Don't knock St. Louis County officials for salvaging a pair of ornate brass lampposts from the old county jail downtown. The building appeared destined for demolition. Efforts to save anything of value or anything that could be reused were resourceful, to say the least.
However, the historic old jail wasn't torn down. Rather, in April, it was purchased and saved by a Minneapolis real estate broker who has since launched a years-long renovation to convert the structure into multiuse office space.
We wish him and his Jail Holding LLC company the best with the endeavor.
We also wish for his lampposts to be returned to where they belong: flanking the front entrance of the old jail, their globes illuminating the columns there and the marble steps that lead to a main door.
The lampposts have long been a part of the jail, which was constructed in 1923, the second of four buildings that make up Duluth's landmark Civic Center. The lampposts are a small part of what makes the old jail the old jail; they are part of its history, its look, its story and its tradition.
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The county instead plans to install the lampposts at the entrance of a new sally port it is building across West Second Street from the old jail. They don't belong there and never will. The new concrete bases and wiring already in place to receive the lampposts can welcome other fixtures -- fixtures that are newly built like the sally port and that well match its tasteful design.
In addition to being the right thing to do, returning the lampposts could win the county some much-needed P.R. points with the Duluth Heritage Preservation Commission. Some with the HPC say the county had no business removing the lampposts in the first place because the old jail is a registered local landmark.
"Any request to remove historic lampposts like that should have come to the HPC," commission Vice Chairwoman Carolyn Sundquist said in the News Tribune this week.
Perhaps. But even clearer than the protocol for permission and procurement is where the lampposts should go now.
"(They) were taken down and refurbished with the idea of keeping them in the historic district of the civic center," the county's Gary Eckenberg said, also this week in the News Tribune.
If the county's true motivation was the preservation of the historic district, county officials should see clearly that the most appropriate places for the lampposts are their original perches.
There'd be no knocking them for that.
