MASON CITY — The City Council in Mason City last night approved a lease agreement as well as an asset purchase agreement for the Suzie Q restaurant.
The restaurant which opened in 1949 at 14 2nd Northwest has been closed since a fire destroyed the adjacent Kirk Apartments building in April 2023. Attempts to find a new owner for the business who would keep the iconic diner in the downtown area have not been successful.
The city’s Historic Preservation Commission has met with the owner, who would like the commission to take ownership of the building, with the commission working to reestablish the utilities to the building and develop a request for proposals for the reuse of the restaurant. The restaurant building sits on a portion of the same lot where The Kirk once stood with the site leased from the Kirk owner.
The restaurant’s water service was extended from The Kirk, and when the building was demolished, the water service was removed, something that City Administrator Aaron Burnett says will need to be taken care of. “When it burned down, people did not realize how intimately intertwined that building was with the Suzie Q. Services were brought off of that building, and so when that building burned down, it really made it impossible for that building to operate as it had previously, and from that point on was shuttered and did not reopen after the fire.”
The council approved to lease the land under the Suzie Q from the new owner of the Kirk property, A2E3 Properties LLC. Burnett says the lease does provide a 180-day notice if A2E3 wants to sell the entire property and the city would have to move the building. He says many places have been looked at as potential sites if a move needs to be made, but that’s not an immediate option under this plan. “It’s trying to figure out what is really the best from an historic preservation standpoint and also what’s functional because it does need to be visible enough that it can actually engage in business. It’s not just meant to be sculpture, so it’s trying to balance those interests and I think there’s some good locations that will do fine.”
The land lease would be for an initial one-year term with four annual yearly renewals through 2030, with rental payments of $250 a month, escalating in each year to a maximum of $400 a month in the final year. The other item the council approved was an asset purchase agreement with the holding company for the Suzie Q for $50,000, which includes all property, tangible property, as well as rights to all recipes, including the famous recipe for the Spic ‘n’ Span tenderloin.
