CEDAR RAPIDS — For 70 years, Norman Ramsey has been looking down to study the ups of architecture. And now, thanks to his extensive collection of photographs, articles and postcards, students of tall buildings will benefit from his passion. He has donated it all, which if stacked in one pile would form its own skyscraper, to the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

“This is a gold mine,” says Jan Klerks, opening one file cabinet after another, “Once we sort it out we can invite people in to do their research.”

“There’s nobody in the whole world who has a collection like this,” adds Marshall Gerometta.

The men — Jan is editor of CTBUH Journal for the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat hosted by ITT and Marshall its database editor — had stopped at Norman’s Cedar Rapids home as movers prepared to assemble the collection for transport. They had seen it before after a phone conversation with Norman.

“Norm just kept on talking about what he’d collected,” Jan says. “OK, this could be really interesting. We just wanted to come out and see what he had.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it in a personal collection,” adds Marshall. “Not anything close.”

Norman, 87, attributes his interest to seeing the picture of a Hong Kong skyscraper in a 1930s National Geographic Magazine as he grew up in Columbus, Ohio.

“When I started it,” Norman says, “I didn’t know it was going to be like this. It’s been a tremendous job just getting it all back together.”

The collection fills more than 60 file cabinet drawers with information, photos and drawings of tall buildings from 150 countries. It is valuable for its variety and the fact much of it can’t readily be found elsewhere, not even on the Internet.

Norman, who one time thought about becoming a minister, took his master’s degree in education to teach speech and debate at several Midwestern colleges, including Wartburg College in Waverly. He and his wife, Donneita, came to Cedar Rapids 43 years ago for his job preparing program media for the Iowa Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse.

Always interested in his communities and drawing, Norman has penned many editorial cartoons published in The Gazette through the years. Some included skyscrapers, like his 1984 drawing of the late Robert Armstrong’s idea to build Skyway Tower, a 30-story residential and commercial building on an Armstrong’s Department Store parking lot.

That never came to fruition. Neither did Norman’s fun drawing of an expansion of Cedar Rapids’ island City Hall into a taller art deco building.

But, his collection includes many Cedar Rapids tall buildings from the 1927 Roosevelt Hotel to the Iowa Electric (now Alliant) tower to the 10-story Iowa National building erected in 1980 that has Verizon offices now. And it includes stuff from old buildings in Yemen to grain elevators around Iowa.

“I think things that are interesting are just interesting,” Norman says. “When I saved stuff, I saved who did it and why. The oddball stuff.”

That’s what Editor Jan loves about the collection. “If the height is interesting in any way,” he says, “we’re interested.”

Even before Norman’s collection is sorted, Jan says, it will provide material for a 10th anniversary issue of the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City.

“We will ask people how these events affected the tall building industry,” he says.

Comments: (319) 398-8323; dave.rasdal@sourcemedia.net