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Twenty-five years ago, you couldn’t dine 600 feet above downtown Des Moines. Not without a balloon, anyway. When you were bringing someone north from the airport in the evening, you couldn’t point to a brightly lighted spot on the skyline and say, “Look – the world’s largest vodka ad.”

If you wanted to hike around Gray’s Lake at lunchtime, a machete would have come in handy. You could play a round at Ponderosa Public Golf Course, but you couldn’t do much shopping nearby unless you were in the market for a bushel of corn right off the combine.

If you talked about public art, people thought you meant spray-painted graffiti. If you said you lived downtown, they wondered under which bridge.

It’s all different now. Politicians like to talk about change, but anybody who has been a Greater Des Moines resident during the past 25 years has lived it.

Of course, we here at The Depot tend to think that the most appalling thing about early 1983 was that you couldn’t read the weekly Des Moines Business Record, because up until October there wasn’t one. There was a Daily Record, and it had started carrying some business news, but it still focused on its original function as a place to keep track of what was happening at the Polk County Courthouse.

You could find out everything that was on the docket for judges Luther Glanton and Anthony Critelli and James Denato, but just a little about the world of moneymaking.

Then, as Connie Wimer recalls, the judges decided they didn’t need the information provided by the paper she had bought in 1981. Unfortunately, she still had several years of payments to make. So she decided to roll the dice and turn it into a pure business newspaper.

This was a year after the Des Moines Tribune folded, leaving the Register as the only newspaper in town and turning a few surplus journalists loose to wander the streets and clog the bars. Was it really a prime moment to start a new publication?

Well, CEOs, mayors and legislative power brokers have come and gone, but the Business Record is still here. Daily newspapers lose ground every year, but we are grateful to report that we have more paid subscriptions than ever. Plus our e-mail products and the quarterly Commercial Real Estate Guide and so forth.

So we’re going to commemorate the past 25 years with a special publication this fall, celebrating both the Business Record and the remarkable transformation of Central Iowa during that quarter-century.

We’re going to ask some of you to help out in an organized way by participating in roundtable discussions. We hope even more of you will take the opportunity to share your thoughts in person or by e-mail or phone. Or click here and it will take you to a page where you can contribute thoughts and photos.

Tell us what matters most to you about the past 25 years in Des Moines. Share your stories about how things really got done. Pay tribute to the people who made things happen.

For sure, you can get a lot more out of living in Greater Des Moines now than back in 1983. There’s more to look at, more to do and more pride in being part of it all.

You can take visitors downtown and show off Western Gateway Park, the “Nomade” sculpture brought to town by John and Mary Pappajohn, the coppery library, the Iowa Events Center, and so on. If they like funky neighborhoods, there’s the East Village. If they’re power shoppers, take them to the Jordan Creek neighborhood and get out of the way.

Then there’s the Des Moines that visitors can’t see but longtime residents know so well. Those of us who have been here through it all can talk about an endless string of people and moments that shaped the place. We’ve been through caucuses that brought national attention and a flood that did the same. We’ve seen the Des Moines Arts Festival soar and watched big shows and bigger stars take their turn on the Civic Center stage.

Of course, we’ve also experienced a few running gun battles and our share of ice storms, and every now and then somebody unfastens a riverboat from its moorings and ruins the fun for everyone.

But, hey – that’s just life in the small city.