School lunches get no respect. From the cafeteria workers who serve them to the “mystery meat” ingredients, they are a staple for comedians and the bread and butter for lobbyists.renaissance – a new birth; rebirth
Partly by design, partly by happenstance, over the past five decades the building at Berry and Clinton streets has been home to some of the city’s most venerable institutions.
Wolf & Dessauer department store. Waterfield Mortgage. Lincoln National Corp. and the Lincoln Museum. The Allen County Public Library’s main downtown anchor.
Call it fortuitousness, fate, cunning decision-making or political chicanery, the next rebirth of Renaissance Square could be for yet another ingrained institution: City Hall.
If not City Hall, the county commissioners have opened the door to the idea of placing a combined headquarters for city police and the county sheriff’s department in the building.
This isn’t the first time the building has sat empty with an uncertain future.
“It was a pigeon-infested, 4 acres of vacant space,” developer Joe Zehr recalls of the building’s state in the mid-1980s.
It had sat empty since 1979, when L.S. Ayres – which bought Wolf & Dessauer – left the building.
Another developer tried to create state-of-the-art office space there in a building to be called The Centrium, but those plans never reached fruition. Dick Waterfield, who had looked at leasing space there for Waterfield Mortgage, and Zehr ended up buying and developing the building themselves, dubbing it, appropriately, Renaissance Square.
To say the building was renovated is an understatement. The developers gutted it, Zehr recalls, leaving only the support beams and floors. Everything else was replaced before Waterfield moved in in 1988.
Lincoln National Corp. gradually leased more space in the building as well, until moving its headquarters there a few years later as the similarly growing Waterfield also needed more space and moved southwest.
Lincoln moved out in 2002, just as Allen County Public Library officials were seeking a temporary home for the downtown main location during a four-year construction project. Though short on parking, the building offered everything else the library needed.
This week, city and county officials will begin discussing whether the site meets their needs. If officials ultimately decide the site is appropriate for City Hall or city-county law enforcement agencies, the building will undergo yet another renaissance.
– Tracy Warner
