Downtown Cedar Rapids aims for place on National Register of Historic Places

CEDAR RAPIDS - The heart of the downtown could secure a place by summer on the National Register of Historic Places.

'What's not to like?” City Council member Monica Vernon, chairwoman of the council's Development Committee, said at the committee's meeting on Wednesday.

Property in a national historic district tends to increase in value, Vernon said, while the historic status allows property owners to secure tax credits and exemptions to help pay to improve their properties.

'This is good news for people who want to fix up their buildings,” she said.

The council's Development Committee voted Wednesday to support the establishment of the historic designations and to refer the matter on to the full City Council.

The city must submit nomination applications for the historic designations to the State Historic Preservation Office by April 1 in preparation for a presentation in front of the State Nomination Review Committee in June. The nominations then will be submitted to the National Park Service in July.

Council member Pat Shey asked Anne Russett, a planner in the city's Community Development Department, if the city has gotten much resistance from owners of downtown property that would become part of the historic district.

Russett said the city had contacted every property owner in the proposed district and had held a public open house and had not received any negative responses. Some property owners have inquired about the benefits, such as tax-credit incentives to help with renovation, of being in a historic district, she said.

Russett said having a property in a district on the National Register of Historic Places is more of an honorary designation and does not come with any local oversight or control. Properties in a local historic district have local standards to follow, she said.

The city is also seeking to secure placement on the National Register of Historic Places for two individual properties, St. James United Methodist Church, 1430 Ellis Blvd. NW, and the Harper and McIntire Building, which has been home to the warehouse for the just-closed Smulekoff's Home Store, 409-411 Sixth Ave. SE. The former was built in 1954, the latter in 1922. Both property owners approve of the historic status, Russett said.The city has been working on the downtown project for some time. In October 2012, the city hired Summit Envirosolutions Inc. to conduct a historical and architectural study of the downtown.

A proposed boundary for the downtown district has been established in consultation with the State Historic Preservation Office and the city's Historic Preservation Commission. In the area, 63 properties have been identified as 'contributing” to the designation of a historic district and another five are considered as 'potentially contributing.”

These properties include the Theatre Cedar Rapids building, the U.S. Bank building, the Higley Building, the one-time Carnegie Library (now part of the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art) and the American Building.

Council member Susie Weinacht said some residents may question the historic nature of some of the contributing or potentially contributing properties, pointing to an older downtown parking ramp as an example.

Vernon said the parking ramp is more than 50 years old and has a style of architecture that might not seem special to her, Weinacht and Shey, but would to someone much younger than they are.

Jennifer Pratt, the city's development director, said owners of downtown property have witnessed the historic restoration of a number of buildings since the 2008 flood. She said the national historic designation could provide an incentive for others to do the same.

Mark Stoffer Hunter, a historian of Cedar Rapids and a member of the city's Historic Preservation Commission, said a historic designation for the core of the downtown makes sense and is not an 'overly ambitious” pursuit.

The proposed district boundary excludes the perimeter of the downtown where most of the city's older buildings were replaced during a flurry of urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s, he said.

The core of the downtown has a 'good stock of historic buildings” where there have been few demolitions in the last 25 years or so, he said.