Eastside Story
Last week the city held a second district planning meeting where city planners revealed a proposal for rejuvenating the nearby commercial district, Towncrest. (I attended the first meeting last year but bailed on this one when I learned that Justin Townes Earle was playing.) By the Press-Citizen’s account, it sounds as though reviving Towncrest will be accomplished with the same sort of multiuse architecture the city is building elsewhere: glass-walled commercial space on the first floor, apartments and maybe office space on top. It’s an architecture that has had some success in town, such as in the Northside neighborhood it has also made an unfortunate mess of south Gilbert Street. Still, I like that the city wants to improve the area, and in the interest of continuing the dialogue, I’d like to offer up some ideas for the kinds of commerce the neighborhood could use.
- Restaurants. Towncrest needs at least two that aren’t chains or Hy-Vee. First, the neighborhood needs a good sandwich place that serves an affordable lunch. Guido’s Deli is a fine model for the kind of place that would work. (If the river floods again this year, let me be the first to invite Guido’s to pack up the kitchen and move east.) Second, the neighborhood needs a good dinner destination. The kind of place hardly matters, though it should welcome walk-ins. ( How nice an evening dinner for two followed by a stop at Heyn’s for ice cream could be!
- A salon. What better thing to bring the neighborhood together than good stylists?
- A bar. My former neighbor Al, who was wanted by the police months after he skipped town, sang the praises of Shakespeare’s when we moved in, and it seems to be a nice townie bar. However, the neighborhood could use another bar down Muscatine Avenue that’s not the American Legion Hall.
- A natural foods market. Could the east side support something like another branch of the Co-op or (gasp) an independent natural foods store? I’m not sure. There are already two chain drugstores here to sell the vitamins, and the downtown Co-op may be too close to draw people from neighborhoods such as Longfellow-Twain—and to be sure, a natural foods store here would need to draw customers from neighborhoods closer in. But a natural foods market would be a fitting complement to the 1st Avenue Hy-Vee. If it had good organic vegetables and bulk spices, I would shop there every day.
- A tattoo parlor. Every neighborhood should have such a stay against gentrification. A night club with live music could serve the same purpose. So, too, could an adult superstore, but that’s not really my style.
That covers cosmetics, lubrication, and food. I hesitate to suggest anything like clothing stores—though the Iowa City/Coralville area as a rule could really use a good shoe store; the options, especially for men’s shoes, are really horrid—because I don’t think it will ever really fit the character of this neighborhood, not before Iowa City becomes a much larger city, anyway. If the neighborhood really is made more walkable, imagine it could supporting artist studios such as Fired Up Iowa City and other, similar creative economy-type small shops. But such possibilities are farther in the future than the ones I’ve named here.
