When the corner of 6th and Locust housed 136 doctors and 67 dentists
11/1/2023When I was a boy — and that was not recently — I would take the bus downtown one afternoon a week to get allergy shots from Dr. Lou Noun.
I would get off the bus at Sixth and Locust, go through the revolving doors into the Equitable Building, ask the elevator operator to take me to the eighth floor, find room 814, hold out my arm, get three pokes from the amiable doctor, wait a few minutes, then head back home to 40th Street on the Ingersoll or Crocker bus line.
Downtown Des Moines was bustling in the daytime in those days — this was the 1940s, after the war — with young, reunited couples heading to Younkers or Ginsbergs to furnish their new houses and to Paul Manning Chevrolet or Abe Chambers Ford or Manbeck Chrysler-Plymouth — or maybe even Peverill Packard — to get in line for a new car. Women, with their gloves and hats, filled the Younkers Tea Room for lunch. Men would grab a sandwich and a beer at Babe’s or maybe just a quick lunch at Bolton & Hay or the lunch counter at King’s Pharmacy (“King’s in the center of things”) in the Equitable Building.
Sixth and Locust was indeed the center of things, because that’s where you went to see your doctor or dentist or, occasionally, lawyer. In 1947, the handsome and imposing buildings on three of the corners — the 19-story gothic Equitable, the 14-story art deco Des Moines Building, and the 12-story stolid Bankers Trust Building — housed 136 doctors and 67 dentists.
Today, of course, there are no doctors or dentists on that corner. The Equitable Building was converted to 164 apartments in 2016, the Des Moines Building to 136 units in 2015, and a few weeks ago the Ruan family announced that Ruan 2 — the building on the site of the old Bankers Trust building — will also be converted to housing. What was the busiest corner in town is just another intersection; Sixth and Locust is just another neighborhood.
Indeed, today all of downtown Des Moines is relatively quiet on weekdays — with Wells Fargo closing buildings and moving employees to the suburbs, with Nationwide selling off a building to the city, with the Register and Tribune building also now apartments, with no department stores and few specialty shops, with more workers working from home — but bustling on weekends and by night. Today, it is easier to find a parking spot during the day than at night, when spots are taken up by apartment-dwellers, by restaurant-and-bar-goers, by guests at the ever-increasing number of downtown hotels. The change, which has occurred gradually over decades, is nevertheless massive.
In 1947, the Equitable Building alone had 79 medical doctors and 46 dentists on floors 2 through 12 — with the Equitable insurance people filling the top floors.
“Every floor on that building had that doctor-office smell,” recalls Des Moines lawyer Mike Giudicessi, whose dentist, James North, was on the ninth floor. So many people were crossing the corner that policeman Tony Mihalovich was stationed there to direct traffic.
Back from the war, surgeon Bud Dorner joined Ben Synhorst in suite 710 at the Equitable in 1949, and 25 years later his son, Doug, joined his dad as a vascular surgeon. He remembers in 1980 looking out his window and watching demolition expert Al DeCarlo tear down the Bankers Trust Building with a wrecking ball. “He was an artist with that crane and ball,” Dorner remembers.
That building, which was built in 1891, had 45 medical doctors in it in 1947, including the world-famous hand-surgeon Julian Bruner, but the demolition of it — to make room for Ruan 2 — hastened a trend already under way.
By 1977, there were only 33 medical doctors and 18 dentists left in the Equitable Building. Thirteen offices were vacant. Lawyers had taken over parts of several floors. By 1987, there were just nine doctors and 11 dentists left in the building.
Doctors — and some corporations and retailers — had begun moving to the fast-growing suburbs, joining a lot of their patients. Then, in 1991, the first building in the Methodist Medical Plaza was built adjacent to Methodist Hospital, and there was a mass move of doctors — including the Dorners — to the modern and convenient new offices. There was little demand for downtown office space in old buildings.
Downtown floundered, by day and by night.
But things were happening. A new ballpark opened in 1993, and over the years a new Science Center was built, a Botanical Center blossomed, a big new arena and event center were built, and plans were under way for a spectacular sculpture park. More and more people started coming downtown for entertainment, and some started to think about moving downtown.
There had always been a corps of people living downtown. In the 1940s, three- and-four-story apartment buildings lined Locust for a couple of blocks west of 13th Street — the Arlington, the Hanwood, the Maxine, the Mayflower — and 94 people lived in the Ewing apartments at 915 Locust in 1947.
But it was another 50 years before the idea really took hold. The old Brown-Camp hardware warehouse was turned into lofts in the mid-1990s (my wife and I have lived there for 20 years), and since then scores of other buildings have been converted or built anew. Developers quickly jumped the new Martin Luther King road — happily built as a boulevard and not as the elevated highway the city politicians and bureaucrats wanted — repurposing some old warehouses and building new developments. Ultimately, the developers crossed the Raccoon River, where still more housing is in the works.
No one really knows how many people live downtown now, or, really, how you define downtown. Estimates range all over the place. The city says that based on the 2020 census, 8,371 people live downtown, but its definition is a bit narrow and many buildings have been built since that census. It’s probably pretty safe to say that if you define downtown as the freeway on the north, MLK road on the west, East Sixth Street on the east, and a block or so south of the Raccoon on the south — that definition includes the 2,000 or so people from Sherman Hill — there are approaching 15,000 people in the area. That’s about the population of Indianola or Newton or Grimes.
Downtown, once full of workers who fled home at 5 p.m., now is filled with young people and old, dogs and babies, cyclists and joggers. Downtowners can cycle or jog or walk to a ball game, a science display, a Broadway show, a major library, or the state Capitol. Bars and restaurants seem to spring up overnight, and the Farmers Market on Saturdays seems as crowded as the State Fair.
The change, in my lifetime, has been huge. Today, with a school for kids and university classrooms for all, with a world-class sculpture park and a glorious riverfront, with a hub of trails that spin out through Iowa — downtown has almost everything.
Except a busy corner full of offices for doctors and dentists.
• • •
Doctors Noun and Bruner and Bud Dorner are long dead.
Lou Noun died in 1991 at age 90. For the last 15 years of his life, he was my neighbor. I moved back from New York in 1974 and bought a beautiful brick home on a hill on Waterbury Road. He lived a short block away, and shortly after I moved in he saw me walking in the neighborhood. He welcomed me, and then asked how much I paid for the house. “Seventy-eight thousand dollars,” I said. “That’s what I heard,” he said. “They knew you were from New York. They saw you coming.” The house sold recently for $1,355,000. Times change.
Julian Bruner died in 1997 at age 96. He grew up in that house I bought, and he loved it and wanted to move in when his parents died. But, I’m told, his wife didn’t want him to, because she knew he loved it so much he would never change it, never upgrade it. So he owned it and kept it empty for many years, throughout the 1960s, coming down once a month — I’m told — and sleeping there. He sold it to a woman who grew up in the neighborhood, but her family stayed just a short time and sold it to me in 1974. He lived just a block up Waterbury Road. For the next 20 years or so, I’d see him walking down the street, stopping and staring at the house. He looked wistful.
Bud Dorner died in 2003 at age 95. He was a great man and a great surgeon, and unlike many doctors of his day, he took a real interest in civic affairs. Among other things, he liked and supported Drake University and especially its sports teams. He was as carefree as a driver as he was careful as a surgeon, and at his funeral Drake President David Maxwell said many nice things about him, and added, “I don’t view this as Drake losing a big supporter; I view it as us gaining three parking spots.”
His son, Doug Dorner, lived across the street from my family for the 30 years we were on Waterbury Road. Our kids grew up together. He inherited his father’s kindness and compassion — it fell to him to call me in the middle of the night and tell me that my 17-year-old son had died unexpectedly in the hospital’s intensive care unit — and he also took over his father’s stock in the Iowa Cubs. Now 82, he has retired from medicine. He and I and two other friends have lunch together every Wednesday.
Mike Giudicessi, just a boy at 70, is retiring from the Faegre law firm. He was a young lawyer at The Register and Tribune when I was editor, and I’ve relied on his advice on everything for the past 40 years or so. He was my defender on First Amendment issues and my partner in owning the Iowa Cubs. He is my friend. He is quick and witty, and he has always looked half his age. As a young man, he was arguing his first case in the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Paul. He had barely said, “May it please the court…” when the chief judge interrupted him. “Pardon me, counsellor,” he said, “but are you even old enough to be here.” “Yes, your honor,” he quickly replied, “I have a note from my mother.” ♦
Michael Gartner was born and raised in Des Moines. He is 85 years old. Along the way, he has been a top editor at The Wall Street Journal, editor and president of The Des Moines Register, president of NBC News, and majority owner of the Iowa Cubs. In 1997 he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing while at the Ames Tribune, where he was editor and co-owner.
