Two Buildings Get Rehab, One Torn Down in Downtown Marion

Again, it's not exactly tourism, but two projects on North Market Street in Marion are changing the views in the historic downtown shopping district.

Hurst-Roche Engineers, Inc. bought both the Duty and Heyde buildings in the 200 block of North Market Street last year and shortly thereafter began renovations.

They've now moved their Marion operations into the Duty Building on the corner. The Marion location is one of six in Illinois and Missouri.

The south wall includes Marion's third exterior mural downtown. This time showing three figures that could be workers for the firm.

The figures are similar to the scenes in Greenville, Illinois.

The building has recently housed furniture stores in the last couple of decades, but before that it was home to a series of pharmacies since the beginning of the 20th Century.

Delos L. Duty, former owner who gave his name to the building when he added the second floor nearly a century ago, started out as a pharmacist there in the early 1900s. He became an attorney in the early 1910s and Williamson County's state's attorney in the turbulent 20s.

He began a high profile murder trial on the first day of his term in 1920, which resulted in a death penalty against Settimi DeSantis, which will be the subject of a new book out later this year by this author tentatively titled, "DeSantis the Doomed and the Curse of the Black Hand."

Duty went on to prosecute union miners following the Herrin Massacre and become a thorn in the side of the Ku Klux Klan during the Klan War of the mid 1920s.

Down the street on the other side in the 300 block, Meridith Ashe, owner of M Clothing & Accessories in the renovated Williams Hotel building next to Bennie's Italian Foods has torn down the old Book Exchange building at 301 N. Market on the corner, but is planning to keep the building in between at 303 and 305 N. Market St.

At one point she had considered plans for a bed and breakfast on the second floor of the Williams Hotel above her clothing store, but ended up with apartments instead.

As to her future plans for the remaining building and the corner lot, nothing is set in stone.

"Right now, I'm not sure, since I just finished renovations [on the Williams Hotel]," Ashe said this afternoon.

As to the corner lot, "for right now, we're just clearing it off and planning."

She's wanting to keep the middle building and eventually renovate it.

UPDATE — Oct 6, 2011

For more on Ashe's business, check out this feature on her from earlier this summer in the Southern Illinoisan.

Lawmakers Consider Other Tourism Bills

The IDEA bill for Marion isn't the only piece of legislation winding its way through the General Assembly today that will affect tourism in Southern Illinois.

Lawmakers in the House Executive Committee are reviewing a proposal tonight to revamp the Chicago trade show business at McCormick Place.

The dirty little secret downstate is that it's Chicago tourism dollars that fund our state's tourism program. When they hurting, the rest of us get to feel the pain.

I'm not sure what the bill number will be yet, but expect it to pass. Chicago's about to lose some long-time trade shows if they don't make changes.

While the focus this week has been on the IDEA bill there are other pieces of legislation that would have greatly benefited tourism that are stuck for now in the Rules Committees of either the House or Senate.

Senate Bill 2559 would have created the Historic Preservation Tax Credit Act. This would have offered a powerful tool that's been used with great success in Missouri. It would have provided an income tax credit equal to the amount of 25 percent of qualified expenditures for restoration and preservation of qualified historic structures. It passed the Senate 48-6 but has been stuck in Rules since April 23. HB 4823 is the House version of the bill. It too is stuck in Rules.

Senate Bill 3458 would have created the Tourism Task Force Act to figure out what direction the state should take in its tourism efforts. According to insiders, this really hasn't been done since serious efforts began in the early 1970s. State Sen. Bill Brady who's running for governor sponsored this bill last year which explains why it's not going anywhere in the Democratic-controlled House.

HB 2556 would allow conservancy districts to create TIF districts, as well as counties to create TIF districts for tourism-related projects located outside municipalities. Bradley introduced this last year on behalf of Rend Lake Conservancy District in an effort to attract developers to their land near Exit 77 on Interstate 57. This bill ended up in Rules last year and has never left.