AS ALL KNOW, or at least are repeatedly told, Rome has a “historic” Broad Street/downtown area. One supposes it is necessary to keep repeating this as any actual history is difficult to detect. There is a difference between history and “interesting old architecture,” the latter of which is definitely front and center.

Other than the Rome Area History Museum and its windows, any reference to past events hereabouts is impossible to find. Come to think of it, even the old-looking buildings might simply be discarded leftovers from a movie set. Perhaps “Gone With the Wind” was filmed here.

That’s why the suggestion of Ann Pullen, design committee chair of the Downtown Development Authority, should be seconded and pursued. She wants historic pictures put in the storefront windows of now-empty, for-lease buildings showing them as they once were.

That’s still not actual history but at least of some interest — sort of like the sidewalk informational past/present views this paper has suggested (and that Cedartown has in its downtown). Or the brass placards on building fronts telling what happened there, an earlier and apparently moribund project. Or retuning the exiled statues to Broad Street, one of this newspaper’s oft mentioned proposals.

If Rome’s oldest portions are all about the considerable amount of notable events that occurred there, why isn’t that worth seeing?