Please Sign This Petition to Make Cottages Historical Landmarks

The Iowa City Council wants to raze the pre-Civil War cottages near the railroad depot in the 600 block of South Dubuque Street to continue destroying Iowa City’s unique buildings and land features to make way for developers to build large, ugly buildings that cater to the rich. The only way to give Iowa City councilors pause in their destructive actions is to give historical buildings historical landmark status. Make sense? It does to me. Historical buildings, working-class cottages built in the 1850s, right after Iowa achieved statehood in 1847 and Iowa City was Iowa’s capitol, should achieve landmark status.

Please sign this petition asking Matt Hayek, the wealthy lawyer/mayor; Terry Dickens, the wealthy jeweler who owns Herteen & Stocker (or his father does); Michelle Payne, a MidAmerican executive; Susan Mims, the wife of University of Iowa athletic department executive Fred Mims, and physician Rick Dobyns to put their favoritism for rich developers aside and consider landmark status for historical buildings for once.

It’s sad to see the unique character of Iowa City’s buildings, businesses, and environment being destroyed. I remember when a developer across the street from New Pioneer Coop on Washington Street tore down the picturesque building that used to house Dawn’s-Bead-Away, the Red Avocado Restaurant, and a book store. The developer built an ugly mausoleum-like structure in its place. Another unique, beautiful structure housing unique small businesses bit the dust.

Then the city council accepted bids for a building to fill an empty lot on Gilbert and College Streets. The council decided not to accept an 85% energy-efficient building that would have housed New Pioneer Coop and the Bicycle Library. Instead they gave a million-dollar Tax Incremental Financing (TIF) deal to one of the richest developers in town, Marc Moen, to build a towering phallic symbol in the sky, a building so tall that it promises to blot out the sun shining through a church’s stained glass windows nearby. The building does not fit the city’s own comprehensive urban plan, yet the one urban planning professor on the council, Jim Throgmorton, voted for it. This doesn’t make sense. The area of town where the Moen monstrosity, a.k.a. the Shadow, is to be located is transitional according to the city’s own plan. Skyscrapers belong downtown, not in transitional areas, which are the spaces between residential areas and downtown.

So obviously, the Iowa City Council doesn’t follow its own comprehensive urban plan. It doesn’t follow its own Sensitive Areas Ordinance either. The council allows developers to build on steep slopes on First Avenue on Iowa City right above Hickory Hill Park. People who already live there and have had their windows broken and their basements flooded due to new overbuilding in a sensitive environmental area, complain or file suit. When they do, Iowa City councilors like Susan Mims and others vow to change the Sensitive Areas Ordinance to eliminate “loopholes” that enable residents to complain that the city isn’t following its own laws. City councilors can change their own law, but that doesn’t change the fact that in the present, they are violating their own law, in my opinion.

We need to save the antebellum cottages in the 600 block of Dubuque Street, and the only way you can do that is to sign the petition in the short term.

In the the long term, we need to unseat the wrecking crew, especially Mayor (wealthy and well connected attorney) Matt Hayek, Herteen & Stocker jeweler Terry “No Chickens” Dickens, Susan (“I don’t need to walk in the woods; you can destroy them and put in a development instead with my blessing”) Mims, physician Rick Dobyns, and MidAmerican executive Michelle Payne.