Step right up and buy an empty building ... any empty building

I’m obviously way too young to have ever darkened the door of Louie’s Candy Kitchen, where Jefferson kids from the ’20s to the ’50s hung out after school.

Despite being closed now for more than a half-century, it must have made quite the impression — if I drank a Green River every time I heard someone mention “Louie’s Candy Kitchen,” I would have fallen into a diabetic coma long before now.

I picture Louie’s Candy Kitchen looking exactly like an old Coca-Cola advertisement come to life, filled with neatly groomed, able-bodied young people clearly enjoying the good life.

My teeth get a couple of shades whiter just thinking about it.

Of course, I have my own cherished memories about growing up in Jefferson.

If I remember correctly, Mondays was the day Walt’s Hallmark put out the new comic books.

I can seemingly remember every single comic I ever bought there in the late ’80s, and whenever I come across one to this day while leafing through longboxes at comic book shops, I always think back, fondly, to Walt’s Hallmark.

And to the ladies who used to work at Walt’s, I’m sorry you routinely found copies of Playboy tucked away inside U.S. News & World Report, probably much to your annoyance.

I often wonder what local kids my son’s age — he’s 6 — will one day have to be nostalgic about.

I don’t think nostalgia is clouding my judgment when I say that the Square of today isn’t the Square many of us knew.

In fact, you know things have gotten pretty bad when there’s a two-day real-estate event planned for today (Thursday) and Saturday called “Empty Building Tour: A Tour of Possibility.”

We don’t have just one or two downtown buildings that need to be filled — we have enough to constitute a whole tour.

The event, an initiative of Jefferson Matters: Main Street, has been in the works for months.

And in that time, we’ve gained a new boarded-up window on the Square above what had been the Metro Club.

The building dates to 1885, if that gives you an idea of what we’re dealing with. I recently did a story on Tina Meseck, who chose to open a speciality and gluten-free bakery (Better For You Bakery) in a residential neighborhood rather than on the Square because the available buildings are reportedly in that bad of shape.

Meseck was up front about the fact that her first preference was to be located right on the historic Square.

Who wouldn’t want to be on the Square?

Unbelievably, the actual Square itself is still intact. As of Wednesday — 12:53 p.m. Wednesday, to be exact, by the clock on my MacBook — we’ve yet to lose a building.

But this week’s empty building tour feels like a scene out of a movie where the doctor climbs on top of the flat-lining patient and, out of frustration, punches him, hoping to shock him back to life.

I walk around the Square, past the empty storefronts and the cheaply done repairs, and find myself thinking the same thing.

“Wake up, dammit!”
The building tour runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., beginning and ending at the Jefferson Matters: Main Street office on East Lincoln Way.

We still have the Sierra Theatre, thank God. And Randy Bunkers isn’t allowed to retire until he passes his doughnut recipe onto me or a specific elected official that we choose by special ballot.

It’s great that we have Jefferson Matters: Main Street to advocate for the preservation of downtown, but the empty building tour is the first real burst of preservation activism the group has undertaken in its more than two-year history.

I understand the hesitation.

Even empty buildings have owners, and in a small town, it’s hard to call them out for neglect or ill-conceived (translation: ugly) improvements.

The city council wants to be Iowa nice as well, preferring to maintain an environment they feel welcomes prospective business owners.

The city believes it can do on its own what a Community Development Block Grant, with federal dollars, would do to revitalize downtown.

Hear that? It’s the sound of masonry crumbling as we play nice.

Maybe it’s time to swallow our pride and admit we need help — communities smaller than ours have successfully used CDBG money to bring their historic commercial districts back from the brink.

We owe it to ourselves, our current business owners, our  kids and their kids.

Louie’s Candy Kitchen, if you’re wondering, was located on North Wilson Avenue, in one half of where the Hy-Vee Drugstore was most recently located.

That one building was, at one time, two separate buildings.

But for the first time in generations, it’s now empty, too.