I am writing in response to Zachary Squires’ article on the demolition of the Briggs Mansion, and to disagree with his excessive criticism of our city when it comes to historic preservation.
Rockford has a long record of preserving historic buildings, and has many current preservation projects that are going on today.
We are in the process of restoring the old Chick Hotel, and the former Rockford Watch building for the future, along with the old stadium home of the Rockford Peaches.
The old Barber Colman factory building is being preserved for housing and commercial use, and companies like Urban Equities Rockford have been preserving many old commercial properties and converting them into modern housing. The News Tower Building and the old Rever’s Marina are other examples of current projects.
There also are many past examples, such as the Tinker Cottage, the old Burpee mansion, next to the new Burpee Natural History museum, the Erlander home, which is a museum of local Swedish heritage, and the Graham-Ginestra house, which has been made into a museum of ethnic heritage.
More recent examples are the Prairie Street Brewhouse project, that converted an old brewery into a restaurant and condominium apartments and the old Amerock-Ziock factory building, that was made into a new Embassy Suites Hotel.
The fact that in the past we have made mistakes and lost some historic buildings that might have been preserved is no reason to be overly critical of current efforts.
The truth is that many efforts were made to preserve the Briggs Mansion, the Chancery Building, and the Elks Club buildings over the course of many years, and it is a credit to the city and its residents that these efforts were made.
In order to make preservation a success, a building must have a future purpose, a future owner that wants to take responsibility for it, and an on-going source of funding to make it happen.
The fact that these things did not come together for these examples is no fault of our city. Sometimes removing a building in order to use the land for a more important purpose makes more sense than preservation, and in other cases no future purpose for a structure can be found that makes economic sense.
Even past successes can continue to be a challenge, as with the Tinker Cottage Museum, which is currently trying to raise $600,000 in order to keep parts of it from falling off the crumbling cliff that it is built on.
If there truly is a criticism that can be made, I would point to the failure of our current city leaders to establish a good relationship with the management of UW Health, which is one of the most important organizations in our city.
It employs hundreds of people and is the last remaining hospital near the city’s center. They are trying to expand their vital mission of providing health care to our community, and do not appear to be getting much help from our city leaders.
If they were doing their jobs properly, our mayor and City Council members would have been on a first-name basis with the leaders of this hospital and made them feel like when they needed more land for expansion, that they could call our city leaders first. They should have been helping to find adjacent properties that could be removed for expansion.
The loss of Mercy Health’s Rockton Avenue hospital should have been a lesson on the importance of reaching out, and establishing cordial working relationships with organizations like UW Health, but they do not appear to have been able to learn from this mistake.
Kurt Harris is a longtime Rockford resident and history buff.
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Rockford may have lost Briggs Mansion, but it’s saved others | Opinion
Reporting by Kurt Harris, Special to the Rockford Register Star / Rockford Register Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Kurt Harris, Special to the Rockford Register Star | USA TODAY Network
