Old Town Cape tries to be downtown catalyst

A new section of Fountain Street that hopefully will divert traffic from the new Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge to downtown Cape Girardeau, new design guidelines for improving facades for historic downtown buildings, three new districts and new things to do, such as the music festival Tunes at Twilight, are among the accomplishments claimed by Old Town Cape in 2003.

The downtown revitalization organization has been the catalyst for several projects that are expected to have a long-lasting positive effect on Cape Girardeau's downtown area.

And Old Town Cape's executive director, Catherine Dunlap, said the group has plenty of plans in the works, including increasing the number of educational workshops for businesses, performing a demographic analysis of the six downtown districts, creating new marketing brochures and developing and maintaining an inventory of available buildings within the Old Town Cape area.

But first Dunlap pointed to accomplishments she feels have been important to Old Town Cape that were made in the last year or so.

Old Town Cape, for example, set up guidelines in 2003 for historic properties with help from Southeast Missouri State University's Historic Preservation Program. The voluntary design guidelines were geared toward property owners considering improvements to their properties.

It also revamped its Web site to expand the resource for prospective business owners on how to start a business in the district.

Old Town Cape suggested and helped design -- along with the university and the city -- the Fountain Street extension near the new bridge. Old Town Cape hosted three workshops: One for area Realtors on what the district has to offer; one for the city's Inspections Services Division on how to work with historic property owners; and one in which national consultant Rick Segal talked to businesses about improving customer service.

Professor is president

Dr. Steven Hoffman, associate professor of history and the coordinator of the Historic Preservation Program at Southeast, is president of Old Town Cape.

"It's one of the truisms of Main Street that we make incremental progress, we make incremental steps," he said. "We took a number of those."

Hoffman, who was on the design committee, said he was personally gratified to bring the design guidelines for historic buildings to fruition.

But he thinks the group's biggest accomplishment was coming up with the idea for the Fountain Street Extension. Old Town Cape suggested that the first entrance from the new bridge should be from a new street that eventually will run north from Highway 74 across Morgan Oak and end at William Street. The first phase was finished by the time the bridge opened.

Hoffman said Old Town Cape sold the university, the city and downtown merchants on its design. "Had it not been for us, the exit would have been somewhere else and just been another street. I'm very proud of that."

Dunlap also points to the fact that Old Town Cape's board members have raised more than $12,000 from businesses and property owners in the district and have donated 5,700 volunteer hours since November 2000.

Old Town Cape also sponsored events, sometimes along with other groups, including the Spring Arts Festival, Tunes at Twilight and Libertyfest.

In 2004, volunteers have set the preliminary groundwork to put bronze signs on historically significant buildings, such as the N'Orleans Restaurant and Meyer Supply.

Dunlap acknowledged that the group often works with other groups. While that may have the appearance of doing little on its own, Dunlap said that isn't so.

"That's the nature of the beast," she said. "The Main Street concept is that we work on getting the ball rolling. We work with people to get things done. We're kind of a catalyst for projects."

smoyers@semissourian.com

335-6611