Bruce Gerleman

Real estate developer and preservationist Bruce Gerleman, was recently awarded the Historic Preservation Hall of Fame award during the Des Moines Heritage Trust’s Historic Preservation Awards Dinner as reported by The Des Moines Business Record. This interview was created by The Des Moines Heritage Trust and provided as a courtesy.

History wasn’t just a favorite subject in school—it became Gerleman’s life’s work. Armed with a marketing degree from Wichita State University and an ambitious youthful goal to buy one apartment building a year, Gerleman began his career buying small multi-family properties, renovating them, and moving on to the next project.

But in 1980, while working on a 16-unit apartment building at 2925 Grand Avenue, the landscape of American real estate shifted. The passage of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 established a 25% tax credit for certified historic renovations meeting Department of the Interior standards. Recognizing a generational opportunity, Gerleman shifted his focus entirely, digging through the archives of Sanborn fire maps to track down historic gems.

Over the next decade, Gerleman would pioneer construction techniques, battle soaring interest rates, and single-handedly save some of Des Moines’ most iconic architectural landmarks from the wrecking ball.

The Grand Avenue Mansions

Gerleman’s historic journey began with the Crawford Mansion at 2203 Grand Avenue. Built in 1892 by successful banker R.A. Crawford, the building was restored under the rigorous oversight of historical experts like Ralph Christian. The project was a massive financial gamble; in the early 1980s, interest rates peaked at a staggering 21%.

“I was borrowing money at 20% and 21% to renovate these buildings,” Gerleman recalls. “The only way these buildings work is if you find a tenant to pay your rent, because otherwise it’s just a historic building sitting there empty.”

Gerleman painstakingly restored the mansion—even using a toothbrush to clean decades of soot from the intricate fireplace covers. Upon completion, Wesley Day Advertising moved in, making it the first certified historic renovation project in the State of Iowa, ultimately landing it on the National Register of Historic Places.

Just down the street at 2404 Forest Drive sat the Governor Albert Baird Cummins Mansion, built in 1893. When Gerleman acquired it, it was a 13-unit apartment building. Disaster struck when a tenant left a cardboard box on a stove, sparking a fire that completely destroyed the building’s complex, seven-gabled roof. Working without blueprints or an architect, master carpenter Greg Haynes recreated the entire roof structure “out of thin air,” allowing Gerleman to return the interior to its original layout and lease it to eager marketing firms and attorneys.

He followed this success with the Polk Mansion, a project so deteriorated that the entire structure had to be hoisted onto stilts so a new basement could be poured underneath. While it didn’t retain enough original fabric for a certified historic designation, it qualified for a 20% tax credit and was successfully filled with commercial tenants.

Moving Downtown: The Homestead Building

In 1983, Gerleman set his sights on downtown Des Moines. The city was planning to condemn and demolish the Martin Hotel across from the Civic Center to build a parking lot. Gerleman stepped in, negotiated a contract with the owner, Bob Nuzum, formed a partnership, and took over the block.

Adjacent to this was the Homestead Building, originally built by the Wallace family to publish Wallace’s Farmer and The Homestead Magazine. The property presented immense structural challenges compared to the Grand Avenue mansions. To comply with modern commercial building codes, the floor load capacity had to be raised to 150 pounds per square foot.

To achieve this without collapsing the building, Gerleman pioneered a “checkerboard” engineering technique. Crews would cut out four-foot sections of the foundation footings at a time, hold the building up around it, and pour new steel-reinforced footings. Once the foundation was secure, they constructed an internal steel frame to tie into the 1892 exterior brick walls, which were entirely non-structural. Finally, they reinforced the floor joists by sistering 2x4s to the existing 2x12s and pouring three inches of lightweight concrete.

The structural gamble paid off. The Homestead Building became the first downtown building placed on the National Register of Historic Places, housing prominent law firms and the beloved Splash Restaurant.

Part 2: Bruce Gerleman The Hawkeye Insurance Restoration & the 250,000 Hat Sale

By the mid-1980s, Des Moines’ Court Avenue was a seedy, abandoned stretch populated by flop houses, biker bars, and vacant properties. Gerleman realized that saving the neighborhood required scale. Over a year, he quietly acquired nine separate properties between 3rd and 4th Streets, convincing the city to launch the Court Avenue streetscape project.

His first target was the Hawkeye Insurance Building, built between 1866 and 1868 by Ebenezer Ingersoll and B.F. Allen. It was the oldest building in Des Moines and the birthplace of the city’s casualty insurance and newspaper industries.

The project was grueling. Previous owners had filled in the original basement to bring the first floor down to sidewalk level. Because heavy machinery couldn’t fit, Gerleman began digging out the basement himself, lying on his back with a small military shovel. Eventually, using an auger and a small crew, they hand-dug the entire basement, discovering the original concrete-and-iron bank vault used by B.F. Allen.

Simultaneously, Gerleman was redeveloping the rest of the block, which included combining the Saddlery Building and the Kaplan Hat Company Building. The latter resulted in one of the most colorful chapters in Des Moines history.

The owners, Harry and Anna Gold, had operated the hat business for over 50 years. Because they equated their net worth with their inventory, they had accumulated over 250,000 hats—ranging from cowboy hats and police caps to railroad helmets—stacked in boxes from floor to 12-foot ceiling across five floors. Gerleman bought the building for $348,000 in 1985 but had to liquidate the inventory before construction could begin.

A front-page story in the Des Moines Register triggered an absolute frenzy.

“I raced downtown, came around the corner, and there’s like 50 people waiting,” Gerleman recalls. “I open the building up, the people flood in… I just sat there at the front door with my hat boxes. ‘That hat’s a dollar. That hat’s $2. That cowboy hat, that’s $5.’”

The fire department had to limit capacity to 50 people at a time as lines stretched down Court Avenue. The sale went national when the Today Show featured it, drawing buyers from Wyoming and Atlanta. After three weeks of selling hats, Gerleman had amassed enough cash to entirely pay off the $348,000 building purchase.

By June 1986, the block was fully transformed, opening as the Court Avenue Historic Entertainment District, complete with the Court Avenue Apparel restaurant, Spanky’s, Frank’s Barbecue, and the Jukebox Saturday Night nightclub.

Part 3: Bruce Gerleman on the 1981 Tax Act, Historic Preservation, and Saving Des Moines Landmarks

Gerleman would continue his preservation streak by securing a $550,000 HUD Urban Development Action Grant to save the Rock Island Depot in 1986, adapting it for commercial use with an asphalt shingle roof when replication of the original tile roof proved cost-prohibitive. He also expanded his footprint outside of Iowa, taking his passion to Savannah, Georgia, and Denver, Colorado.

Reflecting on his career, Gerleman credits the Tax Act of 1981 as a shining example of government policy that worked.

Project / Building Name	Era Built	Key Historic Highlight / Adaptation
Crawford Mansion	1892	First certified historic renovation in Iowa.
Governor Cummins Mansion	1893	Roof destroyed by fire; 7 gables completely recreated from scratch.
Homestead Building	1892	First downtown building on National Register; pioneered checkerboard foundation technique.
Hawkeye Insurance Building	1866–1868	Oldest building in Des Moines; basement excavated entirely by hand.
Kaplan Hat Co. / Saddlery	1892	Funded by a viral 3-week sale of 250,000 liquidation hats.
Rock Island Depot	Vacant since 1970	Saved via HUD grant and converted to office space.

“When I was doing all these buildings and working 14 or 15 hours a day, fixing horsehair plaster… I wasn’t thinking about today,” says Gerleman. “I was thinking, we just gotta get something done today. You do it one job at a time.”

Because of that daily persistence, modern residents of Des Moines don’t look at a uniform skyline of sterile glass and steel. Instead, they enjoy a rich, textured cityscape defined by stately 19th-century mansions, historic streetscapes, and thriving districts that bridge the past with the present.