East Park Place Memories: Oral history project begins

MASON CITY — An oral history project under way in the East Park Place neighborhood will provide a wealth of information about the neighborhood that was severely impacted by the 2008 flood.

When all of the 41 properties purchased in a buy-out have been moved or demolished, “the majority of the neighborhood will be lost,” City Planner Tricia Sandahl said.

Located north of East Park and west of the Mason City Aquatic Center, East Park Place is bounded by North Carolina Avenue, Ninth Street Northeast, the Mason City Family Aquatic Center and the Winnebago River.

“It’s a big historic district,” Sandahl said. “It’s an interesting neighborhood and it’s a unique neighborhood. It has a mix of ethnic backgrounds, a mix of income levels, a mix of professions and an architecturally diverse mix of housing.”

Many of the residents have lived there for years.

Houses date from 1910 to the 1950s.

Many homes in the East Park Place neighborhood will soon be demolished.

A majority of the houses in East Park Place have not undergone significant exterior modification, Sandahl said.

Although some of the houses were purchased with funding from the Federal Emergency Management Authority, most homes in this neighborhood were purchased with funding from a state Community Development Block Grant, Sandahl said.

The architectural narrative project is funded through the CDBG from the Iowa Department of Economic Development. Funding was automatically available to the city for the 18 historic homes included in the buyout because when a historic home is lost, the city must do something to mitigate the loss, Sandahl said.

“CDBG dollars require you to allocate a certain dollar amount per property to mitigate the loss of that historic property.”

But city officials wanted to take it farther.

“We wanted to do something that would be more useful to the community,” Sandahl said. “We didn’t want to limit the oral history only to those houses acquired with CDBG funds.”
So the city applied for and received a $93,000 planning grant available through the CDBG program.

AKAY Consulting of Minneapolis is working with the city to preserve the neighborhood’s community history through an architectural narrative and oral interviews with current residents, former residents and others who know the neighborhood well.

The completion of the historical record is a major piece in what remains of the buyout process, said Alexa McDowell, architectural historian and owner of AKAY Consulting.

“I have done many neighborhood surveys,” she said, “but typically those are architectural surveys only. This project is unique in that its central component is the gathering of neighborhood history and memories through oral histories.”

The project involves a survey of the neighborhood, including the landscape, the houses and the garages. This includes photographing the interior of the houses and making floor plans.
At a public workshop June 22, residents learned more about the project, signed up for interviews and shared photos.

The interviews will continue in August, September and October. McDowell hopes to interview 40 or 50 people.

“The interviews have been wonderful,” she said. “We’ve talked to parents and their kids who are now in their 50s. It is very obvious from all the people we’ve talked to that it’s a very special neighborhood.”

Residents cite the location of the neighborhood as making it special to them.
“The people who grew up in the neighborhood talk about the freedom they had, the proximity to the river and East Park, the proximity to downtown, safety, kind neighbors, having access to the outdoors. But above all there were the trees. It was simply a beautiful place that was

affordable. Nature and the setting were important as to why they chose it and why they stayed.”
The survey itself began in May, beginning with houses scheduled to be moved or demolished and continuing with residents whose homes were not involved in the flooding.
“In June, we were really focused on the interviews,” McDowell said. “We got photographs of houses, floor plans and names of other people to talk to.”
In July, they were finishing the architectural component of the project, including gathering information on the various architects and contractors, design trends, materials used and architectural styles.

The survey is to be completed by the end of the summer. Once the survey is finished, the city can proceed with removing the remaining buyout houses.
The final product will be an edited DVD containing video interviews, narrative text that summarizes the project, still historical photographs and other important documents that tell the story of the neighborhood.

Copies of the DVD will be distributed to the city, the Lee P. Loomis Archives at the Mason City Public Library and the State Historical Society, McDowell said.
The project deadline is October 2014.

KRISTIN BUEHNER
kristin.buehner@globegazette.com