Art for art's sake

 

237 Collective on opening night

Welcome to the neighborhood! The 237 Collective has opened at 111 13th Street SE, near the Coe College campus at the edge of the Wellington Heights neighborhood. Owners Paxton Williams and Abby Long-Williams anticipate the space being used for art exhibits, sales of artwork and handmade clothing, and a "third place" style hangout.

Paxton Williams, whose artistic name is EBISU, kicked things off September 15 with a show called "Momentum."

 

Artist's statement

EBISU combined graffiti-style drawing with found objects. Where on earth was this one found?!

 The crowd on opening night was young and hip, at least when compared to your humble blogger.

Here's what the gallery looks like in daylight, in this more ordinary week. 

View from the front door

Additional artists' works are now displayed. There are thirteen artists in the collective, with two more immediate prospects.

The small (1800 square feet) building dates from 1920, and has been many things over the years, including vacant. It's been vacant a lot.

February 2022

It shares the lot with Cafe Allez, which is anticipated to open early in 2024 in the building occupied 2000-2020 by Brewed Awakenings Coffeehouse. Abby Long-Williams told Little Village that she hoped to spread the young entrepreneurial spirit from trendy neighborhoods like New Bo and Czech Village throughout the city.

Ideally they will be able to draw energy from the cafe, Coe College, and nearby churches and medical facilities. In any case, it's good to have such a creative and aesthetically pleasing venture nearby!

The gallery is open 11-5 Thursday, 11-6 Friday and Saturday, and 11-5 Sunday, with possibly additional hours in time. They plan a Parking Lot Market in October.

Mural on the alley side

SEE ALSO: Malcolm MacDougall, "237 Collective's New Hub for Local Fashion, Vendors and 'Underrepresented Artists' Opens in Cedar Rapids Friday," Little Village, 14 September 2023

Retro restroom, in the basement

Even a pretty MedQuarter isn't right

 

Entering the MedQuarter on 4th Ave at 6th St SE

Public art, gathering spaces, and coffee carts were among features proposed to the general public by staff of the MedQuarter District at a series of open houses last week. A series of story boards offered a wide range of possibilities, and hence of visions, for the roughly 1.5 square mile district on the east edge of downtown.

The district stretches from St. Luke's Hospital (1026 A Avenue NE)...

 ... to the environs of Mercy Hospital (701 10th Street SE), whose campus now stretches across 8th Avenue.

While some features might be more or less attractive to staff, patients, and city residents...

...overall the MedQuarter concept is a suboptimal use of this space.

Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (512 6th St SE)

Long ago, the land between 5th and 12th Streets East was full of city residents. An old picture I've seen of Bethel AME Church shows it surrounded by small houses. Today, the church remains, but sits by itself on the otherwise empty block. In thinking about the future of Cedar Rapids, and the need for affordable housing in walkable proximity to work and school and play, we need to restore historic neighborhoods like Oak Hill instead of emptying them out.

Some current MedQuarter restaurants

The vibrancy of downtown depends on connection to surrounding areas. Too much of the core, in spite of a couple thousand apartments coming online this year, remains oriented to attracting shoppers and diners from elsewhere (so, lots of bars and hair salons, no groceries or hardware). The Wellington Heights neighborhood on the southeast side is the densest in Cedar Rapids, but has no commerce of its own. The restaurants and bars and music venues of the core are fairly close by, but the walk there is bleak and barren.

You want parking? We got parking

There are ways of making that walk less unpleasant, with streetscapes and pocket parks and better lighting. A radical revision of the district could even cut back on its surface parking habit and go in for a dense mix of housing and small shops. Any of this would improve on what's there now, but I feel like I'm voting among false choices.

The fundamental purpose of the MedQuarter is to serve folks like Sophia and Jason here (and me) with hospitals and clinics that of necessity rely on outside clientele like them, and so need a great deal of territory where we can put our cars. Nothing that requires as much parking as the MedQuarter does belongs where the MedQuarter is.

Expansion?

SEE ALSO: "Filling in an Empty Quarter (II)," 25 October 2013

10th anniversary post: Our casino, then and now

 

Bellagio Las Vegas:
Will slots ring where pancakes once were served?

Ten years ago this month, I listened to a Strong Towns interview with Steven Shultis of Springfield, Massachusetts. Shultis, then the author of the Rational Urbanism blog, defended a deal that had brought a casino to his city. It led me to compare the features he liked about the Springfield casino with the Cedar Rapids downtown casino proposal. The resulting post, entitled "Their Casino, Our Casino," marveled that Springfield, a down-on-its-luck post-industrial city, got a much better deal both in terms of revenue and design, than Cedar Rapids did. 

That point became moot the following year, because the Iowa State Racing and Gaming Commission disallowed the Cedar Rapids casino on the grounds that it would pull business from casinos in nearby towns. This is a terrible rationale--what other industry operates with this level of state protection?--but this state government seems to exist mainly to thwart cities' plans, whether those plans are good or bad. 

In 2017, Cedar Rapids saw several more casino proposals, but they too came to naught. "Bill," a commenter on my blog, lamented that "now we are looking at a gaping open space on the west side of the river." Of course, the city had created that gaping open space in order to facilitate construction of the casino, but more importantly, six years later that hole is in the process of being filled! First and First, a high-quality multi-use development, will complement the surrounding area in exactly the way the casino would not have done.

Now, the casino is back yet again. In July, the Cedar Rapids City Council approved an agreement with a private firm to set aside land for casino construction at 1st Street and F Avenue NW, maybe half a mile north of where it was going to go ten years ago (Vaughn 2023; see also "Cedar Rapids Casino" 2022). The city gets credit for persistence, if not wisdom.

Casino benefits (and maybe costs, too?) are oversold. Any positive impact of a casino on either local economic development or state tax revenue is likely to be modest at best. Existing casinos, even protected by the state's anti-competitive policy, are hardly models of revenue generation. In 2017, during the last round of casino proposals, I noted that the well-worn shops on the Bever Block downtown, which have since been demolished, vastly exceeded in taxable-value-per-acre either of the region's two most successful casinos (in Clinton and Riverside). Moreover, neither Clinton nor Riverside is a model of a thriving city.

Economic studies, once you exclude industry-sponsored work, are extremely cautious about the local impacts of casinos. (See the review of research by the Richmond Federal Reserve District (Scavette 2022.)) Mike Walden of North Carolina State University summarizes the reasons for caution (Liotta 2019):

Obviously the economy questions: Will people come to gamble in your small town? For example, [even] if this is going into a small town there are lots of opportunities for gambling, not just going to Las Vegas or Atlantic City, but online, on your phone, et cetera. So that's one question, will new people come?

The spending would need to be new to the local economy, not money currently being spent at other venues ("substitutability"). 

You don't just want to build this off your existing population because what happens generally is if someone is already a resident in your small town, and they're going to spend money gambling, that means they're not spending the money somewhere else [in town]. So the whole point here is to attract people from outside.

Another factor is whether attendant social problems (addiction, crime) counteract the small increase in economic activity.

Will people flock to the casino on 1st Street NW in impactful numbers? Probably not. Nationwide, counties that open gambling venues see only marginal economic improvement compared to neighboring counties without those venues (Lim 2017, Radhakrishnan 2015). Even a gambling destination like Atlantic City "has difficulty keeping a single grocery store open" (Scavette 2022, citing Burch 2021).

Cedar Rapids is not a small town, we already have grocery stores, and our economy is not struggling. So it's safe to say we will not be Vegas on the Cedar, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. But businesses aren't required to be transformative before they open. Visions of tourism glory set aside, is there any reason to dislike this project? Alas, yes.

The opportunity costs for that land are painfully high. Businesses that get handed nine square blocks in the core of the city had damned well better be transformative. (See the map with the 2022 story for dimensions.)  If the casino was going to land on the edge of town, say by the extension of Highway 100, we would not be having this conversation. But we're going to land it on a huge chunk of the near northwest side that had been planned a few years ago for high-intensity urban development once flood protection was installed:

story board, 2017 Northwest side open house

As with First and First, anyone with imagination can come up with multiple projects for this territory that would blend more with the existing neighborhood and produce more return for the city: missing middle housing, a school, a corner grocery store and pharmacy, a hotel, a park, a downtown-scaled Target like the one just opened in Iowa City... anything really that wouldn't rely so heavily on out-of-town traffic and (gulp!) parking. Imagine Clinton's Wild Rose Casino--appropriately and conveniently located on the outskirts of town--plopped onto a large portion of our town's most valuable land. Make sure you have plenty of antacid before you do this, though.

The deal with Peninsula Pacific Entertainment is less advantageous to the city. In 2013, I thought we'd sold short compared to Springfield, but this version sells even shorter. Compared to the 2013 proposal, the footprint is bigger, the number of competing venues is greater, and the much-touted charitable donations the group has promised are lower. (I'm no movie expert, but I know the difference between net and gross!)

FEATURE	SPRINGFIELD	CR 2013	CR 2023
Street Position	Multiple pods within existing street grid	One pod on one megablock	One pod on even bigger megablock
Housing feature	54 market-rate apartments	None	None
Additional amenities	Bowling alley, movie theater (won’t compete with existing venues)	Restaurants, event center (competing with existing venues)	Bars, restaurants, event center, “foodertainment” center (competing with existing venues)
Annual taxation	$26 million	·       $1.2 million + 1 percent of gross receipts ·       charitable donation of 3 percent of gross receipts	·       Wagering tax information not found and may not have been decided ·       Charitable donation of 8 percent of net receipts
Legal status	Provisions fixed by voter-approved measure	Provisions evolving	Provisions evolving
Transportation	Casino workers can take bus to work, close to transit center	Limited bus service, not close to transit center	Limited bus service, far from transit center

I conclude this retrospective the same way I concluded the 2013 piece:

I expect the Linn County Casino is going to be built, and the results will not be all bad. However, despite its primo location the casino won't enhance the emerging urbanism of downtown Cedar Rapids, nor will it provide much needed connectedness between downtown and the near west side neighborhoods. How did Springfield, which is clearly in more desperate shape than Cedar Rapids, manage to swing such a favorable, far-sighted deal? How did Cedar Rapids manage to miss this opportunity?

SEE ALSO: Jim Kinney, "Taking Stock of MGM Springfield, Five Years Later," MassLive, 20 August 2023