The Sundstrom’s life
and a Covid coma
By John Marshall
LINDSBORG –Stone and stucco can fall victim to the corona virus in a collateral way. When a magnificent structure is deprived of people – staff, guests, celebrants – the vitality drains out of it.
For three months The Sundstrom Center, a magnetic Lindsborg landmark at Main and Lincoln, has been subdued, mostly mute in a mild, corona-induced coma. Precaution put meetings, conventions and galas off limits. The big beige building has waited patiently, the spaniel expecting master home any minute. (A building like this, in this town, can get in your head.)
Seven years ago workers put the finishing touches on this reinvented building to end a year of chain-link fence, rubble piles and dust, great machines clawing, hammers jacking, saws whining. Workers moved among stacks of sheetrock, palates of brick, boxes and packages and shrink-wrapped clumps of whatnot. As the air cleared, the City’s new J.O. Sundstrom Conference Center emerged, an exemplar of downtown renewal and community revival.
This resurrection took time. There were doubts in the early 2000s, when things seemed troubled. Over its durable, earlier life, the building had several owners and various obligations. In 1879, Jacob O. Sundstrom opened his mercantile store at 102 N. Main. At that time Lindsborg emerged as a determined ethnic community. Mr. Sundstrom advertised his broad inventory in both English and Swedish, the Swedish much appreciated because at the time most Lindsborg residents spoke English only a little, if at all.
Thirty years later Sundstrom’s became the Bertschinger-Sattler Dry Goods Company; in the 1940s it was the King Oscar Coffee House. For 20 years, beginning in 1973, the structure was home to the Lindsborg Community Library. At the 104 and 106 North Main storefronts there were dry goods and grocery stores, a hardware store, Viking Auto, and on the south Western Union, a bus station and a travel agency, according to the City’s quarterly, Lindsborg City View.
In 2003 the City, mercifully, bought the structure in order to save the building and its heritage from a neglectful owner. Countless meetings and planning sessions followed. Ideas and dreams flowed, and there were arguments, debates, discussions, all rising from the passions carried for this rich heirloom and the visions of its place in the community. What would happen?
The town’s leaders were practical. A special sales tax for infrastructure improvements and economic development, approved by voters in 2010, helped matters. More meetings and many planning sessions followed. (The bones and flesh of the place were beyond saving but the semblance must endure.) The conference center was put to blueprint, and two years later work began to gut the building, preserve the face and reclaim its dignity.
At a grand opening gala in late summer, 2013, we had a look. The new J.O. Sundstrom Conference Center seemed a fit for community custom and fashion. The exterior was a sensible and earthy stucco with bold lines and elegant trim. It speaks today of quality. The interior breathes comfort and says welcome, but not loudly. The colors are at once soft and commanding with a nod to the firm strokes of art-deco against smooth, half-globe chandeliers. Coordinated patterns angle down from ceiling over walls and onto the flooring. Charm is at work here, an invitation to both the sophisticate and the less so: enjoy, be at home, it says. All that’s missing are a few stencils from Gustav Malm ‒ but this is a conference center, not a baron’s living room or parlor, even if it has the feel of a living room and the glint of a parlor: Make yourself comfortable but get down to business. Like that.
The high-tech aspects of this conference center were beyond us, but in short the audio, video, air and heating, and sound and lighting systems are superior, state-of-the-art. Geeks, we are told, have not been disappointed.
In the shadow of Covid, the Sundstrom begins to awaken – proud, radiant, an axis for the City’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. It shows the good that comes in a community that constantly puts itself to the test, and what can evolve when its people respond with a reinforcement of heritage.
The Sundstrom Center will stir and come to life again. A place belongs forever to those who claim it hardest, who love it most radically, and who remember it most obsessively. To this end, they are its triumph and its reward.
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