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 second of 2 episodes, we conclude Bemidji's story of their restoration and preservation of Bemidji's Carnegie Library.

There were great many people involved in the work we did.

As we went along, some people would volunteer at the Annual Tea that the group put on, and it was like a gala, where you'd have little cups of tea and was awesome, though.

People just had an excuse to get out and maybe "gussie up" a little bit, but also bring your pocketbook, because we're talking about raising millions of dollars.

Some people couldn't give money, but there were over 6000 hours of volunteer time given.

We had fundraisers at Art In The Park, people donated.

Other people took a fairly strong leadership role in terms of doing the paperwork, doing all the contacting and so on.

My role was mainly a major donor fundraising.

From the very beginning, we threw our net wide, not just in Bemidji.

In fact, two of our major donors came from other states, and they would sit with these people, talk at length, bring them all the information, have multiple meetings with these people, and these people would open their checkbooks and write out these mammoth checks, hundreds of thousands of dollars people were donating to this effort to save a building!

We started a fund at Northwest Minnesota Foundation, that was a way for us to provide a donation receipt that people could get a tax deduction on, and that was a big step.

I'm the old-fashioned guy, I mean, I remember when the March Of Dimes was actually dimes, and we'd go collecting dimes.

I mean, so I said, "Listen, let's get some buttons and sell some buttons."

Alan Brew sold, I don't know how many thousands of buttons, and he never quit either.

I went to major public events, I went to cooperating restaurants and pubs, and sold a lot of buttons over about 2 summers.

We had people representing the business community, we had particularly good support from the city manager, Kay Murphy.

Kay was vital to the success of our project, especially in the early years.

Being part of the city administration, and part of our team, she would help us with our communications to the city, to coach it in a way that they could not only be informed, but understand our intent and what we were doing.

Those people that were donating $5 or $10 dollars are just as important as the people that were donating hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I had people give me $2.00, when I didn't think they had 2 dollars.

that was a wonderful thing.

The people that gave those few dollars here and there, they're unrecognized, but I want to recognize those folks too.

We may not have their names, but their dollars that bought the buttons, or whatever we did, shirts , we've made t-shirts, whatever little fundraiser we may have done.

It was important to us that those people are remembered.

One of our very special donors is Andy and Marilyn Kuhn, that did a donation in memory of their grandson, who was 16 years old.

he loved our Bemidji area, they are summer residents.

They gave a significant donation to this project.

It's a sad story, but I think that for this family, it means so much that their grandson, their son, their nephew, could have a place of honor along Lake Bemidji, the lake that he loved to fish in.

It just brings it, for them, to a really nice place.

The total of the three major grants we got from the state was over $400,000.00, and then we had 5 major benefactors who gave us a total of 1.2 million dollars, which has made all the difference.

one of the things about moving the building is, as a national registered building, you have to get the blessing of the National Park Service, and in order to do that, you have to have a compelling reason, and you have to have a lot of data.

What we had to do was commission the archaeological survey of the site, to evaluate the.. what they call the "area of impact", to make sure there was no reason, since this is a site of great historical significance, that moving the building wasn't going to cause any damage.

There was the very likely possibility that there was Native American, a resting place, behind the Carnegie towards the lake.

We had to have a group come in, and scan down into the ground to find out if we were going to be moving the building back, would we be disturbing, disturbing these remains.

There was a scattering of pot shards found, but that area is an upland, and all the stuff down slope was, at various times, part of the lake, or a marsh .

This was the first really dry land, and anywhere in this vicinity of the Mississippi River and the lakes along it, high land was occupied off and on forever.

We found out that we could, that it would be possible, to move this back without disturbing anything.

The library, if you see it now driving down 5th Street, was exactly as it was..straight ahead on 5th Street, although there was much more of a boulevard between there and Bemidji Avenue, but that relationship, that particular physical relationship, had to be maintained in order to us for us to stay on the National Register with that building.

Once we had that, then we had to put together the story, and we worked well and so gratefully, with the State Historic Preservation office people to write our application and then they sponsored it with the National Park Service and they've approved it.

Then, their approval goes to the National Park Service and we got a remarkably fast response back from them, in about 8 months, which is about three times faster than it ever happens.

Elapsed time was about 2 years from starting our, the project part of moving the building, and getting the response back from the Park Service.

The other thing is, we had to have that park service approval in order to ask for any grant money for any other funding.

You have to take it one step after another, and that's what we ended up doing.

Then we started the cycle of serious grant writing, and there were some ups and downs in there, but we got our first Legacy Grant approved for the architectural design and development work, and that was a great success.

We watched the meter on the front of the building and you'd keep driving by and you'd look at it and think, "I can't believe it's going to work, is it working?"

and you'd start feeling more and more like, this is going to happen.

By then, the Friends of the Carnegie had raised enough money to pay for the additional design work, and we'd had some other significant donations from the community and some of our benefactors, so we already could see that we were going to make it it was just going to take time and we just had to keep at it.

We went to the architectural design part of the project with the assumption that we're going to be moving the building back.

Once we got that done, we turned around and reapplied for more grant money from the state for the Legacy grant to actually do the restoration and the systems work, the HVAC and the stuff.

The Legacy grants won't pay for anything like the new addition or for moving the building, because that's not part of their charter, but they will pay for accessibility and they will pay for the restoration.

So we applied for $345,000 worth of Legacy grant, and we got it!

It's one of the 3 largest grants they have EVER given, so we're pretty proud of that, too.

That has, that sort of tipped the balance to the city to give us the go ahead.

By the time we'd raised about 1.7 million, we convinced the city it was time to put the project out for bids, because we had to know how much is it really going to cost, and at that point, we got our most heartbreaking news of all.

When the bids came back, it was 2.2 million or 2.3 million.

It was FAR more than we expected, because part of the moving the building was so expensive.

That was when everybody was heartbroken, and we had to retrench, and we had to convince the city, We had to come up with some good alternatives, one of them was just leave it in place, and not do the addition, and just restore it temporarily and do the rest of the work sometime deep in the future.

Another option was to pick the building up and spend all of our money just to move it to the rail corridor, because we could park it there.

We're moving the building, it falls off the National Register, but we could put it there as part of the project the city wanted to do for the rail corridor work and then eventually restore it, or we put our ducks in a row.

We said "here's what it's going to take, if we don't move the building, we can accomplish it."

We did Plan B, if you will, and that was to add an elevator tower on the northeast corner that provided more safe access than on the street side, AND access for ADA accessibility, and all of those things were a really big win.

We can do the accessible entrance, we can do all the other work we need to do, but we just can't move the building, and I'm still heartbroken about that, but we saved the building.

They roped the area off, they started getting ready to do this real work for the building.

It was like you felt this presence of of not just the people in the community at that time, but I felt the presence of Dick Rose.

I felt the presence of all the people that had traveled through there when the streets were dirt, everything that it took to get to this point, embodied in this old building that had a lot of life left in it, and was about to be torn down and the community members said "Yep, stop, we're going to keep this one."

Because the heart of the community in Bemidji, and this is true in a lot of places, you can raise two and a half million dollars with a heart that strong.

Our architects were with us, Smith Nolting was the firm, and we had Denise Koenigsberg, who was our key lead architect, she's fabulous.

Denise had resources in the cities with a firm of special historic preservation architects, a gentleman named Alex Hecker who came and helped us through a lot of the grant writing app and design part of the thing, so the combination of Alex and Denise was just dynamite.

When we did the original design, we knew that the lower level was never going to be restored back to the original.

We really wanted to have tenants in the basement because that would help have a future for the building, and it would have people in here, keeping the heat on and using it, which is what we needed.

They started pressure washing the outside of the building, they did the roof, and these parts began to look like they must have back when that thing was first built.

It was, it was newer than new, it was reborn new.

The challenges of this project include- well, basically it has everything in it, there's restoration, historic restoration, renovation, and new construction.

There's a little bit of everything in this project, so it's not very big, it's not a very large project, it has just a little bit of everything in it.

The windows for one, a lot of them had been boarded up, the transoms boarded up at the top, some of the windows had been boarded up on the interior, and were missing all of the historic wood trim.

There was aluminum storm windows that had been added on the outside in the 70s, maybe.

Part of the project was to restore Some of the old wood that had to be demolished in the lower level was used to re-mill trim for the windows upstairs.

we wanted the historic interior to look 100 years old, but to be in good condition.

So the woodwork was not refinished, but restored.

It was cleaned, patched where it needed to be, and touched up where it needed to be, but it still looks a little patchy in some ways, in the finish, because it is 100 years old.

The plaster, a lot of it was loose and coming off of the walls and the ceiling.

The plaster was secured in place and then covered over with some thin gypsum board panels.

The plaster is still under that layer for historic observation in the future.

A lot of people wondered why did we keep the historic radiators in the upper level, they're no longer functional, the piping below is removed, but we keep them because they are original .

They're historic, people will bring their grandchildren here and they're going to say, you know, "what is that?"

Well, historically, you can say "that's how we used to heat the building."

Little things like that seem irrelevant today, but they tell the story, the historic story of the building.

The lower level, portions of it were restored, but the majority of the lower level is modern; modern day restrooms, mechanical space and whatnot, so the lower level is mostly modern.

Then we have the brand new addition, which of course, is modern, but the design of it was to be compatible with the historic.

You don't want to be mistaken as historic, so it looks different, compatible, but modern.

To be compatible, you might use some of the same materials but use them a little differently.

The brickwork matches fairly closely to the original brickwork, but the stone down below, (in an original historic building we call it a pillow stone, it's kind of a rock-based stone) but in the new addition it's smooth face, and at a different elevation.

We worked with the Minnesota State Historical Society on the design of the new addition.

We had the design pretty much all buttoned up at one point, but then the state had a slight change in staffing our personnel, but the state decided that we needed to lower the roof of the addition, they didn't want it to match the roof line of the original building, so we did some redesign, lowered the roof line of the new addition, had to move some duct work design around.

Well the decision was, in order to keep it on the National Registry of Historic Places, they couldn't fix anything, they couldn't disturb the structure, so they decided that they were going to build an entryway on the side of the building that was lightly fixed to the building, didn't disturb the structure, so that it's actually a freestanding thing but it looks like it's part of the building.

You'll see how the addition tucks back, and there's just a strip of modern windows that separate the new from the historic, so they're just barely touching, they're not, it's not built into the historic.

One of the difficult things in a project for a historic restoration, is all the unknowns that come up, when you're uncovering walls and looking at floors and what not, unforeseen conditions are uncovered and you have to deal with that.

For instance, the plaster that's falling off of the walls or coming loose from the ceiling, and having to re-secure that.

Finding that some of the brick is so loose that it really cannot stay in place.

For instance, the chimneys, the chimneys on the building were so deteriorated, they had to be dismantled and removed, and then reconstructed.

When a visitor comes to the Carnegie; first of all, they're just going to be awed by the space, the overall feeling of the space, and then they'll start to notice things, like the fireplace.

The fireplace was covered over with paint and we had that paint removed and now it's the original "iron spot brick" is exposed, so details like that.

The wood work, the scroll work on the piers in the center of the main space.

Now a usable, accessible building with beautiful restrooms in the lower level for the tenants and the renters, and the other little programs we're going to see roll out in this building.

I see all the beautiful woodwork and the floors and every little detail that was planned to make it as authentic as possible, historically restored.

The fireplace is beautiful, there's just so many little details, it's just, it's just a lot to take in, just a lot.

One of the things that I am the most proud about is that we never quit.

We had good points, high points, but there were an awful lot of low points.

Barriers came up, problems arose, and we just didn't let that stop us.

We were creative, we stayed positive, the teamwork, we all helped each other get through it.

We never said die.

We just kept going because we cared about this project and we wanted to see it through and we succeeded.

A lot of love, hard work, and money, and it was just an opportunity to do something right after we had all seen what happened with the old high school, you know.

It was a chance for the community to rally back together, instead of just being scattered to the wind and disbanded, in the guise of "Well, we'll tear it down and build a new one."

It was said once that a town without old buildings is like an old man without any memories.

It will always be, as long as it's standing, a symbol of the City of Bemidji and of its citizens.

I think that's part of preserving our history, is just knowing what is there, what was there, and how do we continue to respect and honor that past culture.

Bemidji as a community is 120 years old, maybe.

It's not the east coast, it's not Europe, it's a small lumber town that has grown into a proud regional community, but we don't have a long history.

What we have is community civic belief in ourselves, that our grandparents had, that we have, that we want to leave for our children and for future generations.

There aren't many physical ways to show that, there aren't many old buildings.

Studies and research says that if a city has preserved its historic downtown, then tourists who come to the city stay longer, and spend more money, therefore.

They also, on top of it, get more tourists, people who are interested in the history of a region or the kind of people who came here.

Where did they come from and what kind of people were they, or maybe they had family ties they want to come and research.

The experience of shopping, going to a restaurant, being on the street, enjoying our beautiful downtown with its artwork and its nice period buildings, this kind of center of our community, really enriches everyone's life, in a way that driving to a big box store and shopping will never do.

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."

When they knew that it was going to be torn down, community members, they went out and they had signs, "Save The Carnegie Library."

There were those people, that, right away when they knew it was going to get torn down, having that old high school still being processed in their heart, and wait a minute, now you're gonna, now you're gonna, this one too?

People came out and those people need to be thanked, too, for raising awareness.

Keeping the light on, keeping the doors open, and keeping the building standing, was everything to us, it was the ultimate mission at the time.

Anything that's worth doing can be painful and because we loved it so much, though, I couldn't have been talked down off that cliff if I didn't care.

It's not just this thing that we're preserving, it's an experience.

People live, work, and experience architecture.

It wasn't built for government bureaucracy, it wasn't built for a church and religion, and it WAS built for education.

I think that's pretty significant, to show, again, the enlightenment of this group of people and their intent on building a community and prospering.

We ought to be able to hold and cherish that symbol.

There are places like the Carnegie that are visible manifestations of the things that our parents and grandparents believed in for this community.

Buildings like the Carnegie attract visitors, they attract community members, this Carnegie is going to enhance our historic downtown and all the other good things we have in our historic town.

There's that part of it, but there's also that lovely intangible of, of what our parents and grandparents intended, and what now we can pass on.

For 7 years, one thing that kept me going was people stepping up and saying, we believe in your project.

Walking in the mornings on the trail, somebody on a bicycle would stop and they'd say, "I saw you with this.. something.. in the city council meeting, and you're the guy, and you two, you two are working to save the Carnegie, and I just want to tell you I really support your project."

You have a stronger family when you can hear from grandma and grandpa, when they can, you can, sit on the stoop with grandma and grandpa, or at the Carnegie and hear a little bit about the past, and she does that, she echoes the past and she exists in the future, and how beautiful is that.

Thank you for watching.

Join us again for the next episode of 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 4, 2008.

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