Hey, UI: Don’t destroy our historic Melrose Neighborhood

By Jean Walker

----

Signifying its historic importance, most of the Melrose Neighborhood in Iowa City is on the National Register of Historic Places, and the City has noted that efforts should be made to preserve it.

However, less than a week before the topic was to be brought to the state Board of Regents, University of Iowa officials told the Melrose Neighborhood that it was purchasing two neighborhood houses and demolishing eight to make a temporary parking lot for up to 300 cars at Melrose Place - though the entrance appears problematic and those 300 cars could be disruptive to Melrose Avenue traffic. No time was allowed to find alternative solutions.

The Regents approved the UI's purchase of the houses, even though one property is in the neighborhood's National Historic District and includes the neighborhood's last (100-year-old) barn. The UI is proceeding with its plans, choosing a consultant for the project even though it has not yet obtained city approval for the necessary vacation of Melrose Place.

Since the 1920s, the UI's modus operandi has been to buy neighborhood homes and use them temporarily before demolishing them to build a large institutional building or parking lot. Many historic subdivisions adjacent to the Melrose Neighborhood have been erased by the UI.

The Melrose Neighborhood contains the last historic houses in this area - houses occupied by people who still choose to live there to walk to work at the UI. So the neighborhood's history is a shared history with the UI, and for the UI to destroy the neighborhood is for it to destroy its own (as well as the city's) heritage.

Despite that, and even though the UI has said it favors historic preservation and has given assurances it does not intend to purchase any further neighborhood properties, the UI has continued

to purchase such

properties.

Once the UI purchases these properties, it can destroy them, and the city cannot preserve them. Also, these properties go off the tax rolls, causing a deficit in funds for the city.

Due to its historic importance, the Melrose Neighborhood should be off the table for further acquisition/destruction by the UI, which should make its future plans with that in mind. Once an area is cleared, its historic properties are lost forever.

To ensure this neighborhood is preserved, the city needs to uphold its stated commitment to the neighborhood's preservation and make a clear statement to that effect directly to the UI, perhaps stating that the UI should not purchase any further properties east of Melrose Place. Similar statements by the Historic Preservation Commission also should be made.

The UI needs to uphold its commitment to historic preservation (and preservation of its own history) and look elsewhere than the historic Melrose Neighborhood for future expansion. It should not play Monopoly in our historic district.

This is not an industrial wasteland. This is where we live - our architecturally historic houses, our homes, our history and our heritage. The playing field is very unequal if UI officials are planning for the destruction of our very homes, especially without our timely input or consideration of less-destructive alternatives.

If the UI omitted the possibility of using the historic Melrose Neighborhood for destruction/development, it should be able, with the help of the considerable brainpower of the university, to come up with innovative and satisfactory alternatives.

If the UI keeps picking away at the Melrose Neighborhood, it will disappear like all the other little neighborhoods in the area already erased by the UI.

Jean Walker is a representative of the Melrose Neighborhood Association and is a 39-year resident of that Iowa City neighborhood. Comments: jean.walker@mchsi.com.