Window Wonderland

Next Page Books on 3rd St SE (Window Wonderland winner)

The Czech Village-New Bohemia Main Street District is celebrating the winter holidays and welcoming shoppers with festive window displays. A brisk walk around the district last weekend identified these memorable efforts, which hint at placemaking days of yore when store windows like Marshall Field's in Chicago were must-see destinations.

Analog Vault on 11th Av SE (best newcomer) warmed the heart of this former college radio dj

Fong's Pizza on 3rd St decorated their totem pole

Parlor City on 3rd St has a lot of window space to cover. They went with a Nightmare Before Christmas theme.

Found & Formed on 16th Av SW went for the more traditional "Night Before Christmas"

Lucky's Tavern on 16th Av is having a white Christmas

Create Exchange on 16th and C (2016-17 winner). This is a small sample of their efforts.

Our arrival in Cedar Rapids coincided with the end of Armstrong's, the last of the downtown department stores; it was up to Smulekoff's Furniture on 1st Street SE to keep up the window tradition for years after that. In that heyday of shopping malls, hardly anyone cared about having a civic space where people gathered to celebrate holidays like Christmas.

Today's resurgent downtowns have smaller shops, so decoration-as-destination/placemaking requires coordinated effort. The district is... getting there.

Official city tree in Green Square downtown