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The wall of ... potential

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By Barb Ickes | Thursday, March 20, 2008 1:03 AM CDT | () comments

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There’s something cool about it, even if you’re not sure what.

The oddly shaped piece of land at Iowa and East 4th streets in Davenport has looked so tired and rundown for so long that I think we stopped looking at it. It was too depressing, too forgotten.

Now that most of the old W.G. Block plant has come down and a neighboring building is on its way down, the corner has a different look and feel.

It looks ... possible.

You can tell at a glance that the small brick building that stands amid the wrecking crew started life as a service station. It has that look — like some guy with a rag in his back pocket is going to walk out the door any second and cheerfully ask, “Fill her up?”

At some later point in time, the service station became a burger joint, said Gary Carter, the senior vice president of community and economic development for DavenportOne. He’s in charge of the Iowa and East 4th redevelopment and said he’s learned from looking into the spot that Davenporters once could get three “Wow Burgers” for a quarter there.

Maybe it was the price that put the Wow in the Wow Burger?

A couple of things about the land are making Carter’s charge of redeveloping it more tricky than usual. For one thing, it has a triangular shape. For another thing, it’s got that ugly retaining wall, which can’t be torn down because it supports the railroad above it.

But I’m not the only one who isn’t convinced that the highly tarnished retainer couldn’t be polished into a nifty gem. And I can’t believe I just used the word “nifty.”

Bill Ashton, who was hired to give an engineering assessment of the wall, is encouraging D1 to have a mural painted on it — something that serves as a handsome welcome into the downtown. His wife went another step, finding a photo of the first train to cross the tracks and suggesting that it might make a nice subject for the mural.

But wait. That’s not all.

Why couldn’t one of the talented muralists whose work is now part of the riverfront skatepark be commissioned to paint something totally cool and hip on the big, old wall?

Carter is smartly thinking along the cool and hip lines as he looks for new opportunities for Iowa and East 4th. After all, the neighborhood above it, with its made-over loft apartments, is teeming with young people.

“We’re trying to find something that would accommodate the growing neighborhood over there,” he said. “For the building we’re keeping onsite, we’re thinking about a café or something. We need to find a way to put some amenities down there.”

Well, hallelujah!

A creative muralist might even make use of the window-like openings in the great wall, which hold rusted augers that look like mounted machine guns.

Thank goodness the Block folks didn’t turn the land over to the last City Council.

I know what they’d have done with the old wall: Banged their heads against it.

Barb Ickes can be contacted at

(563) 383-2316 or bickes@qctimes.com.

Comment on this column at qctimes.com.