping us send the right message to other people that will want to invest in downtown.”
That building was the main anchor in what was known as the “Stevens Block” of downtown Spirit Lake in the early days of the city’s development.
