Quad City Images

23/09/2025

Darrin Nordahl was the City Designer for Davenport from 2006-2012. After his position was eliminated due to budget cuts, he wrote this editorial in the QCTimes. I think it is even more applicable now, especially with city elections coming up. In our non-partisan city elections, it isn't the typical R vs D conflict. What we typically come down to is a faction that wants to grow Davenport and understands that amenities and development are important to that goal, and the opposing faction that tends to repeat "streets, sewers, and cops" and typically scoffs at any quality of life improvements or amenities. I think most readers of this page know which side I come down on.

Darrin was one of the biggest believers in Davenport needing to think bigger. He created dozens of renderings like the one below, showing underutilized areas of Davenport, and what they could become. Unfortunately, especially since the departure of Craig Malin, Davenport has consistently failed to live up to this editorial, or the idea of thinking big. The area shown in the image, Mound and River Drive, still sits sadly vacant. Mayor Matson's mantra of "Safe, Stable, and Welcoming" is the lowest of goals for a city. I think we can do a lot better, and I'm hoping to share more of how we can think bigger in the coming weeks.

07/09/2025

Tired of people who say otherwise.

21/08/2025

Throwback Thursday: Back in 2006, the Adler Theatre underwent a pretty massive expansion and modernization of their stage, which enabled them to bring in larger Broadway-style productions. The lesser-known part of this project, was removing half of the north/south wing of the Mississippi Hotel. The way they went about this was by lifting a mini-excavator onto the roof, and slowly demolishing the east side of that section of the building, floor by floor. It also involved setting up a mini tower crane in the east lanes of Brady Street for many months. The remainder of the former hotel and apartment building were renovated into the Mississippi Lofts as part of this project.

I watched all of this from my apartment at the time, in the Crescent Lofts. Sadly, my digital camera at the time had no optical zoom, so I actually took many of these images by holding binoculars up to the lens of my camera! The later phots were clearly taken after I had upgraded my camera. I also believe that because of this project, the entire wing of the Mississippi Hotel/Lofts building along Brady is empty and basically just a shell or facade to keep up the appearance of the building, but maybe someone more in the know can correct me on this. You can see in the Google aerial photo that the section behind the expanded stage is half as wide as the wing along 3rd Street.

19/08/2025

It's been a while since I've done one of these. Where in the QC is this?
(This is probably a pretty easy one)

05/07/2025

Sports Illustrated featured Modern Woodmen Park and the Quad Cities River Bandits as part of their Stadium Wonders series this week, and it's quite a glowing review. Dave Heller certainly does a great job talking up not just the stadium and the team, but the Quad Cities as a whole.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIcujX8NrhI

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25/06/2025

Like any social media space, the Quad Cities sub on Reddit can be a depressing place, but there are occasional redeeming interactions that make it worth checking out. This week someone asked, "What is one thing you dislike about the Quad Cities no one really talks about?" I kind of stream-of-consciousness ranted out the following, but I think it does accurately portray my feelings about the QC's lack of community pride, so I'm sharing it here.

𝐖𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟-𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐞𝐦 𝐚𝐬 𝐚 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐮𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐮𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬.

People think we don't deserve nice things, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for them when anything bad happens. You can see it all over this thread. "We shouldn't have more parks, because there are homeless." Having a better quality of life for everyone, and trying to address the national problem of homelessness are not mutually exclusive. This also causes us to accept less, because public officials are like, "It's just Davenport, we should just accept what we can get."

People who have barely traveled think things are terrible here. I've been to 30 states, and haven't discovered an obviously better place to live. There are places with better amenities or higher quality of life, but they tend to have insanely high cost of living. I can live here and visit the Rocky Mountains every year, or I can live in Denver and work 60 hours a week to break even, and barely get to visit the mountains. Living here I can visit Chicago any time, but not deal with Chicago freeway traffic every day.

People that have lived here forever take for granted everything we have going for us. The whole phrase "bridge to nowhere" implies that the Mississippi riverfront is nowhere. People come from around the world, or pay 10s of thousands to go on Viking cruises to see the Mississippi, but to us it's just "the river." We have a PGA golf tournament. There are only 36 of those, and we are something like the 135th largest metro in the US. I'd certainly call that punching above our weight, not to mention the whole charity per capita aspect of it. The Figge is an extremely impressive art museum for a metro our size, but it gets ignored by most in the QC. We have a waterski show that rivals anything you see at Seaworld or wherever, but most people don't even know about it. The QC makes a ton of money off of tourism, but many locals don't think anyone visits here.

On the other end of the spectrum, people in Des Moines think that they live in the best metro in the world. As annoying (and wrong) as they are about it, overly positive thinking works out a lot better for them than overly negative thinking does for us. When people are proud of their hometown, that feeling rubs off on visitors.

But to wrap this up, I think the whole "We don't deserve nice things," attitude towards quality of life improvements is the worst consequence of our low self-esteem. Quality of life is everything in the modern world. People who work from home can live anywhere. If we make this a great place to live that also has $160k nice homes, we don't have to constantly chase the next manufacturing plant or data center. Companies come where people want to live. If we don't build amenities because we have other problems, that's just asking to head into a death spiral.

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17/06/2025

Back in September of last year, there were a bunch of articles about the fact that Dave and Busters had applied for a liquor license for a Davenport location on Elmore. Since then, there haven't really been any follow up articles, including the fact that they were granted their liquor license. Some people may have suspected the project fell through.

But no, Dave and Busters is definitely coming. There's a job listing for a General Manager for Davenport on the Dave and Busters website, the real estate company for the strip mall it will be located in is listing it as an anchor, and construction has started on the section of the building in question. The only thing left to wonder about is how soon it will be opening, and what effect it will have on Malibu Jacks, QC Family Entertainment Center, and (doubtfully) the Bettplex arcade. As some long time QCI fans know, I've been a big supporter of these kinds of businesses for almost 2 decades, (https://quadcityimages.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-gameworks-is-and-why-we-need-it.html) so I'm certainly happy to see another entertainment option coming to the QC.

08/06/2025

I have such fond memories of Saturday morning bike rides with my family that involved a stop for breakfast at the bike path McDonald's. It's good to see a local established company take over this spot. Hopefully they can bring back this experience.

🕰️ Throwin’ it way back! 📸 ✨ If you have any old pics of this spot, we’d love to see them!
🍟➡️☕️We are collecting memories for the bigger Coffee Revolution!

29/04/2025

More Figge LED testing images. Animated GIF in the comments.

22/04/2025

Wow. The lighting of the Figge is a part of the Destination Iowa/Main Street Landing project that has kind of flown under the radar compared to the park, but they're testing it this week and it is amazing. There's an official Glow Up party in May, so if you don't catch it during the testing phase, make plans to attend that event.

04/04/2025

I haven't posted much recently, mostly because it's been a rough couple of years to be a fan/defender of Davenport and its civic institutions. I'm hoping with a new Mayor coming, and a new City Administrator, Davenport can start fresh over the next couple years.

Main Street Landing should be a very visible sign that Davenport is improving again. It's fair to say that I've been waiting for yesterday's groundbreaking for a long time. My whole QCI online presence pretty much started when Davenport was working through the original River Vision process, and during that planning process, it was revealed that the casino was interested in building an 11 story hotel on the riverfront. That controversy certainly fueled a lot of online blog discussion.

Since then there have been so many different plans, concepts, and visions for Davenport's riverfront. Some of the plans, like River Vision's design for the area between Gaines and Marquette, were mostly completed. Others were never started. The last remnants of the casino were removed in 2017, and the centerpiece of what should be a world-class riverfront has sat vacant since then.

Different groups, from the Riverfront Improvement Commission, to the Downtown Partnership, to the Figge, tried to nudge the city towards doing something, but it took millions of dollars in free money appearing via the railroad, Covid-recovery funds, and a Destination Iowa grant to finally convince City Council to spend essentially zero city money to do something that should been done a decade ago.

But now it is FINALLY HAPPENING. The bids came in where they needed to, dirt is being moved, and yesterday several dozen riverfront supporters gathered to officially break ground on Main Street Landing. As long as tariffs or our current political hellscape don't interfere too much, by next fall families will be coming from around the QC and beyond to spend time on Davenport's riverfront. The Skybridge has never been a "bridge to nowhere," but it will be a bridge to more than ever once MSL is completed.

There are a lot of doubters, particularly online, but I believe them to be a vocal minority, as they've always been in Davenport planning and politics. To them, I suggest they wait and see. For all of Davenport's recent troubles, they did hire world-class experts to design this park, and I think it will be wildly popular. I can easily see families that would normally pass through Davenport on I-80 en route to Chicago from Iowa City or DSM detouring into downtown to let their kids play at Main Street Landing, and then grab lunch at Front Street, Barrel House, or any other of the dozens of great restaurants downtown.

Davenport needs to grow. The answer to attracting new residents is no longer the 1990's dream of landing a new manufacturing plant or corporate office. The answer is to be somewhere that people want to live. Main Street Landing is a big Yes to the question of whether we want to be a place like that. I can't wait for the ribbon cutting.

31/08/2024