You can read Ottumwa’s history so easily in its two main streets—Main and Second—that they might as well be bound between covers and shelved in the domed Carnegie library that faces the city’s Central Park. There are solid, confident buildings that recall long-ago wealth—the YMCA and the YWCA (both now closed), the Hotel Ottumwa (which hangs on somehow), and The Ottumwa Courier‘s polychromed Egyptian Revival temple. There are relics, too, of the final years of comfortable prosperity, like the sleek Chicago, Burlington & Quincy station from 1951, which greets two Amtrak trains a day and houses a cluttered local-history museum upstairs.
But there are also underused commercial properties that were refaced in the 60s and 70s with metallic screens hiding vacant upper stories. There are empty display windows, a long-closed Chinese restaurant, side-by-side movie palaces with their facades inexplicably stripped away, a dusty former computer store, a couple of adult theaters that may or may not still be open, and an unused bank building whose Classical cornice crumbles above “No Loitering” signs. Parking is almost distressingly easy to find.
“When you look at old pictures of Ottumwa, these streets were crowded,” says Himar Hernández, an Iowa State University Extension and Outreach specialist in community and economic development who is based in the Wapello County Extension Office on Main Street, beside a smoke shop and just down the block from a soon-to-close Dollar General store.
Mr. Hernández’s purview includes the whole eastern half of the state, and his responsibilities include establishing a variety of leadership, diversity, and small-business programs. But it’s fair to say that he spends a lot of time on Ottumwa, which he says may be in worse shape than any other Iowa city—especially now that casino revenues from riverboat gambling are sprucing up Missouri River towns like Council Bluffs.
“Ottumwa was in a downward trend for years,” he says. The city has lost 10,000 residents from what was once a population of about 35,000, leaving it with an infrastructure bigger than it needs and bigger than it can afford to maintain. To make matters worse, Mr. Hernández says, a mall opened on the other side of the Des Moines River in the 1990s, and “nobody promoted downtown or downtown living.” Stores closed, properties were abandoned. Only now are the efforts of people like Mr. Hernández beginning to reverse the decline.
He works with city officials on a variety of issues, like toughening ordinances related to empty buildings, and he works with other organizations, like Main Street Ottumwa, to prod the city officials. An important new ally for the extension office, he says, is the Ottumwa Regional Legacy Foundation, created with some $60-million in proceeds from the recent sale of the local hospital to a for-profit corporation.
At the other end of the spectrum, he works with businesses too small to interest the local economic-development agency, which he says is more focused on “big-box stores and big companies” than on start-ups. Recently, for instance, he helped organize a local microloan program that allowed an Ottumwa entrepreneur, José Rodas, to open a tortilla factory with three full-time employees even though a bank had refused him a loan.
Just last month he brought 20 Iowa State architecture students down from Ames to offer local businesses free advice on sprucing up their premises. He is particularly proud of the owners of the Super Mercado, who are renovating the apartment above the grocery store—one of two on Main Street that cater to Latino customers—and plan to live there.
Indeed, Mr. Hernández says members of Ottumwa’s growing Latino community have been more interested than others in opening businesses downtown. Ottumwa’s population is more than 10 percent Latino, he says, thanks to a Cargill meat-packing plant that has attracted a number of Latino employees. Immigrants from smaller Mexican communities who didn’t feel comfortable in big American cities found Ottumwa much more to their liking, and good jobs in the Cargill plant have kept them here.
But getting them involved in local organizations has been more difficult, he says. “It takes a lot of trust-building,” in part because many immigrants have a longstanding fear of governments. “And we’re still seeing a lot of the Latino youth not flowing to the colleges,” though about a fifth of Ottumwa’s school students are Latino.
Mr. Hernández may be the city’s least likely immigrant himself, as he explains over lunch at Bubba-Q’s, a barbecue joint on Market Street half a block off Main. Born in Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands, he came to Ottumwa High as a 15-year-old exchange student in 1993 and liked the city’s people so much that he came back in 1999 to enroll in Indian Hills Community College.
After earning a bachelor’s degree from Buena Vista University, up in Storm Lake, in 2006, he was hired by Iowa State as a specialist in community and economic development. It’s one of five areas Iowa’s extension service focuses on, the others being agriculture and natural resources, industrial research, families, and youth (including the popular 4-H programs).
Mr. Hernández travels frequently to other counties to set up leadership projects, programs to encourage college among Iowa’s growing population of young Latinos, and similar efforts. The idea, he says, is to empower communities, organizations, and people to help themselves, because the university can’t put an extension expert in every city, town, and hamlet (the state has 99 counties and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of little towns).
Until this fall, in fact, his responsibilities were statewide, but the university recently hired José M. Amaya, a former English and Latino-studies professor and a former diversity director at the grocery chain Hy-Vee, to cover the western part of the state.
That should give Mr. Hernández a little extra time to spend on Ottumwa. During a quick tour, he shows off old mansions on the bluff above downtown—"There’s none of that big money anymore"—as well as a new Main Street restaurant called the Appanoose Rapids Brewing Company that has not only upstairs living space but also a back deck looking out toward the river. Just across Main Street from the restaurant is an empty building he’s particularly excited about—plans are in the works to make it a year-round farmer’s market with several incubator retail spaces.
Facts, stories, and ideas large and small spill out too fast to write down. He’s pushing the city to abandon the one-way-street scheme adopted when downtown had far more traffic (already the city has replaced many stoplights with stop signs). He’s urging officials to install the latest crossing-gate technology to make it safe for trains to roll through downtown without blaring their horns—that will make life more pleasant for what he hopes will be a new generation of downtown residents. He’d also like the city to install more downtown trash cans. As he parks the car back on Main Street, in front of the extension office, he says, “I’m not going to run out of projects any time soon.”
