Bartender Hannah Lynch pours 10 orange peel pictures for a occasion group on Thursday, at Cliff’s Dive Bar in downtown Cedar Rapids. Co-operator Justin Zehr said downtown nighttime activity has picked up once more soon after the peak of the pandemic. (Geoff Stellfox/The Gazette)
Household and good friends of Wes Buckley, a previous Cedar Rapids resident, offer cheers Thursday in honor of his not too long ago deceased grandmother, Barbara Wright. They experienced attended a memorial service ahead of collecting at Cliff’s Dive Bar in downtown Cedar Rapids. (Geoff Stellfox/The Gazette)
A indication welcoming people today to downtown Cedar Rapids shines in the sunshine Thursday. (Geoff Stellfox/The Gazette)
Out of doors seating at Cobble Hill Eatery and Dispensary sits vacant Thursday underneath a indicator advertising and marketing emptiness in the adjacent commercial making in downtown Cedar Rapids. (Geoff Stellfox/The Gazette)
A detour indication directs website traffic as a result of downtown Cedar Rapids as development carries on Thursday. (Geoff Stellfox/The Gazette)
Business area that is commonly occupied sits vacant Thursday at the Higley Constructing in downtown Cedar Rapids. (Geoff Stellfox/The Gazette)
CEDAR RAPIDS — The automobiles roll into town seemingly all at once.
It is 5 a.m. on any supplied weekday, and a little cadre of staff toting laptop computer bags and donning organization apparel — collared button-down shirts, a gown, a pair of clacking heels — seems.
Hrs later on, after these employee bees depart their workplaces and peel out of their parking places, even more people stream into downtown Cedar Rapids to consider their place, filling the streets and parking plenty to grab some grub and chat over content-hour beverages.
Teenage trios pause briefly at a end signal, then speed up yet again as they turn on to Second Avenue SE, using by whimsically on electrical scooters. The sound of audio from a demonstrate at McGrath Amphitheatre carries more than the Cedar River and drowns out their laughter.
The activity is a welcome sight as the city main of Iowa’s 2nd-major metropolis shakes off the impacts of COVID-19.
By night time, this area on the east aspect of the river is a central place for close friends to mingle and for people to get and take pleasure in a comedy exhibit, musical functionality or every single other’s organization.
But by day, as pandemic-prompted do the job-from-dwelling appears below to continue to be, group stakeholders agree it is apparent the virus’ spread slowed downtown action — and business enterprise hasn’t solely occur roaring back.
In this reasonably new actuality, Cedar Rapids is not alone as cities all-around the country from Washington to Louisville encounter existential issues about how to spark new lifestyle into their downtowns.
A hub produced up of place of work towers, the city’s central district has very long experienced restaurants, retail and housing interspersed in it. But the pivot to remote or hybrid function formats has additional business vacancies and resulted in fewer daytime visitors downtown, putting the city core at a important juncture.
The town of Cedar Rapids is making ready to operate with the Downtown Self-Supported Municipal Advancement District to refresh its Eyesight Downtown grasp plan. This will be the to start with strategic exertion to ponder a route forward for the urban core considering the fact that the onset of COVID-19 in the spring of 2020.
“This is an prospect for us to re-visualize what we want our downtown to glance like, and it is undoubtedly dependent on the ecosystem in which we live now submit-COVID,” Mayor Tiffany O’Donnell reported.
COVID-19 saps downtown power
Late a person the latest weekday early morning, Justin Zehr sat with his again to 2nd Avenue SE inside of Cliff’s Dive Bar and Grill, one particular of the various downtown spot dining establishments he co-owns together with Bricks down the avenue, LP Street Food stuff on Third Avenue SW and many others. Behind him, only the occasional person or car handed by.
In advance of COVID-19, Zehr stated it appeared Cedar Rapids was booming. There was frequent energy and real enthusiasm bordering the city’s progress, he claimed. His dining places were being viewing document numbers. Metropolis officials had been in talks with builders to repurpose key downtown authentic estate.
The Heart of The usa Group prepared to flip the Warranty Bank creating and Previous Earth Theater into two accommodations below the Marriott flag, and developer Steve Emerson envisioned a 25-story large-rise near the Paramount Theatre with about 100 residential units, a grocery store, rooftop gardens and much more.
Immediately after some delays, other initiatives stayed the system inspite of COVID-19, which includes transformational developments these types of as the $81.5 million Initially and 1st West combined-use web-site that includes a Huge Grove brewery, hotel rooms, housing and additional on To start with Avenue W and To start with Street SW, as properly as the $52 million mixed-use “Banjo Block” progress adjacent to the Cedar Rapids General public Library and Greene Square.
But COVID-19 “took the wind out of” downtown momentum, Zehr stated. The pandemic set the Guaranty Lender and Paramount superior-rise assignments on ice, and with it, sorely necessary additions for downtown: resort rooms, more housing and a grocery retailer.
With most adult Us citizens vaccinated versus COVID-19, Zehr reported nightlife has mostly picked up all over again.
VenuWorks, the business contracted to reserve situations for town-owned general performance venues which include the Alliant Vitality PowerHouse, Paramount Theatre, McGrath Amphitheatre and the InOn Ice arena, has orchestrated concert events and situations that Zehr stated have offered a strengthen to nighttime visitors downtown.
It’s the daytime targeted traffic which is lagging, he claimed, with gradual lunch hrs proving “the largest miss” in the operate-from-household surroundings.
“The extra it is really booked, the improved it is for downtown, the far more strength there is,” Zehr explained. “But also, persons do require to get again to get the job done and they do need to get back again in the office. … Every single city this sizing ought to have a downtown that is quite related, and there really should be some issues likely on.”
Each time city leaders converse with executives of big downtown companies, they have an request, O’Donnell stated: “Get your people back to do the job.”
O’Donnell, a prime organizational leader herself as chief govt officer of Women Guide Adjust, said company leaders worry attempting way too tough, way too speedy to get workers to return to the workplace. They are grappling with a lack of skilled personnel and with the “Great Resignation,” an economic development of thousands and thousands of Us residents — dissatisfied with their positions, trying to find far better place of work disorders or opting to retire — quitting in unprecedented figures.
“They’ve appear to realize that in a war for expertise and in a war for workforce, if folks want to perform in the office a few days a week, they get to get the job done in the office a few days a week,” O’Donnell said.
Housing, lodge rooms vital
Remote function, retiring staff and corporate locale shifts have set out there place of work place in flux, explained Town Council member Scott Olson, a true estate broker, as cubicles and overall offices the moment stuffed with staff now sit empty.
District 3 council member Dale Todd, who signifies downtown and much of the surrounding core districts together with New Bohemia, Czech Village and Kingston Village, mentioned there are some downtown houses that have languished because the 2008 flood, COVID-19 worries aside.
“We are not working at our whole capacity due to the fact we nonetheless have a host of stragglers who have yet to capitalize on the prospect that the flood offered,” Todd said of those qualities, extra quite a few in the japanese-experiencing element of downtown.
The route forward, city leaders concur, is to insert far more housing where offices after ended up to generate a lot more activity and attract additional amenities, and to create at minimum one more hotel to enable VenuWorks reserve much larger functions that call for much more overnight visitor house. Other vacancies, this kind of as shut dining establishments, will probably “backfill” themselves in time, Olson said.
Emerson is perhaps the main developer supplying new daily life to real estate in the city main, having office environment spaces that at the time hosted firms that most likely under no circumstances would have returned and changing these underused buildings into housing.
Some of the renovations Emerson has concluded include the previous Grant Vocational Substantial School in Kingston Village and Smulekoff’s on the east bank of the Cedar River. Emerson is practically concluded with the Dows Constructing on Next Road SE and has two other tasks in the will work at the Skogman Constructing, 417 First Ave. SE, and the Iowa Building, 411 Third St. SE.
He claimed it utilised to be the situation that downtown was “a ghost town” simply because of its business-centric composition, but the action created by inhabitants in the city main appears to make it “vibrant and more healthy.”
There are eating places, bars, things to do these as axe-throwing and the river all in a single concentrated locale that is effectively-connected to the surrounding core districts, Emerson mentioned, so persons really do not have to migrate significantly to appreciate a good mix of leisure and facilities.
“Once you get plenty of men and women down there, it appears to be like you get ample of an electricity that all the sudden folks want to be down there and there are items to do,” Emerson stated.
To spur fascination in repurposing some of these areas, the Cedar Rapids Metro Financial Alliance introduced a “Race for the Space” method for aspiring and present organization entrepreneurs.
The chosen organization will gain $20,000 towards rent and establish-out at a chosen downtown house, a $7,500 credit rating towards architectural layout services and help, as well as an owner education and learning training course. The winner can decide on from five areas in the inventory based mostly on regardless of what suits its operation, said Jesse Thoeming, downtown govt director with the alliance.
“The objective was for it to be a attract to the form of organization that wouldn’t have even viewed as downtown Cedar Rapids, or possibly not even Cedar Rapids at all, with out this kind of plan,” Thoeming explained. “Uncertainty is the toughest variable for any existing or prospective business enterprise operator.”
This sort of a application will not fix the difficulty of business vacancies on your own, Thoeming mentioned, but it’s the Financial Alliance’s hope that it can move the needle to entice a new business and dietary supplement the attempts of a professional-economic enhancement City Corridor.
Downtown eyesight unwritten
Going for walks together a generally empty Next Avenue SE, Dante Tusing, 19, and Braxton Janda, 18, both from Cedar Rapids, mentioned they hoped to see the rest of downtown morph into something akin to NewBo.
It’s pleasurable to “terrorize the streets” on a scooter, Tusing stated. And with gas selling prices mounting, Janda claimed he likes “anything that can maintain me out of my automobile.” But they’d like to see additional gatherings and spontaneous issues for youthful people to do.
For the duration of a the latest evening at Chrome Horse in NewBo, the two explained they were sitting down down and eating ice cream, and two several hours later they were being attempting to defeat adults at a songs trivia match.
“We were being losing terribly,” Tusing explained, however Janda insisted they did not trail all that considerably at the rear of.
They agreed they’d like to see Cedar Rapids just take inspiration from Chicago, the place Tusing claimed there appears to be to be a additional shared feeling of neighborhood.
“Here it feels like we do not truly have a lifestyle or group or nearly anything genuinely pulling us all with each other,” Tusing said. “We’re just form of listed here.”
No matter how the facial area of downtown shifts, Todd insists the heart of the metropolis still is the area exactly where people today want to be. Downtown “will notify us what it definitely needs to be when it is time,” Todd stated, and it shouldn’t be when compared to other towns.
Thoeming stated the vital to building a “wow” variable to lure readers to the urban main is doubling down on general public art, modernized lights jobs that make a lit-up nighttime skyline and features this sort of as trails — everything that generates buzz.
Tim Kindl, co-proprietor in the local restaurant team with Zehr, reported downtown Cedar Rapids could use a grocery store or a bodega.
Right up until downtown increases it population density, Emerson said the grocery retail store issue is a “chicken and egg” state of affairs.
“We will need a grocery shop to guidance the citizens, but we have to have people to aid the grocery retailer,” Emerson said. “ … You you should not want to put just one down there now that is just likely to fall short or get rid of dollars.”
Kindl also recommended a “free parking Friday” to make downtown much more inviting for people to shell out time in, like throughout the river in Kingston Village or in NewBo exactly where motorists do not have to fork out to park. Zehr recommended a small home tax adjustment on the SSMID to spend for these types of an initiative.
O’Donnell claimed she was ready to ponder how to make totally free parking feasible to some extent even though downtown tries to “wake up and revitalize,” even though she understands the costs are a income generator for the town of Cedar Rapids.
She sees folks strolling their canine, driving Veo e-scooters and bikes, going to espresso stores and bars as component of the vibrancy of downtown. But she maintains a bigger eyesight — the bustling heart of the metropolis she campaigned on very last year.
It’s a downtown that includes walkable neighborhoods where by the necessities are in a 15-moment stroll, you can locate recreational activities or get a consume together the river and, after Iowa’s new two-yr moratorium on new casinos licenses expires, it’s possible — just possibly, just after two failed tries — Cedar Rapids citizens will have a $250 million leisure elaborate wherever they can gamble.
“We’ve got to make certain to have matters that folks come to down here,” O’Donnell claimed. “Let’s not make them. Let’s make them want to.”
Opinions: (319) 398-8494 marissa.payne@thegazette.com