There’s really not a tremendous amount of news relevant to the antiques and design business that comes out of Wisconsin, so this one immediately caught my eye, for a couple of reasons.

The first is that it’s about a town called Evansville, part of the greater Janesville area, just inside the border with Illinois. It’s an area that has been particularly hard hit by the sluggish economy, especially because it’s home to a huge GM plant that specializes in SUVs, and was recently slated to be shut down permanently in 2010. Secondly, I happen to live in Wisconsin right now – for another month, anyway – and have seen and experienced first hand how bad the economy is here.

The article linked to below, from the Janesville Gazette of today, Aug. 14, is talking about the impending opening of Windmill Antiques and Company, a planned 23-dealer shop. Town officials are hoping that the shop’s opening, along with extensive restoration and road re-building, will draw local and out-of-town visitors to the Evansville Center.

I wish them all the luck in the world – the center and the town both. It’s going to be a tough go of it, that’s for sure. It’s interesting to me to see a town turning to antiques as a hope for an upswing. Mostly these days you see group shops and malls going out of business because of the lack of disposable income among likely buyers.

To me, this says that the area desperately needs something positive to happen, and that antiques could be that thing because there are a lot of good buys to be had right now, even when people are struggling. The truth is that many antique dealers are offering tremendous deals on all level of antique and collectibles to keep their business rolling and, in the spirit of Windmill Antiques, using that availability to drive economic renewal. I hope, for all of our sakes, that this goes well. If it can work in the upper Midwest, then it can work anywhere.

I have to add that the town is also home to a very fine collection of excellent late-19th to early 20th-century architecture.

Here’s the link to the article.

-Noah Fleisher, Aug. 14, 2008