Entrance, 803 3rd Avenue SE (approaching intersection with 8th Street)
(12/18/2025) Nearly a year after the closing of the 1st Avenue Hy-Vee, Waterloo-based S International Market opened a second location near downtown this spring. They specialize in South Asian cuisine, while also having a variety of basic offerings for any taste. The building was previously a Jeff Jones furniture outlet, and before that Hawkeye Seed Company; back in 1953 it housed the Kadlec Brothers Studebaker dealership on what used to be Auto Row. S International Market is open seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. It is not in a residential area, but is conveniently walkable to a lot of people east of downtown. The entrance is off the sidewalk on 3rd Avenue; its modest parking lot is east of the building.
The first section past the entrance has a wide variety of snack food. The health and beauty aids section is a sharp left turn once inside the door. Along the windows facing 3rd Avenue are gigantic bags of rice and other staples, enough to feed any size crowd or supply any prepper.
Looking through windows at great big sacks
I'd brought a short list for a pickup shopping the first time I visited, not really knowing what lay beyond the rice. They have a large selection of meat and eggs, but their milk collection was one gallon of whole milk. I didn't find yogurt in the cooler, which surprised me. When I asked the woman at the checkout, she found me their last bottle of yogurt drink, which didn't serve.
far aisle: cooking pots and more rice, produce cooler
meat selection
For Pooh: Honey and condensed milk (I couldn't find the "international preserves," though; I could have asked)
Coffee aisle; they also have an outstanding selection of teas
The coffee aisle included a variety of "white" coffee, which I hadn't previously encountered. According to Johny Morrison's highly informative Coffee About site, white coffee is a coffee bean that hasn't been roasted long enough to make it brown. (S International Market also sells "brown" coffee, another new term on me, but that's merely what before today I would have just called "coffee" [Color With Leo 2025.]) White coffee has a "nutty and earthy flavor profile," but are so dense and hard they can ruin home grinders (Morrison 2024).
They do not sell wine, beer or liquor.
I'm glad S International Market is in the area. For many people in Cedar Rapids it is their closest grocery store. If I were to do a serious shopping there, though, I would have either (a) to prepare by accompanying another shopper who knows what they're doing, or (b) just to plan my meals around whatever I can find, which could be fun but risky if you are cooking for someone else.
Today's haul at home: drinks and candy
S International Market joins Saigon Market, 803 2nd Avenue SE, one block away. Hornbill Asian Market, 1445 1st Avenue SE, will open Saturday, December 20. The nearest grocery with an African focus is Mula African Food Market, across the river at 425 3rd Avenue SW; several more are located farther out on the west side.
Wide sidewalk on Emmons Street approaching downtown Hiawatha
(12/16/2025) Of my three posts in December 2015, two were on the subject of sidewalks. We must not have had a white Christmas that year, because none of my pictures showed snow, nor did I mention the difficulty of walking in snow and ice. (I've done that elsewhere, though!)
Dan Burden at CSPS Hall, December 2015
Early in December, Dan Burden, author and Blue Zones director of innovation and inspiration, spoke at CSPS Hall, who praised Cedar Rapids' just-begun sidewalk construction program. Not only do "complete streets" perform better economically, he proclaimed, but sidewalks provide the opportunity for individuals to get exercise and encounter other individuals, which auto travel does not. The key, he stressed, is "completing the system," providing a network of sidewalks that get people to "places to go." In the years since, Cedar Rapids has effectively linked people to parks, stores and schools, albeit some neighborhoods were able to reject new sidewalks, and all the new sidewalks haven't stemmed the outward movement of people and places.
10 foot sidewalk on 3rd Avenue SE by Greene Square, December 2015
The city had also begun installing wider sidewalks in high-traffic areas, usually about 10 feet wide, as opposed to the old standard of 4-6 feet. I surveyed a number of sidewalks in the core, as well as a number of urbanists commending the use of wider sidewalks. The Change Lab Solutions guidebook Move This Way: Making Neighborhoods More Walkable and Bikeable(n.d.: 48) noted Generally, two couples or two wheelchairs should be able to pass each other comfortably on a sidewalk, which requires about 10 to 12 feet across....Ideally, sidewalks should also be wide enough to allow benches for older adults and families to stop and rest or relax.
Very wide sidewalk in New Bohemia, November 2025
The Cedar Rapids zoning code requires sidewalks in all new developments, but without respect to width except the usable part of the sidewalk must be not "less than five feet wide" (2024: 154).
Wide sidewalks are becoming more common, in some cases accommodating bicycle traffic as well. My perception is that the metro's initial forays into bike lanes in the 2010s has been mostly replaced by wide sidewalks. This can create confusion about whether bicycles are supposed to go, as on the Grant Wood Trail where it runs along 6th Avenue in downtown Marion:
bicycles will please divert: 1300 block of 6th Avenue, Marion
Having been surprised by a cyclist as I stepped out of the Marion Public Library, I applaud the intent anyhow.
When a planned shared path connecting to Washington High School raised concerns among elderly residents of Cottage Grove Place, the bike and pedestrian parts were separated in 2021.
sidewalk divides across from Washington High School (Google Earth screenshot)
Sometimes there is signage that indicates... an aspiration to being a shared use path?
This is not a bikeway, and it doesn't narrow
(The cognoscenti will recognize this as Emmons Street west of I-380, about a quarter mile west along the same sidewalk as the picture at the top of this post. They will also know that the Linn County Trails Association, as per the latest Trail Connections, is raising $100,000 towards an improved bridge to get Hiawathans to the Cedar Valley Nature Trail.)
Even that sidewalk is better than no sidewalk, however, which is the problem with Boyson Road in Hiawatha near the Cedar Valley Nature Trail, and more curiously, the north side of Twixt Town Road in Mairon where riders board the Marion Circulator (the far side of the street in this picture).
bus transfer station, Twixt Town Road
And, since we've had more than 15 inches of snow since Thanksgiving, it's worth adding that any sidewalk is only as wide as it's plowed.
In this picture: it appears the sidewalk was cleared before the street was plowed.
Part of the problem is the proximity of the sidewalk to the street (which puts pedestrians right next to traffic even in fair weather). In any case, don't attempt this stretch in a wheelchair or with a stroller!
(12/9/2025) My ignorance of the Chicago Pedway was inexcusable but real. Despite being born in the city, living most of my young life nearby, and continuing to make several trips per year from nearby Iowa, I had never been in the Pedway until last week. I found out about the Pedway from my son Eli, who joins me in my love for the Windy City, and who found out about the tunnels from a video made by University of Illinois-Chicago architecture professor Stewart Hicks:
"The Bewildering Architecture of Indoor Cities" (13:11; discussion of the Pedway begins about 3:15 in)
So, on a bitterly cold December day, Eli and I sought out the Pedway. In the course of the morning, we covered maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of its five miles. The Chicago Pedway is neither as well-marked nor as well-equipped as the Minneapolis Skyway, though it has more commercial spaces than Cedar Rapids' Skywalks.
The first trick is finding your way in. Entry points aren't well-marked at all. Even when you locate an access point, that's no guarantee of access; the Pedway is not maintained by the city, but by individual property owners, which means availability is not easy to predict.
This skywalk across Clark Street is an unusual section of the Pedway, most of which is underground.
Clark Street: another no go
Alas, it too was closed.
Eventually, we found a way in through the basement of Macys department store, formerly Marshall Field's, at 111 North State Street. In this part of the Pedway, there are wayfinding maps...
Barbara's is a Chicago-based bookseller with mutliple locations
Once through a rudimentary passage across Randolph Street...
...the action really begins. There are some fast-food restaurants in a fancier section across Michigan Avenue.
Pedway getting bougey
fast food collection near train station
(Note that the space on the left is for rent. If you've always wanted to own an underground business, now's your chance!)
There was even an Amazon Go store, which surprised me. I didn't realize they were still around, much less underground!
130 East Randolph Street
The restrooms were a little scary, but sometimes in a storm any port will do.
restrooms, Chicago Pedway
The Pedway also connects to two train lines, the Metra Electric which serves the south side of Chicago, and the South Shore Line which serves commuter stops between Chicago and South Bend, Indiana. Both the waiting areas...
festive waiting area
...and the tracks themselves...
South Shore Line
...were very seasonally festive. Kind of a Polar Express vibe, which I don't get at the larger stations at the west end of downtown.
If you come in on a train that stops at Millennium Station, finding the Pedway is easy. It's also easy to find from some parking garages as well as Lower Randoph Street, where there are more entrances/exits.
Lower Randolph Street near Michigan Avenue
Urbanists like Jeff Speck criticize skyways, and by extension pedways, for taking foot traffic off the streets. While that's a fair criticism in Minneapolis, I didn't observe that here. At least around Randolph and Michigan, there were many more people at the surface level than in the Pedway, even with the bitter wind.
Overall, the Pedway was a novelty, but a bit chaotic for the first-time visitor. Along the way, I spotted a Dollop Coffee, but when I tried to return I could not find it a second time. Here phone apps are no help, because the addresses don't distinguish between surface and underground levels. One Dollop Coffee location (150 North Michigan Avenue) led us to a very corporate building, with security guards who looked like they wanted me to buy coffee there only so they could shove it up my... I settled for a surface level Stan's Donuts at 181 North Michigan, which was very satisfactory.
We couldn't find how to get beyond where we ended. Referring to the map above, we could get to #25 but not to #37 or #50. After surfacing, we made a couple halfhearted attempts to rejoin the Pedway north of Millennium Park, but eventually saved that for another visit. I'd call it a fun prowl, worth doing if you know Chicago well, but hard to navigate and dubiously functional.
"T3": 200 block of Johnson Av NW (Google Earth screenshot)
(12/2/2025) Work continues apace on Cedar Rapids' casino, due to open at the end of this month. In time, when it is a fabulous success and we are all rolling in prosperity, you can tell me how dumb I was back in 2025 for my negative outlook.
There are three reasons to oppose casinos. The first two relate to the morality of gambling and the class distribution of gambling losses (which fall much more on the poor). There are also doubts, given the rise of Internet gambling, whether brick and mortar gambling still has a future. I'll take all those as read, but my specific complaint about this casino has to do with its use of land. We are taking several blocks close to the center of the city, which should be used for more intense development, and using it for what is ultra-suburban development.
Casino, under construction, F Avenue view
Andres Duany, one of the earliest new urbanists, described traditional development patterns as a transect that gradually tapered from the most intensive development at the urban core ("T6") to agricultural ("T2") and natural ("T1") areas at the edge of town. (See the discussion at Steuteville 2017, as well as Andres Duany, Jeff Speck and Mike Lydon. The Smart Growth Manual [McGraw Hill, 2010], 1.4)
This ordering is "useful" (Steuteville's word), because it preserves space in urbanist design for nature and agriculture, enables people not to be completely dependent on cars, provides a unified concept of development, and allows that development to proceed in harmony with surrounding areas.
Future casino parking. I-380 in background
Development according to the transect is more inclusive by centering economic opportunity on the urban core. Kevin Klinkenberg (2015) wrote about why urbanism matters most in urban cores: If we truly care about the less fortunate in society, we would want them in places of maximum opportunity for access to jobs at low cost--not scattered about in suburbia. Less need to drive, and more green space at the edge of town, is also better for the natural environment on which we all depend. And making intense use of the most valuable land is better for city finances.
Casino construction, from 1st Street NW
Cedar Rapids, like most towns, was built according to the transect long before Duany coined the term. Downtown looks like "T6" and the core neighborhoods look like "T3." The problem is that, in the decades since the town was built, the area around town that was once "T4" and "T5" was gutted and remains a doughnut of emptiness. Instead of small but intense development that could provide customers and clients for downtown businesses as well as property tax revenue for the city, we have what we have, making for a car-dependent city and lots of complaints about parking.
Future casino parking
City officials are enthused about the advent of the casino--scheduled to open 12/31/2026--because they know the political value of a flashy project that gets a lot of attention and promises fun for all. But I wish the casino campus, parking lots and all, would look more like the stretch of Johnson Avenue pictured above, which I called in 2022 one of my favorite streets in the city. The nine blocks of this project could be a neighborhood with workers and shoppers for downtown as well as neighborhood businesses, and students for nearby schools if we ever decide to build schools near the center of town again (another sore subject, for another day). The tax value of an individual property would be small, but collectively they would likely provide more city revenue than the casino will.
If one of the residents meets with misfortune, the neighborhood will survive, and the house will survive under new ownership. If the casino fails, I think we're looking at a big box with a long term vacancy.
If we must have a casino, put it out on Route 100.
One last look, from the trail along the Cedar River
It felt like it! (And on the Celsius scale, it actually was.)
(11/28/2025) Consumer confidence may be down at COVID levels, and Black Friday ads are increasingly oriented to websites, but it's still Black Friday. If you give a boy a parking lot, he's going to want to take a picture of it. At least it was warmer than last year, though at first not by much. Eventually the sun came out and it was all right.
Along the way, I saw this marquee.
Question, 224 Collins Road NE
The riddle was not funny, which weirdly reassured me I was not becoming hypothermic.
Answer, 224 Collins Road NE
Strong Towns started Black Friday Parking in 2013; my first year was 2015, covering roughly the same territory as this year. For the record, I also wore the same Garfield School sweatshirt. The Parking Reform Network has taken over the promotion, but the point remains the same: to document excess surface parking, even on what is arguably the busiest shopping day of the year (Lefebvre 2025).
I started a little past 9:00 at the bus stop on Twixt Town Road, close by the Collins Road Square shopping plaza. It was maybe one-third full.
Collins Road Square, looking towards Petco
Collins Road Square, looking towards Michael's
Across Collins Road is Lindale Mall, which dates from the early 1960s, but the Collins Road side has gotten quite the facelift. Its many parking lots were half-full, maybe more.
Lindale Mall, parking lot facing Collins Road
Hobby Lobby had the fullest parking lot I saw, easily 60 and maybe 75 percent full...
180 Collins Road, looking towards Hobby Lobby
...but even that plaza had plenty of empty spaces.
180 Collins Road, other side of the plaza
There were no cars parked in the huge lot on the other side of Collins Road. It has been vacant since the Hy-Vee grocery store. I don't know for a fact that Hy-Vee is retaining ownership of the building and just leaving it vacant, but I wouldn't put it past them; they tried that at their Mound View store, which also remains vacant anyhow.
empty parking lot at vacant building, 279 Collins Road (utility pole cleverly used to block sun)
Across Northland Avenue from the former grocery store, however, Northland Square plaza's parking lot was well used, being at least 60 percent full.
Northland Square from the east
But even today, there were plenty of parking spots going unused.
Northland Square, middle of the plaza
I cut across the Collins Aerospace parking lot--mostly empty, with a skeleton crew working today--and ended up at the Blairs Ferry Road Target. It had a lot of shoppers, and its parking lot was at least two-thirds full...
Target parking lot, east edge
...but a great big parking lot is hard to fill.
Target parking lot, west edge
I've said most years that I don't think these particular parking lots are driven by mandates in the zoning code (though those do exist). It's just how we develop commercial strips. Collins Road may be the ghastliest such strip in our city--though the Westdale area gets some votes, too--but it's just one example of development we shouldn't be doing. The parking lots themselves are just part of the damage, but they do more damage in town than they do on the suburban edge. I'll have more to say about that in a future post.
In a Strong Towns post entitled "What Comes Next After Abolishing Parking Mandates?" Tony Jordan of the Parking Reform Network argues that repealing such mandates is the first step on road to truly walkable cities:
To build the type of cities we want, to take advantage of zoning reforms that re-legalize compact, walkable, and transit-rich neighborhoods, we have to continue to pursue comprehensive parking reforms that go beyond repealing minimums and actively combat car dependency. Fortunately, these additional reforms and strategies are also simple, impactful, and fiscally advantageous. Cities should price their curbs to manage demand and spend the revenue on infrastructure and programs that improve safe, convenient, and equitable access to our communities for people traveling by any mode, not just in their cars. (Jordan 2022, italics mine)
(11/25/2025) I don't know quite what to make of the whirl of events surrounding Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), third term member of the U.S. House until recently known for a series of inflammatory statements that made her one of President Trump's most vocal supporters in Congress--and, however weirdly, one of the most effective at rallying the base and getting under the skin of Democrats: "Once greeted with derision by Washingtonians as a shrill and zany show pony, she is now seen more as a savvy operator who understands the conservative base like few others" (Draper 2025).
I also don't know what to think about the Epstein files, information related to the superpedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who died in 2019. Releasing the files won't get anyone fed or access to health care, nor will they help us mitigate climate change. Nevertheless, the Trump administration has been turning themselves into pretzels to keep them under wraps, so I can only conclude there must be something in there that Trump needs us not to know.
Yet, while Attorney General Pam Bondi, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Sassmonger in Chief Karoline Leavitt have done what they can to protect the President from Epstein revelations, Greene was one of four Republican House representatives to sign a discharge petition directing the files be released by the Justice Department. All four personally resisted Trump's calls to unsign the petition, which passed both houses and then was signed by Trump. Shortly thereafter, Greene (alone among the four hardheads) announced she would resign her congressional seat after the first of the year.
[A}ccording to interviews with friends and associates... she had become politically isolated, feeling betrayed by Mr. Trump, disgusted with her own party and friendless among the Democratic opposition. When Mr. Trump announced on Truth Social last week that he had had enough of Ms. Greene’s apostasies, labeling her “Marjorie Traitor Greene” and threatening to run a primary opponent in her district, Ms. Greene felt blindsided. Terrified by the ensuing wave of death threats aimed at her and her family from apparent supporters of Mr. Trump, she could no longer see any upside to duking it out in the political arena. (Draper 2025)
I am not imagining that Greene has had a road to Damascus experience, and that she will now be advocating for abortion rights and citizenship for immigrants, or that she will join a holy order like Duke Frederick at the end of As You Like It. If she is a candidate again, or if she attempts conservative media stardom (Drenon 2025), I expect she'll be the same old MTG. (Call it the Megyn Kelly rule?) I don't feel at all sorry for her; she is reaping the whirlwind that she herself sowed. I am, however, impressed that she found her moral core, a line across which she would not take her partisan hackery.
In our city, we're not going to agree on everything, and on some things we will find ourselves to be strongly opposed. But I for one can respect, and deal with, people who find some core values that are more important to them than partisanship or financial advantage.
Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 173 pp.
He strikes a match and holds it to his cigarette.
"I'm not the right person for this life," I say.
"Who is?" he says, exhaling in my direction. (36)
(11/14/2025) Ten years ago this month, I reflected on the defeat of a local referendum to raise the library tax, and read Vivian Gornick's celebration of life in New York City, while the world around me was showing gun violence, terror attacks, and anti-Muslim sentiment. This month, Cedar Rapids voted down bonds that would have funded public school capital projects ("Cedar Rapids Schools Thank" 2025), and a white nationalist cadre is fueling the Trump administration's tear-gas attacks on American cities and their terror campaign against immigrants (cf. Schulze 2025, Carrasquillo 2025). Seemed about time I revisited Vivian Gornick.
Ready to read, at Brewhemia in New Bohemia
On second reading, her segmented essay proved to contain so much more than I'd caught the first time through. She indeed celebrates the life around her in her long-time hometown, but out of need more than pleasure. Like Thomas Merton, her days have included both dark nights and promising dawns. Parker Palmer (2011: 36-38) would describe hers as a "heart broken open," with love born from pain.
As I reread The Odd Woman and the City, I found myself underlining and circling, marking passages with abandon. It's worth noting that I almost never do this. Some people do. U.S. President John Adams engaged in a running dialogue with whatever he was reading, at least once scrawling "Fool! Fool!!" at some work that displeased him. I wasn't arguing with her, though, just trying to keep up with the numerous dimensions in her reflections, as she jumped around in time, and roped in exemplars from street people to other writers. There is so much I wanted to show you in this book that I didn't discuss in 2015. It would probably be easier on you, me, and Gornick, though, if you just read it.
"The City" is, after all, only part of the title. "The Odd Woman" is Gornick herself, which she announces early (p. 4), but without telling us why or how. In time she tells us that, growing up in the Bronx, she and her friends were already walkers, and what she saw as she walked up and down the streets of Manhattan showed her what she anticipated would be her life (p. 11, p. 51). But it was not to be, despite advanced degrees, relationships, and jobs. She simply could not--would not?--fit in anywhere. Her longtime friend Leonard tells her:
"Fifty years ago you entered a closet marked 'marriage.' In the closet was a double set of clothes, so stiff they could stand up by themselves. A woman stepped into a dress called 'wife' and the man stepped into a suit called 'husband.' And that was it. They disappeared inside the clothes. Today, we don't pass. We're standing here naked. That's all." (36)
Freedom from traditional roles had become freedom from any role, intolerable because "no one wanted freedom" (p. 121), an insight she attributes to Henry James. She identifies with Mary Barfoot, the main character in George Gissing's novel The Odd Woman; Rose, the mother in the musical Gypsy; and John Dylan, an actor whose stroke left him with a speech impediment that he used to disturbing effect in a public reading of a work by Samuel Beckett.
Gornick's oddness, and her "inability to make peace with" herself (p. 19), is survivable only in the city. Walking becomes a sort of therapy once "nothing turned out as expected" (p. 14), but it is even more than that. It is her connection to people: Leonard, with whom she converses so intently that time becomes unreal (p. 17); the active residents of Manhattan's West Side, which she prefers to the "calmer, cleaner, more spacious" East Side (p. 94); and even the men in line at a soup kitchen, who remind her of journalist's line about "ruined faces worthy of Michelangelo" (p. 152). "It's the voices I can't do without" (p. 173), like the three she samples in rapid succession on pp. 37-38, but she is also comforted by all the nearby presences as she goes to bed at night (p. 21).
Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)
Along the way we meet her mother, ex-lovers, other friends, and any number of writers on these themes, including the poet Charles Reznikoff (p. 38), the novelist Isabel Bolton (p. 79; see also Bloom 2016), and Frank O'Hara, who wrote: I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people don't totally regret life (p. 42). Once you allow for the possibility of oddness, it's everywhere.
Gornick is still with us at 90; she turned 80 the year The Odd Woman and the City was published. In old age, she seems satisfied she's figured out what her problem is. But it continues to be the people of her city who make the "odd" life satisfying. She concludes:
I am home, having dinner at my table, looking out at the city. My mind flashes on all who crossed my path today. I hear their voices, I see their gestures, I start filling in lives for them. Soon they are company, great company. I think to myself, I'd rather be here with you tonight than with anyone else I know. Well, almost anyone else I know. I look up at the great clock on my wall, the one that gives the date as well as the hour. It's time to call Leonard. (175)
