Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production Funding of Common Ground is made possible, in part, by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their 2nd century of service to the community.

Member FDIC Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm Producer/Director Scott Knudson.

In this first episode of a two-part series, we examined Bemidji's efforts to restore and preserve its Carnegie Library.

The Carnegie Library is our history.

History matters, and it also brings in folks that come to our community, and they go "Wow, these people really care about their community, look at this downtown, look at the way we take care of this community."

There are places like the Carnegie that are visible manifestations of the things that our parents and grandparents believed in for this community, and it will always be, as long as it's standing, a symbol of the city of Bemidji and of its citizens.

You can't just tear it down, you have to care about the old things that you have in your community, you have to care about the heart of your community.

What went on here is a lot of work over the last seven years to convince the city council that we needed to save this building, then take the time to do the fundraising to succeed, and then get the construction done, and now celebrate.

All my dreams came true, all of my dreams came true, we have tenants renting the building, we have purposes for the building upstairs, and my imagination has been really busy over these seven years, coming up with ideas and dropping little pearls of ideas into the Bemidji Jaycees ears that -Gosh wouldn't that be a good place for you to have an office ?"

and that's kind of how it started.

It gives me goosebumps, it is so beautiful, we knew, underneath it all, it was going to be good, but to see it really here is just spectacular.

The high ceilings and the windows have been restored and you can see the lake and the woodwork is so gorgeous, and the columns out front look so beautiful and the restored floors, and the new addition is spectacular, I was not expecting it to be anything other than just an entrance, but it has gorgeous windows and you can stand in there and you can see the lake and the light is beautiful, and it enhances the exterior of the building.

You come up the stairs and the old walls are in the inside now, and you can see what the windows were like and it's just.. it still, it gives me goosebumps, and it will forever, I think.

There are two or three generations who have not seen this upper level like this.

There have been offices and other spaces in this building, and so now we've torn them out.

You walk in, you see natural light, you can see out the windows, you see the lake view.

To see them come into the building and the joy they have on their face to see this finished work, is really what brings me joy.

With enough rent being paid by the people down in the lower portion of the building to cover all the expenses and necessary repairs, but those old brick buildings are better than a lot of stuff that's being built today.

I think it took probably 6 or 7 years from the idea that we're going to save it to completing it, and that was during my whole term as Mayor, so I feel a strong affinity for the work that we did, and also the fact that it was a big accomplishment for our community to get this done.

It is better than I envisioned, but I had a vision, and that's the difference between those that just go move into something and leave it the way it is, and those that say "Wow, but we can do this with this," but we could see that it was a diamond in the rough, because it was a diamond, it just was in the rough, and we fixed it.

Andrew Carnegie,the philanthropist, endowed more than 3000 Carnegie libraries worldwide, starting at the end of the last century, previous century, into the early 1900s.

He believed that literacy was one of the most important requirements for success for young people, especially people who grew up in poverty, so he, based on his own experience, after he collected all that wealth, gave it all away - primarily to endow libraries across the world.

There were probably two or three thousand in the country, but Minnesota only had about 65.

What happened was, small towns across the country started to put together, usually the women's organizations, would start a city library or a town library, and they'd collect books, and it would be a subscription library, so it was kind of private.

Three or four years later they had 1400 books and it was time for the city to take it over, just after the city was incorporated.

The Ladies Library Association handed off the original library to the city, a library board was created, and the library board, then, at their instigation, wrote away to Andrew Carnegie, because by then it was known, well known, that he was willing to fund the construction of libraries for small towns.

Several requirements - first of all, the city had to provide the land for the construction, the city had to sign a contract, an agreement in perpetuity, that they would contribute 10 percent of the amount that Andrew had provided, every year, for the maintenance of the building, not for books ,for maintenance, and not for salaries or for librarians, it was strictly to take care of the buildings.

Carnegie was a pretty enlightened guy in that he refused to build a library for a community unless it was open to everyone, all races, all religions, all people, open.

So there were many libraries, many towns across the south, which didn't want libraries because they were still segregated.

In 1908, A.P.

Richie, the library board chairman, wrote away to Andrew Carnegie and after some negotiations, they agreed that Andrew Carnegie would provide $12,500.00 for the construction of our library here in Bemidji.

The city authorized the piece of land in Library Park to be the location for the library and away we went.

The Carnegie Library in Bemidji opened in 1910 to great press.

The Ladies Library Association kept meeting here, the Red Cross came here, there were theater performances here.

It was a collection location for books for the U.S.S.

Beltrami in the 2nd World War.

This was actually a coming together under one spot, of books and readers and people who are interested about talking about books and so on, so it became, in many respects, a social gathering place for a significant number of people.

You know, to understand the significance of the Carnegie, because some people do and some people don't, I think you need to go back and visualize our community at the turn into the 19th century when the Carnegie was founded, and if you think about our community then, it was basically a crossroads of two railroads - it was filled to the brim in the summer with rough lumberjacks, it was probably notable only for the number of saloons and brothels it had, but that's our history, but even then, a number of people in the community came together and they put a stake in the ground and they said, "we're going to be more than this, we're going to stay here, we're going to prosper, we're going to raise our families here, we're going to educate them, and we're going to have a community."

That stake in the ground was the Carnegie Library, It served as a library for the community until 1961.

Then when it finally got too small, they moved the public library down the road and this became a social welfare office for about 20 years, and we have some stories from people about how cold it was, and the furnace in the basement didn't really work very well, and it was not a very pleasant place for the social welfare office.

Luckily, when that moved on, the Bemidji Community Arts Council thought this was going to be a gorgeous place to have their facilities, so they came in, they put up some false walls, they put some offices in, and they turned it into a gallery and an arts council.

We had artist galleries in the basement, we had the Region 2 Arts Council here, the Headwaters School of Music and the Arts was here for a while, so the city is really lucky that, from the moment the Carnegie opened until 2 years ago when the Watermark Center moved out, there were always tenants in the building.

The heat was on, the sidewalks were shoveled, so it really didn't deteriorate like so many libraries did in other towns when they got too small to be libraries anymore.

Really, the Carnegie story starts with the old high school, when it was a beautiful castle-esque high school in what was the heart of Bemidji and it was the most iconic building we had - just beautiful, the architecture was unmatched.

A massive building, and then they built a new high school.

So the conversation was, "What do we do with the old high school?"

and again, what often happens, is they don't really know.

In truth, there was too many things you could have done with it.

The real champion from back then was named Dick Rose , and he was an architect, a wonderful man who pushed really hard to try to save the building.

There was a lot of ideas: you know, people maybe could move in there and have apartment buildings, it was contentious, going back and forth trying to save it.

One season, they just shut the power off, shut the heat off.

The decision was to just kind of let it, let the old high school go, though there was all these people that wanted to save it, in the end, the high school died.

People were devastated, they thought that it was going to be saved, they thought it could be used for something else, and then suddenly, it's being bulldozed.

Bemidji lost a large part of its heart when that old high school went down , but the Carnegie library survives only because the old high school died.

And that's not like a good thing, but that's just part of the story that we need to remember.

It was on the heels of that loss that we were able to save the building.

By the end of the 2000s, the city knew that the building was starting to be in disrepair and the Watermark folks had signaled that they weren't going to be able to be tenants anymore, they needed to move on.

Coming in here after the tenants moved out was sad and frightening; it was dark, it was cold.

We turned the water off and emptied the pipes.

It was smelly, it was dirty, there were walls that didn't belong here, the ceilings were covered, the paint was falling, the plaster was breaking, there were chipmunks living in the basement, there was water in the basement, there was bricks falling out of thee.

off the chimney, there were windows broken, there was linoleum peeling, the bathrooms were scary, outdated, the building was unaccessible.

It was, it was sad, it was a concern because we had to get the work done, because the every winter it sat empty, it was going to deteriorate further.

We did our best to get it going as fast as we could.

The situation was that you had the Library Park with limited parking on the lakeside of the highway, and business properties on the inward side, so the plows would come down the street and push the snow towards the lake and that was affecting the condition of the masonry in the building, broken out windows on the lower section, and there was really no space left in between for people to walk in the wintertime so it was, it was a significant problem.

They looked at the proximity to the street, they looked at the fact that it's not an accessible building, that there was no new tenant in sight, and they said "We don't think we can afford to keep this building any longer, we have to do something about it, and that probably means tearing it down."

We were dealing with that other level that was very heavy, where we knew we were fighting against not just the community's idea of "Well, whatever," but also a feeling nationwide that really didn't seem to care about educational institutions.

It had gone through in front of them, 3 times, they decided to tear it down 3 different votes, that's it.

They were going to have a 4th meeting to put out the bids.

Mike Breeden is one of the people who was the initial.. who raised the flag to alert the community that this was happening, because I think it might not have been really communicated.

He got enough people involved and ready to try to do something about it.

You know, he was an important part of the initial project.

There was very strong community support that "yes, they wanted to keep the Carnegie," but nobody knew what to do with it and nobody had the funds.

The city just didn't have the funds to do what was necessary, especially to make it accessible.

At this time, I was the video technician for the city of Bemidji.

I was also running a public access station that I and a non-profit had spearheaded.

I was at every meeting; joint planning commission, joint planning board, the city council, so I would broadcast these meetings.

There was a lot of characters in these meetings, but there was one that really caught my eye, it was old Lew Crenshaw.

Lew wasn't from around here, you know, he was a "from out of nowhere" southern diplomat, and he had me just watching him, and I would, of course, train my cameras, because when he would speak, he'd have ways of presenting to the room - it was, just, he was so captivating.

I'd get talking to this guy, and come to find out Lew has this amazing back story and he was working for, he was a "high-up" guy working for this extremely big global corporation, and Lew was going to other countries, and setting up factories, and in these really intense meetings with big scary Russian guys.

I mean, he was, he had been in the thick of it, but now, he had retired to northern Minnesota and was keeping himself a little, keeping himself from being rusty, by being involved in civic duty.

I got involved because it was something I thought we could do, and I thought it was something that was important.

It was a long and hard journey, harder than I ever imagined.

Very early on, one of the first major donors I had to help us - we had to help us - our team, was Joe Lueken.

He said to me once, he said "Lew," because I was pretty down in the dumps, and he said "Lew, we have to be able to afford our history."

I never forgot that, it carried me along through this, you can't just tear it down, you have to care about the old things that you have in your community, you have to care about some of the, the heart of your community.

Well, there were people that were very in favor of it, and then there was the other side, so you, you had it all, but it had nothing to do with age, it had to do with their perspective on saving a building, a historic structure, that what it meant for some people, like myself, how important it was, and then what others didn't see their value in saving it.

I hope they see it now.

Those community members just rose up and said "you're not going to do this, please give us a chance to figure out what we can do to prevent this from happening."

In 2012, the public uprising, basically, the community protests, convinced the city council that we needed the time to have, to assess the feasibility of what we could do with the Carnegie that wasn't just raising the money, but it was how much we were going to need to raise, and what else we could do with the building.

We formed a non-profit group, which later became known as "The Friends of the Library.. Friends Of The Carnegie Library" group, but this group had a lot of heavy hitters on it, and that was led in large part by Lew Crenshaw and his wife, Kathy Marchand.

My role was mainly one of the "search for major donors."

It was a little fluid, we had people who started out with us as the Save The Carnegie Committee, some of those folks stayed with us through the whole project.

Other members left and new members came and joined us, but we couldn't have done it without that list of people who did everything from fundraising to grant writing, to proofreading, to winter teas, to working at the concessions, to showing up at Art In The Park.

We came up with all these different ways to get in and try to stop the city council on the 4th time they were going to vote on this thing, to give the citizens a chance to save the building.

so we started moving and grooving on things, got ahold of David Gurney, got ahold of the Historical Preservation Society, Michael Meuers, Allen Brew.

God bless these guys, they were the people that were already invested in trying to save these old old buildings.

We used an architect to make an estimate of what it was going to take.

We had them build a 3d digital model of the Carnegie, where we could zoom in and around, and we embedded these into videos that we made that were able to show what the possibilities were.

There are a lot of issues, because the building's on the National Register for one thing, so there are many requirements that you have to comply with - the standards for national registered buildings, and then there were the whole issues of accessibility and the proximity to the highway, and the damage, so lots of variables that we had to try to decide.

There wasn't a war, it was very contentious, and people had their reasons, you know, because they're stewards of the city, they're safeguarding, and the finances and everything that was at play, but our meetings, when we were formulated and had our meetings, we were meeting inside of City Hall and the mayor would come and sit with us, and, you know, people would see it was a very open and transparent thing, so once the decision had been made, that we had the opportunity to save the building, they did come alongside of us.

The committee went back to the council and recommended that it wouldn't take, I think we said about 1.2 million dollars, at the time, we were dreaming, to restore the building.

I'm speaking very generally about heritage preservation, got in front of the city hall, made our presentation, this is after multiple, multiple meetings.

We were there back in the days of Greg Negard, and some of the old guard, but we had that place packed, and we didn't know it was going to happen but we, man, we were trying.

We originally wanted to come up with a purpose, a place, that we wanted to have a reason for the building survive, so I had always thought it'd be a great place to have public access television - it's right there by the lake, you can turn the cameras on what's going on at the Art In The Park, and so we utilize that as part of a way to say "hey, we've got a reason for this building to stay alive."

Don't kill it, you know, just stop, please don't kill the building, and that was, that was working."

You're gonna have to do the architectural study, they had this long discussion and then the vote happened.

"Okay," and Do, Do..." The room just erupted in applause.

It turned out old Lew Crenshaw had managed to have the city council overturn a three-time over vote to tear down the old Carnegie Library.

Greg Negard was a council member at that time and it was his idea to say "how about if we would donate the first hundred thousand?"

which would be about what it would cost us to demolish it, "and give that as seed money for the community group."

But one of the major caveats was that we would have to move the building back, I think it was six feet or something like that.

I think originally it was 10 feet, and there was an audible groan in the room.

Which is the right thing, but, we knew it was going to take far longer and cost far more so that started us off on our journey.

How can we raise what was going to be millions of dollars to move, who's ever even talked about moving a building before?

Not just a house, it's not a trailer, this is a mammoth building, when all of us were like, "Oh man, how are we going to do it?"

It was Allen Brew who stepped forward, "here's a check for $10,000.00 dollars."

Being somewhat of a romantic at heart, I simply stood up and said "I'll cover the $10,000.00," and that's what kept it going, and at that point, we started to feel like "yeah, yeah, you know with community support in this and people buying in, maybe we could raise that amount of money, and hey, there's grants, we could start writing a bunch of grants.

We're a non-profit."

We could also maybe , possibly, keep this thing on the National Registry while still moving it.

like, but how?

It's all these different things, but we had this feeling the entire time that, go, go ahead, we'll go to the mats for this thing, because we've come this far.

So we did, we got very organized.

Thank you so much for watching.

Join us again for Part Two on Common Ground.

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Production funding of Common Ground was made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their 2nd century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people, November 4th, 2008 If you watch Common Ground online, consider becoming a member or making a donation at lptv.org.