Are cottages historic or just shacks?

"They aren't worth wasting our time and money on them," said City Councilman Wayne Edsall, who urged other councilmen last week to consider junking the 1940s-era buildings. "They don't add anything to the park."

Some preservationists couldn't disagree more with the councilman's idea. In a town with so few buildings remaining to remind folks about the past, why remove more? they wonder.

The cottages, which are barely larger than a typical shed, were once part of a tourist village started by Bonita pioneer J.W. Liles on the banks of the Imperial River. In 2001, the city bought the 11-acre Old 41 Road property so it could be turned into a downtown park.

In March, 10 cottages on the site were demolished after council members decided that those structures, which were built about two decades after the others, had deteriorated beyond use and had no historical value.

The remaining six cottages were moved from their original site along the edge of the burbling river and arranged in a row parallel to Old 41 Road near the center of the park. No soul has used them since then.

A few weeks ago, police and city officials say, vandals smashed the windows of several of the cottages and others at the two-story Liles Hotel, another vacant building in Riverside Park. To Edsall, the crimes signaled that the cottages are "an attractive nuisance for more vandalism."

"We knew when we bought them they were probably termite-infested and that has turned out to be a fact. They have dry rot. They're just old and dilapidated," he said.

The city should tear them down and build replicas of the old buildings in their place, Edsall suggests. That would save the city plenty of park-pegged dollars, and the buildings could hold anything from art galleries to ice cream shops, he said.

Councilman David Piper acknowledged at a meeting last week that some of the cottages are in "real rough shape." He left it up to the city's consultant, Parker/Mudgett/Smith of Fort Myers, to decide how they could be used.

The firm is drawing up a master plan for Riverside Park. Bill Mudgett, who is heading the project, said he intends to ask council members to decide the cottages' fate during a meeting in December.

"They have historical connections," Mudgett said of the cottages. "You have to make a determination whether the historical designation warrants spending money on it. It may or may not be. We don't know yet. A project's value may be worth more value than what you put into it."

If the city knocks down the old buildings, it won't set a good example to others who own historic structures in the city, Councilman Ben Nelson said.

"You don't save historic things because it makes economic sense. You spend the money to do the repairs because they do have historic significance. You may say, 'It's just a shed. They don't mean anything to me.' But I think there's history there," the councilman said.

Doris Wollam, a Bonita Springs Historical Society member, is not happy with the city's changes to the property. The cottages lost a lot of their ambience when they were relocated, and the plywood that was tacked over the windows recently doesn't help, she said.

"Now, it looks like a penitentiary," Wollam said. "I think it's a shame."