Telling Iowa's Stories: Our Recent Dubuque Features

♪♪

Perched on Schmitt Island in the Mississippi River,

Catfish Charlie's is a great stop for travelers

to soak up the views and take a break for a bite to eat.

How are we doing here? I'll get those.

Well, the people I get to meet

is probably the best part of the day.

Kohlsdorf: Opened in 2005,

Catfish Charlie's is the brainchild

of Charlie Cretsinger and his wife.

Well, enjoy the rest of your day, okay?

The couple wanted to open a restaurant in Dubuque

with a menu matching its idyllic location.

Cretsinger: We decided

there was maybe a hole for a seafood restaurant,

but I didn't want a regular seafood restaurant.

I like local fishes, so we have everything from catfish,

obviously, catfish for Catfish Charlie's,

catfish, walleye, bluegills.

And then we do have the shrimp and salmon and things like that.

Our menu is very, very wide.

We are located right on the Mississippi River.

So, you can sit here, look out at the river.

[ Printer humming ]

[ Sizzling ]

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Kohlsdorf: Catfish Charlie's has been open

for 19 seasons. For its menu,

the operation harvests 9,000 to 15,000 pounds of fish

annually from the Mississippi River.

Cretsinger: Yeah, you build a restaurant,

and as that restaurant grows,

you want to be unique in certain fashions.

So, why not take fish directly out of the river.

We're river to table.

Kohlsdorf: The restaurant also prides itself

on introducing travelers to other local businesses.

Cretsinger: We have a general store inside, which we do

all local products -- local jams,

local candies, local wines, local whiskeys.

Kohlsdorf: Catfish Charlie's has expanded

in many different directions since its inception.

Cretsinger: How are we doing today?

Kohlsdorf: Those traveling on the Great River Road

can take a break from driving and cruise

on the great river itself.

Hey, buddy, are you going to drive the boat today?

Cretsinger: The American Lady --

it's got a capacity of 135 people.

We do a lunch cruise. We do a happy-hour cruise.

We do a sunset-dinner cruise.

They range anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours long.

Kohlsdorf: Cretsinger celebrates cuisine found anywhere

along the Mississippi River.

On weekends, visitors may find unique menu items

being smoked on the patio for special occasions.

Cretsinger: Funny to see people's reactions

to when they walk out on the deck

and there's a whole alligator on a hog roaster cooking.

Dubuque has a lot to offer here.

So, when you come to Dubuque, we have the River Museum,

we have the Mines of Spain, we have the tour boats.

We don't care whether you're eating, drinking,

talking, having a good time.

All I want you to do is be here and enjoy it.

[ Laughs ]

Well, enjoy. Thanks for coming in.

Appreciate it.

♪♪

I've had a lot of people say, you know, I've

never seen those windows.

♪♪

I didn't even know they were there.

Nobody in town knows that it exists.

♪♪

[Nebbe] In 1893, parishioners of St. Luke's

congregation commissioned Louis Comfort Tiffany, the

son of the famed jewelry maker, to make stained

glass windows for their newly built church.

This was after seeing his work displayed at the

Chicago World's Fair.

♪♪

[Cheryl Vahl] There are 110 windows.

It's the 5th largest collection in the country.

[Mary Armstrong] Dubuque has a lot of art and the

windows I think are just part of that.

They show that this has been established for a

long time.

♪♪

[Mary Armstrong] Anybody that say they

don't know about it, I say well just come, I'll show

you around.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Welcome to St. Luke's.

Thank you.

So, where is everybody from?

Missouri and Illinois.

In 1896, there were 5 windows in place.

Those are --

Pay attention to the faces,

they're always beautiful, very often expressive.

Anyone can walk in off the street and say, whoa,

those are beautiful.

But when you know something about how they

are done and what went into it, you see them on a

deeper level.

♪♪

[Nebbe] While Tiffany used many new and

different techniques to make his stained glass

stand out, Favrile glass was his most well-known.

With help from a chemist, he used high temperatures

to infuse the colors into the glass while creating

various textures and densities.

He later patented the process.

♪♪

[Cheryl Vahl] They're not made like that

anymore and we've learned a lot about how they are

made.

The window production was done in a studio where

Tiffany only hired single women for their dexterity

and because they wouldn't be bothered by the demands

of children and home life.

[Nebbe] The women who worked in Tiffany's studio

had different titles depending on their jobs.

There were the cartoonists who transposed the

drawings from the small scale to a much larger

grid on a glass easel.

There were pickers, women who picked out the glass

to be used in each window.

And there were cutters, women who snipped the

glass and attached it to the easel using beeswax.

Tiffany would then come and either approve the

women's work or shatter it with his cane.

♪♪

[Cheryl Vahl] We're doing what we can to

preserve the art.

So many of his creations have been destroyed or

lost and you see them on Antiques Roadshow that

they have been purchased at garage sales and nobody

knows what they are.

[Nebbe] After over 100 years, the windows were

badly in need of repair.

The lead was getting soft, causing the windows to

sag.

Years of using coal to heat the church had

obscured their vibrant colors.

♪♪

[Cheryl Vahl] It was in about the 1980s

they started fundraising for the restoration.

♪♪

[Cheryl Vahl] I remember the angel and the

lilies window, her hands were black as were her

feet.

And after she was cleaned you could see her fingers

and her toes.

♪♪

[Cheryl Vahl] All the restoration is funded

by people who come and see the windows and make

contributions.

♪♪

[Cheryl Vahl] With the restoration, people

have become more aware of how unique they are and

they have become more of a valued treasure.

♪♪

[Mary Armstrong] People come because this

is a large collection and they are large windows.

They just come to see what Tiffany is really like.

♪♪

[Mary Armstrong] They don't have to go to a

big city or they don't have to go to a museum,

they can just come here to Dubuque and here they are

just waiting to be seen.

I've had several people who say they don't know

how we can even listen to a sermon with these

windows.

And a lot of people just like to sit and just look

at them.

♪♪

[Cheryl Vahl] Cherishing what you have

and taking care of that piece of history is

important.

♪♪

Hagerty: Of course, Dubuque is the oldest city

in the state of Iowa,

and it developed beginning in the early 1830s.

Settlers came to the Dubuque area

mostly for the lead mining.

And so because of its advantageous location

on the river and with the surrounding bluffs,

there was a lot of, you know, wood

that could be be harvested for lumber, for fuel,

for all sorts of purposes for a growing settlement.

And so Dubuque became a center for the lumber industry.

The history of the Millwork District is really dominated

by two large millworking companies.

They both kind of established themselves around the same time.

But the first one that established themselves

we call the Caradco Company.

It was Carr, Ryder, Adams & Company.

They developed the construction,

the fabrication of wood doors,

wood windows sashes, trim moldings,

things like that for building construction materials.

Another millworking company,

which we now know as Farley & Loetscher,

was established by Christian Loetscher,

who was an immigrant from Switzerland

who came to Dubuque in the 1870s.

But both of these, both Caradco and Farley & Loetscher,

grew to be -- they both kind of considered themselves

the largest millworking company in the United States.

Both of them made that claim.

And between those two companies, Dubuque was probably

one of the largest millworking centers in the world.

Narrator: The story of Dubuque's Millwork District

tells the story of the entire town.

For more than a century, lead mining and lumber boomed,

and settlers built a town around them.

The district became the engine of the community,

and today it is being reactivated

to match modern living.

Gronen: The Millwork District is about a million square feet,

so about a 17-block area.

The Rouse & Dean Foundry,

which is just across the street from us,

that is known to be the oldest building in the district.

But we are in the Caradco Building,

AKA the Schmid Innovation Center.

And this particular building is actually six buildings

that were all infilled, joined at one time.

And the construction on the first building

started in the late 1860s.

And the last building was completed in 1909.

So it was quite a span of time

to create the structure that we see today.

Hagerty: When you're looking at this particular district,

the architectural style is --

it's not necessarily a high architectural style.

It's what we call vernacular.

There are not a lot of architect-designed buildings

in the Millwork District.

They are buildings that were designed many times

by either someone within the company.

Christian Loetscher, for example,

was reputed to have designed

most of the buildings that Farley & Loetscher were in.

You could tell that they really prided themselves

in the design of their buildings

when they built these industrial buildings.

You know, they all are very cohesive in design.

There are lots of architectural elements

to the design of the buildings, particularly with Caradco.

We see the the main Caradco building has the two arches

on the north facade and then the south facade.

And then there's like a tunnel that you can walk through,

and then it takes you into the courtyard.

And then when they built in 1924,

they built the building to the north,

which we now call the Voices Building,

or the Dupaco Building,

that also has an arch on its south facade.

And when you look then either from the south or to the north,

you can look through these two large buildings

and you can kind of see how they would have done

their manufacturing process.

You know, they were able to move very easily,

you know, from building to building.

The other thing that was distinctive

about the Millwork District

from a circulation standpoint

was that there were several catwalks or passages

that spanned the street.

So you could go from one building to another

on the inside of the building.

You didn't have to go outside.

And there's really only one remnant

of that left in the district.

It's the multilevel catwalk that spans from

the Voices/Dupaco Building to the Novelty Iron Works building.

And that was constructed in the early 1900s

because those two buildings were connected from a --

they were both Caradco buildings.

Narrator: In the early years of Millwork District,

artificial lighting wasn't available.

So all of the buildings built in the 1800s

incorporated large windows

that could be used to vent hot air and noxious fumes.

Additionally, nearly every building

incorporated rooftop monitors

in order to bring natural light to the center of the structure.

Possibly the most important feature of each building

was the masonry work with brick and limestone,

a critical decision that saved the district multiple times

from cascading fires.

Hagerty: Within the buildings, there are also firebreaks.

There are multiple masonry walls that divide the building.

There are fire doors that, you know, if there is a fire,

then those doors are shut so the fire can't go

from one part of the building to the next.

So the masonry construction, it's beautiful,

but it also serves a functional purpose.

Narrator: While boasting to be the hub

of lumber milling in the world,

Farley & Loetscher legitimately constructed

the world's largest indoor lumber storage facility

at the corner of Washington and 7th,

a towering building constructed with 60-foot timbers

and enough space to house a year's worth of materials.

As big as a stadium.

Even more impressive to learn

is it was first erected more than 300 miles south.

Gronen: It was the St. Louis Exposition,

and it was a timber-frame structure,

a large, like, pavilion.

And when the exposition was over,

Mr. Farley had attended the exposition,

and he ended up purchasing the timber frame,

which was taken down piece by piece,

hauled up here on a railroad line,

and they had to tie, like, cars together

because the timbers were so long

that they exceeded the length of one car.

So brought all that timber up here.

Erected it down here a block south of us.

And then they bricked the building

on the exterior of the timber frame.

Narrator: For nearly 150 years, the Millwork District thrived

as the industrial heartbeat of Dubuque.

However, following World War II, construction methods

shifted across the country,

with lumber falling out of favor,

being replaced by steel and other durable materials.

By the 1970s, both Caradco and Farley & Loetscher

were a thing of the past,

and buildings across the Millwork District

started to close for good.

There was a process back in 2005 called Envision 2010.

And basically what it was was getting the input

from tri-state citizens

on what they wanted to see happen by the year 2010.

So they came up with a list of,

oh, my gosh, I think it was over

like 3,500 projects or something.

And then there was a task force formed

to whittle it down to 10 projects.

And among those 10

was the redevelopment of this warehouse district.

Hagerty: The amazing thing about it is it really

is one of the most intact historic industrial areas,

not only in the state of Iowa, but throughout the Midwest.

In a city the size of Dubuque,

to have this much historic fabric in an industrial area

is just amazing.

With Envision 2010 showing the local desire

to reclaim the Millwork District,

developers started to think of ways to revitalize the area.

By 2011, the Millwork District's first redevelopments

were in place,

with 72 apartments available in the Caradco building

with 75,000 square feet of commercial space open below.

While not industrial millworking, lead smelting,

or ironwork, the re-activated Millwork District

certainly retains the energy of its history.

Yeah, so now with the redevelopment

of this whole district,

the character of the district has changed dramatically.

And so I see more and more

as I'm driving around in the morning,

I see people walking from the northern residential areas,

walking to work or bringing their bikes to work.

So this becomes then a more walkable city.

It becomes, you know,

an area where there are a lot of different business

and economic activities for people

because more people live downtown.

So the restaurants are busier, the bars are busier,

the retail shops are busier.

So we hope to see more and more of that.

Almost kind of becomes a snowball effect.

Narrator: The Millwork District is once again

writing the story of Dubuque.

And while this chapter is alive and well,

it is still a long way from being complete.

Gronen: There's a lot of buildings, a lot of work

that has taken place in the district,

but there's a lot more work that still needs to happen.

And even though all this work has been going on for

just over 10 years,

we all knew it was a marathon, not a sprint.

It was going to take a long time to be able to do all the work

that's necessary in this district to bring it back.

Hagerty: We kind of see Dubuque as a special place,

not only because of its wonderful historic buildings,

but because we do have the ethic of historic activation,

making buildings active and work for people,

but then also working together to make these things happen.

These buildings will still be here in 200 years, most likely.

They're really treasures.

They can unpack so much opportunity

and so much economic development,

so much vitality for communities like Dubuque.

We'll take you a little bit 

 into Dubuque's past  and I think you'll like it.

 As we go up, it kind of  varies with each walk.

 And then our first stop  is actually at the top

 of the hill here. 

 One, I think people  just love history.

 And up here, there's so much.

 We have a lot of really,  really old graves and people

 that are here, huge amount  of history in the cemetery

and that's very unique. It's one

 I like knowing where  a town or cities come from

 and the people that made it. 

 Stop here at Dr. Asa Horr.

 He was very influential. 

 There are graves up here  that the stories were unknown

 and until we started  doing these walks because

 family members from  way down the line,

 that's my family member. And  here's the story behind them.

 But like, we have a royal 

 princess buried in Linwood,  we have an Olympian.

So it is really an interesting

 gathering of people you  know that you can talk about.

 So it's kind of cool. 

 Honestly, if we did this 

 in April, we'd probably  get nobody to sign up.

 There's a lot of different  groups of people 

 that come out for the tours. 

I think they're they're learning  and finding out that there is

 so much history in the area. 

 Now, again talking  in the mid 1800s.

 Dentistry wasn't  quite like it is today. 

 And that gives us  a great opportunity to

 do these types of walks, walk  through and educate people

 not only in kind  of the ghost side of things

 and the fun side of things  that way, but also in 

 the vast history that we have  right here in Dubuque.

 First off, we'll start 

 with the chapel,  the chapel was built in 1987.

 G.R.I.P.S is the Great  River Investigative

 Paranormal Society.

 It is a ghost investigation

 group. We'll turn it on  so you can hear it

 here in just a few minutes. 

 And that that'll be  more interesting. 

 We try to prove the 

 existence of Ghosts,  or we try to debunk

 some of the things  that people think

 is paranormal, but  really have an explanation.

It's been like flickering. And 

we've got some activity here. 

 It was possible before. 

 In in a weird way because  my son at first was interested

 because of the ghost hunting  shows when he was younger, so

 I got some of the equipment.

 Then he got interested  in other things like girls

 and I had all the equipment. 

 But then I found 

 there's a lot of people  that were interested as well.

 Now that's kind of  interesting. Yeah,

 because that's a correlation.  Did we get a name?

 Our group is pretty  tight knit, and I think

 one of the reasons is 

 we all have kind of different  personalities and different

 interests and various sizes,  various designs.

First off, they probably bring 

 different experiences  that they've had, 

 And she was instrumental 

 in getting the right  to vote for women. 

 Everyone just brings a  unique style to the group and

 helps out doing different  things. All right.

 Well, he's just answered 

 yes to everything  I say any just about.

 But we're really respectful 

 all of not only others'  opinions, but also of

the spirits that were visiting  and interacting with.

 So they came in lots  of different sizes now

 because I joke, We  bring a lot of positive energy

to start with our active area. 

 Having fun, making  some jokes, being people

 puts them at ease,  put spirits at ease. 

 That is one thing  we do not do is provoke

 or try to bring negativity. 

 Great, because we need  people like you to.

 We need people like you  to keep us honest 

to make sure that what we see, 

 we're not automatically  thinking is is a spirit

or some paranormal experience,

and that's how I started out. 

So I had this initial picture, 

 which doesn't really have  just kind of a normal picture.

 But then when I took  the second picture, I had

 kind of there and  there those light streaks.

 So often the simplest 

 explanation is the  one people overlook

 this here is flashlight  streaking across.

 And this here is simply lens  flare and reflection.

 And when you've gone  through everything possible

 and you still have 

 that evidence, then  it makes it a lot more fun.

 She took a few pictures, 

 but if you look behind her  at a little bit, there's what

possibly appears to be a face. 

 This is a labor of love 

 for us. We really hope that  you enjoyed your time here,

 But at the same time, 

 when you have stuff  you can't explain, 

 it kind of makes  you at least wonder.