The expansive, picturesque buildings along Historic Fourth Street just keep finding new lives.
Since the 1990s, a big push has seen the 110-year-old buildings filling up after substantial renovations. In that group is the Evans Block, which has seen a $1.5 million restoration overseen by local contractor Bart Connelly. He is currently negotiating with multiple entities to fill the Evans Block spaces and Connelly hopes to have the entire building filled by the end of 2005.
Evans Block, located at the southwest corner of Fourth and Iowa streets, is among the few impressive blocks located along Historic Fourth Street. The eastern-most of the Historic Fourth blocks, Evans Block joins Boston, Plymouth and Krummann Blocks in being built in the late 1800s in Richardson Romanesque-style architecture.
Connelly is an owner of the Dakota Dunes-based construction firm of Connelly, Tiehen and Sons Inc. He has admired the building for years and is pleased to have a hand in its restoration, which is concluded on the main floor, although work remains on the upper three floors.
People are also reading…
"We have gone as far as we can without a tenant," he said of the bottom floor. Finishing interior work will be done to the specifications of the tenants who sign leases. "We just need to lease it, then it will be done," he said.
Connelly said "this is the exciting time of the job, when it is ready and looks like an old building with all the new stuff. It will look just like the building did in 1890."
He said plans for architects were drawn up with the help of photos of how the building looked 110 years ago. "I am just pumped on how the windows turned out, with all the natural light," Connelly said.
Plans call for developing the 16,000 square feet of space for a mix of uses - restaurants, retail shops, offices and possibly apartments. The first floor, with 19-foot-high ceilings, is a likely site for a restaurant. The upper floors, all with 4,000 square feet, will likely be commercial sites, "but we haven't ruled out residential," Connelly said.
A structure severely in disrepair when he first saw it, Connelly has painstakingly restored the building, including an open staircase that runs from the second to fourth floor. A specialty stone restoration firm from Kansas improved the north and east stone outside walls, which are staggered in block patterns. The only new construction is a large tower on the south/back side of the building. But that portion turned up an old find at the beginning of February - a livery stable which Connelly figures is about a century old.
The four-story commercial building is named for Fred T. Evans, a leading Sioux City entrepreneur and banker of the time. Evans built the structure to house the newly-formed Northwestern National Bank. Evans Block was designed by Charles P. Brown, whose designs reflected the influence of H.H. Richardson, and Brown was one of the most prominent Midwest architects in the era.
In the time after Evans bank was closed in 1895, the structure housed a hotel, saloon, factory and various stores. The El Foresteros bikers used Evans Block as clubhouse in 1985 and the city later red-tagged it.
Bret Hayworth can be reached at 293-4203 or brethayworth@siouxcityjournal.com
