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| (The Daily Times. June 24, 1905) |
Free admission. Free movies. Free concerts. And a roller coaster to compete with the new one at Suburban Park in Davenport. I didn't see a price listed here, but from what I've seen elsewhere, rides were 25 cents and the lines were out of this world.
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| (Davenport Democrat and Leader. April 9, 1905) |
The coaster was seventy feet high and ninety feet wide, and had a total length of nearly 300 feet. The paper said readers could view three cities from the top of the roller coaster.
It was to be erected north and west of the pavillion and was expected to be in operation by June 1.
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| Colorized image, showing the cast of The Balkan Princess |
The Balkan Princess was performed at the Burtis Opera House on March 30, 1913. The Daily Times descibed it as a "bubbling musical comedy." It was filled with sentiment and happiness and told the story of the romance between Princess Stephanie of Balavia and Grand Duke Sergius.
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| Motorcycle police officers Edwin Blackhan and John Bryant |
Automobiles were multiplying, drivers were
testing the limits of speed, and the old methods—foot patrols and horse
officers—couldn’t always keep up. So the department bought a motorcycle.
The plan was simple. A motorcycle officer
would remain near the station house. When an emergency call came in, he was
dispatched, racing through city streets faster than any patrol wagon could
manage.
The first motorcycle officer was Charles
Boettcher. He set the pace for the new experiment, proving that two wheels and
a powerful engine could change the way a city was policed. When Boettcher moved
up to detective work, Olaf Dahlquist took his place.
By 1914, the motorcycle squad had become
indispensable. The Davenport Democrat and Leader said the
department would be “lost” without its motorcycle officers. Speeding
automobiles—sometimes called “auto speed maniacs”—were becoming a menace. The
department answered with a machine built to match them.
They chose a Flying Merkle, a powerful
motorcycle capable of reaching 55 to 60 miles per hour. That speed made it more
than a novelty. It made it a weapon against reckless driving. As the department
put it, a “motorcycle cop is the only effectual solution of the auto speed
maniac problem.” It took a high-powered car to escape a motorcycle man, and few
drivers owned one.
In the spring of 1914, two officers carried
the city’s motorcycle duties. Edwin Blackhan handled the daytime shift. John
Bryant took the night watch.
What began as a simple experiment quickly
proved its worth. Within a year, Davenport’s motorcycle patrol wasn’t just a
curiosity. It was essential. And plans were in the works to add another cycle.
Map showing the proposed route of the Davenport-Iowa
City Interurban Railway. Company name: Davenport, Iowa City & Western
Traction Co. It would run within five miles of the Rock Island and Clinton-Iowa
City branch of the same road.
(The Daily Times. October 18, 1909)
The Davenport Democrat and Leader printed this picture of the newly built Columbia Theater and Hotel in 1913. The building at Third and Ripley Street in Davenport was built by T. J. Walsh at a cost of $150,000.
The H. C Kahl home on Marquette Street Hill in Davenport as it looked in 1913. Kahl, vice president of the Walsh-Kahl Construction Company, built the home at a cost of $200,000.
(Colorized photograph from the Davenport Democrat and Leader. December 29, 1913)
Crescent Macaroni and Cracker Company
Flames gutted the
Crescent Macaroni and Cracker Company on January 25, 1915.
The plant at Fifth and Iowa Streets in Davenport, Iowa, was the largest macaroni company in the country. The company that employed 250 laborers and 35 salespeople had its best year in 1914, requiring employees to work overtime most of the year.
The fire broke out shortly after 8:15 p.m.
Night watchman George Montz said it started in front of oven number one on the west side of the plant. He turned in the alarm at 8:16, but nearly twenty minutes passed before the first fire company arrived.
But for a stretch of time, it had an inn sitting right at its center.
Nicholas Fejervary built the mansion in the 1800s,
up on the bluff with a clear view of the Mississippi. It wasn’t tucked away. It
was meant to be seen.
In 1902, his daughter gave the property to the
city of Davenport. The mansion became an inn.
And Davenport used it.
Weddings filled the rooms. Clubs held meetings
there. Community dinners ran long into the evening. If something important was
happening in town, it was happening at the Fejervary Inn. People dressed up,
shook hands, and looked out over the river like it were part of the evening.
It didn’t last. By the 1930s, the building had
been torn down.
Now it’s just park. Grass under your shoes. Trees
overhead. A regular afternoon.
But once upon a time, this wasn’t just green
space. It was where the entire town turned out for events and celebrations.
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| Visitors at Monkey Island |
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| Police Officer Henry Janssen |
A patrolman steps into the dark never knowing if the next call will be nothing more than rattling doors—or the last thing he does. Most nights blur together. Fights broken up. Drunks sent home. Lives nudged back from the edge.
Then
there are nights that change everything.
At
4:10 a.m. on May 1, 1911, Davenport police officer Henry Janssen answered what
sounded like another routine call. A burglary at 330 West Fifth Street. Night
Desk Sergeant Henry Nagel dispatched Janssen and Detective Sidney La Grange to
investigate. The city was quiet, the kind of quiet that makes footsteps sound
louder than they should.
As
the two officers rounded the corner of Sixth Street, they nearly collided with
a man moving fast in the opposite direction.
He
was in a hurry. Too much of one.
The
officers stopped him.
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| Charles Grilk (from The Daily Times. April 4, 1924) |
Roosevelt arrived like the weather. Loud.
Electric. Unavoidable.
That morning, he took breakfast at the Davenport
home of novelist Alice French—known to readers as Octave Thanet—one of the most
powerful literary and political voices in the state. The table was crowded with
influence. Words were chosen carefully. Futures were weighed between coffee
cups.
Then, Roosevelt and Grilk went to Central Park.
Thousands packed into Central Park in Davenport.
Roosevelt spoke. The crowd surged. Grilk stood beside him, absorbing the force
of borrowed gravity. It was a public anointing. A signal that this young
Davenport lawyer had entered the bloodstream of national power.
He lost that race, but the door never closed again.
Grace Reed on Utica Ridge Road? That story crawls under your skin and refuses to pay rent. Margaretha Nehlsen poisoning her own kids with chocolate—chocolate, of all things—makes you want to interrogate every candy dish you’ve ever seen at a church potluck. And Harry Hamilton, the ex-cop who decided law enforcement was more exciting when you were shooting at it—he’s the kind of character you expect to find at 2 a.m. in a tavern that claims it closes at midnight.
The book doesn’t guide you so much as shove you down a gravel road at high speed, shouting facts at you through the open window. There’s a feverish energy to it, the sense that the author has been living on gas-station coffee and county-archive dust for far too long. Each chapter feels like it was pulled from a file drawer that local officials swore didn’t exist.
The project was huge for the Tri-Cities — the biggest construction job anyone around here had taken on. The new temple was planned to be 150 feet wide, 160 feet long, and 100 feet high. Trinity Church had to come down to make room, and its stone was crushed and packed into the new foundation.
Construction was supposed to take a year and a
half. John Soller said it would be ready for the Shrine and Consistory classes
in the fall of 1922.
The dining room was expected to seat 1,200 people,
and there’d be a billiard room, game room, and even a soda fountain.
Primo Carnera hit the Tri-Cities like a runaway circus elephant that suddenly decided to walk upright and take questions. People had whispered about him for months—the giant from Italy. He was built like a locomotive—six-foot-eight, two-eighty-five, wearing size-23 shoes that looked less like footwear and more like state-issued pontoons.
Primo Carnera (left), Al Singer (right)
The papers printed a photo of Carnera looming over Al Singer, the Bronx firecracker who usually strutted into a ring like he owned the joint. Next to Carnera, he looked like some doomed newsboy drafted into mythology by mistake. Singer was coiled and ready. Carnera looked like he was debating whether to punch, or simply let gravity do the job.
He wasn’t here to fight. Just an exhibition match on July 10, 1930, at the Palmer School’s open-air arena. A chance for the locals to gawk at something their brains refused to classify as normal. Crowds swarmed him. They wanted to touch the hands, measure the shoulders, stare at the monstrous shoes and swear they weren’t hallucinating.
When help reached the site, the wreck looked unreal. Seven cars were thrown off the tracks—some half-buried in the dirt, others twisted into crooked piles. A cattle car had exploded into splinters. Thirty head of cattle lay dead or dying, their moans drifting across the fields. The Davenport Democrat and Leader said the pitiful sounds could be heard for blocks.
How
the three-man crew lived through it was a mystery.
Engine
No. 2529, run by engineer Thorpe, had been crushed into a tangle of iron. The
fireman crawled out first on his hands and knees, shaking and scraped raw but
alive. A witness said he looked like a man clawing his way out of the jaws of
something that meant to kill him.
