Cedar Rapids tour provides historic insights

By Kaye Ross
The Gazette

CEDAR RAPIDS — I had an epiphany near Roosevelt Middle School on Saturday that had been gestating for about 45 years.

A tour bus stops Saturday in front of the flood-damaged City Hall on May’s Island. City Hall, formerly Veterans Memorial Coliseum, was built on fill land. Cedar Rapids is one of one or two places in the world with its government on an island. Photo by Cliff Jette.

My grandparents Mart and Edna Hockemeyer made many trips here from Indiana when I was a kid to visit us. Grandpa loved to tease me, and was barely out of the driver’s seat when he’d start in on the name Cedar Rapids.

“We came to See the Rabbits,” he said. “Where are those rabbits? Kaye, you go get the salt and we’ll get us some rabbits. You have to put salt on his tail — that’s how you catch a rabbit.”

On Saturday, local historian Mark Stoffer Hunter was talking about historic areas in flooded parts of town on a Cedar Rapids Area Convention & Visitors Bureau bus tour when the bus slowed down near Roosevelt at 300 13th St. NW.

Roosevelt was one of four junior high schools built in the 1920s to relieve overcrowding in the town’s old elementary schools, which at the time included students through eighth grade, he said. The school, of course, sits on an enormous hill that drops down to a flat grassy spot now called Hill Park.

Did we know, Hunter said, that the park was the site of Cedar Rapids’ first ballpark? There were no Kernels then, he said. The team was called The Bunnies — because Cedar Rapids sounds like Cedar Rabbits.

Grandpa!

I am sure that every one of the 155 other people who took one of the four tours with Hunter had his or her eureka moment just as I did.

And I think Hunter may have been secretly hoping that would happen, because as he noted places where buildings from the past no longer stand, he made the point over and over that we should think about the decisions being made today on what to keep and what to tear down after the great June flood. Similar judgments made by our forebears meant the loss of Union Station on Greene Square and ornate homes on Mansion Hill.

Can we avoid creating future generations’ own great regret, their Union Station?

See a list of historic sites in Cedar Rapids

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