Charles Dawes won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925. He was elected Calvin Coolidge’s vice president in 1924.
He also died in 1951, but you wouldn’t know it from the spectacle on the Evanston lakefront Thursday morning.
About 35 residents joined in formation on the east lawn of the former Evanstonian’s house, 225 Greenwood St., in an effort to persuade Northwestern to allow the Evanston History Center to stay there.
“As you know, something has gone wrong,” said Dawes, portrayed by Chicago actor R.J. Lindsay. “So I have come back from the dead to reclaim my house.”
The lakefront mansion was completed in 1895. The Dawes family eventually entrusted the building and a sizeable endowment to NU. Since then, NU has helped pay for upkeep and allowed the Evanston History Center to administer and operate from Dawes House.
“We think we accomplished what we intended: We got the message out, we rallied our troops,” Evanston resident Frank Corrado said. “This is the start of a campaign.”
Corrado is head of “The General Returns” campaign, an ad hoc group of residents that has taken up the cause of the Dawes House with militant vigor since NU closed the house to the public in April.
Eugene Sunshine, NU’s senior vice president for business and finance, said the money given to NU by the Dawes family and the History Center’s endowment aren’t enough to bring the building up to code and maintain it. Sunshine estimates such repairs at around $4 million, which would include fire safety, structural repairs and handicap accessibility.
Still, local activists insist the university is violating its original covenant with the Dawes family and the History Center. They said the university is not paying for maintenance and trying to profit off the sale of “living history.”
NU has a slightly different perspective.
“The people today just didn’t understand,” Sunshine said. “They didn’t get the facts straight. There’s no argument about that: it is what it is.”
NU spends anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 a year on the house and has no set plans for the building’s future, Sunshine said.
The campaign said NU is grossly overestimating the cost of repairing the building. Activists at the meeting distributed copies of a letter from Evanston Fire Chief Alan Berkowsky to Ron Nayler, NU’s associate vice president for facilities management. In the letter, Berkowsky said the house could remain open to the public with minimal repairs – most of which referred to installing exit signs and reduced capacity requirements.
But such bare-bones repairs wouldn’t allow the house to be fully used and would only allow the building to continue to operate for a short time, Sunshine said.
The rally concluded with “Dawes” and his troops marching on University President Henry Bienen’s office to demand the deed to the mansion. Security allowed a costumed Lindsay inside to hand over about 35 signed petitions to the president’s secretary.
Sunshine declined to comment on the group’s proposal to complete the basic repairs mentioned in Berkowsky’s letter and transfer the deed to the History Center. However, the university is in negotiations with the center to allow them to remain in the building rent-free through 2009.
Activists said they hope Thursday is the beginning of a grassroots campaign similar to recent protests against new construction in downtown Evanston and renovation of the Civic Center at 2100 Ridge Ave.
But most attendees said they were still trying to get a grasp on the issue.
“It smells funny,” said long-time Evanston resident Mary Moring. “Something is not quite right in the way it is being laid out (by both sides).”
