Mitigation projects are often undertaken as a means of creating some balance to a situation when a historic is lost. Such projects can take many forms. The following mitigation projects are two examples in which brochures were created to document the lost resource and to provide an accessible history of the resource and its historic context.
Avenue A Trolley Barn and Office – Pottawattamie County – Council Bluffs, Iowa
The Omaha and Council Bluffs Bridge and Railway Company’s Trolley Barn and Office at 2800 Avenue A was one of Council Bluffs’ last remaining facilities associated with the area’s street railway system that, for some eighty years, had been central to the community’s growth and development. Built in 1904, the Avenue A facility provided shelter and repair space for the cars of the trolley system and office space for its employees. After the street railway ended service in Council Bluffs in 1948, the buildings were closed.
Related businesses, including a bus barn and a truck repair company, used the facility until the early years of the twenty-first century. But, like many large-scale facilities constructed for a very specific function, new uses were difficult to find.
When the Avenue A Trolley Barn and Office became vacant in 2003 and a new use could not be identified, the facility was slated for demolition, which was completed in late fall of 2006. Today a community park has been developed on the land formerly occupied by the Avenue A buildings, with the contributions made by the street railway system in the history of Council Bluffs commemorated at the site.
The Avenue A Trolley Barn and Office brochure was part of a Memorandum of Agreement arranged to mitigate the loss of this historic resource.
Download Avenue A Trolley Barn Brochure in PDF
Ideal Neighborhood – Webster County – Fort Dodge, Iowa
From the early days of settlement, pioneers across the country located homes, places of worship and schools in close proximity to the downtown, wherethey shopped and worked. This very practical approach to community planning created an ideal neighborhood – a setting where the basic components of life were close at hand. In a time long before the automobile, when travel was on horseback, by carriage or on foot, such development simply made sense.
As time passed, towns grew into cities with trolley lines and the automobile easing access between downtown and the far reaches of an expanding city. As a result, a neighborhood ideally balanced with the intersection of home, work, worship, and learning close at hand, became less necessary and so, less typical.
The Ideal Neighborhood brochure was part of a Memorandum of Agreement arranged to mitigate the loss of two historic resources formerly located in this Fort Dodge neighborhood.
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