Historical Review

During the January 6th City Council meeting, the City Council approved a contract with Jennifer Price with Price Preservation Research to conduct an historical survey for the downtown area.  This survey will include all the buildings on the 500 & 600 blocks of Lake Avenue along with the north side of the 100 blocks of east and west Railroad Street.

The purpose of this survey is to determine whether Storm Lake's Downtown is historic.  This could be through a district or just individual buildings within the downtown.  Most of the buildings within the downtown are more than 100 years old, but the age of the building doesn't necessarily make a building historic.  The Iowa State Historic Preservation Office and the National Historic Preservation Office base their findings on four different historical criteria:
1. Is the building associated with events that hold a significant contribution to history?
2. Is the building associated with lives of significant people?
3. Does the building embody characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction, or that represent work of a master, or that possess high artistic values, or that represent a significant and distinguishable entity whose components may lack individual distinction?
4. Does the building yield important information in history or prehistory?

Jennifer Price will start the historical survey in mid-January to conduct research on the downtown buildings.  Once Jennifer has completed her research, she can start preparing the Site Inventory Forms that will need to be submitted to the Iowa State Historic Preservation Office.  The reviewing by the State Historic Preservation Office is a requirement for the Downtown Facade Grant.

If any building owner within the Area of Potential Effect would still like to participate in the grant please contact Emily Haselhoff at 712-732-8002 or e-mail Haselhoff@stormlake.org!

Welcome!

Welcome to the Storm Lake Downtown Facade Blog!  This blog will keep the downtown business owners and citizens of Storm Lake up to date on the progress of this newest project in The City Beautiful. 

To bring everyone up to speed so far on what the City has done to get involved in this project here is a little recap.  About one year ago, City Staff was informed of the Downtown Facade Revitalization Grant and started assembling an application.  This included going around to downtown business owners to find buildings that would like to participate in the facade project.  The grant application was sent in back in January 2013 and the City was officially notified in August that the Storm Lake Downtown was one of thirteen projects that would be funded!

The City found two great groups to help provide the experience needed to get this great project for our downtown rolling!  The City is contracting with Simmering-Cory Inc. from Clear Lake, Iowa to help with the administration of this grant.  Simmering-Cory brings a lot of experience to this project from administrating projects for previously awarded communities including: Colfax, Conrad, and Red Oak. 

To help design the improvements for the front facades, RDG Planning & Design out of Des Moines was brought into the project.  RDG also has a lot of downtown facade revitalization experience working with this grant and others in communities like: Des Moines, Belle Plaine, Colfax, Conrad, Manning, and Grinnell.  Architects from RDG were in Storm Lake on November 6th to meet with building owners to discuss the some of the proposed changes to the different downtown buildings.

Keep checking this blog for more updates and information on the Storm Lake Downtown Facade Project!