I don’t know how many of them will be torn down. I know a lot of those houses have damage that is devastating. It would cost more to fix them than tear them down. I hope that after we get those torn down, we can, over time, get new housing built back in there.
—JOHN BERGE, PRESIDENT OF THE CZECH VILLAGE ASSOCIATION1
As I mentioned previously, Czech Village’s 16th Avenue SW was where my Grandma Uchytil did much of the family shopping and where, I suspect, Grandpa did much of his drinking. The Avenue—with its unusual mix of arts and crafts, food and bars, and even, later on, a detective agency—was exotic territory to a young city boy visiting each summer from Chicago. I was often introduced as “Charlene’s boy. From Chicago.” The food Grandma served was also exotic, much of it with a Czech flavor.
My grandmother Georgia passed away in 1981 and, if I can indulge in a very non-midwestern activity of bragging, she was the greatest cook on either side of the Mississippi River. You should have tasted her three-color layered gelatin salad. About fifteen years after Grandma died, my mother sent me dozens of Grandma’s recipes, all neatly written on index cards. They were often annotated with comments. On the three-color layered gelatin salad, which does not skimp on white sugar or marshmallows, Grandma wrote, “Large batch. Real good and festive.” Achingly sweet too, I might add.
Her kolachky, a popular Czech jellied pastry, was to die for—or to die from. Well worth an early exit. This was robust Midwest cooking, much of it made with fresh vegetables and berries from my grandparents’ large garden on Fruitland Boulevard. Each morning during the summer, I took my cereal bowl into the garden and helped myself to red raspberries. Brown eggs and bacon came from nearby farms, and although no one was advertising any of this bounty as “organic,” I imagine most of it was just that. Yes, the chickens were free ranging, but only until Grandpa caught them by their necks and cut their heads off. Then we ate them.
I noticed that mainstays on Grandma’s recipe arsenal were packed cups of sugar, fistfuls of Crisco or lard, stacks of cream cheese (used in her kolachky), and infinite sticks of butter.
Out of these ingredients and her oven came jam thumbprints, apple strudel (from a Mrs. Padzensky, may she rest in peace), oatmeal carmelitas, strawberry delight cake, Mrs. Kretas’s rye bread, peanut blossoms, toffee and pumpkin bars, Amana nutmeg cookie balls (makes four dozen), pork chops and dumplings (I had trouble with the dumplings), mountain of mashed potatoes with butter lava erupting down the slopes, almond butter sticks, poppy seed coffee cake, and noodle pudding. Almost all her recipes fed at least two to four dozen guests. The attention to volume suggests a time when groups of neighbors and relatives had time to eat and visit.
I have no recollection of seared tuna salad, veggie burgers (although she did experiment with a soybean sandwich), huckleberry vinaigrette, or blackened swordfish. I do recall Grandma burning some fried Cedar River catfish. It was indeed blackened. And we ate it.
In the Fruitland Boulevard kitchen, and probably up and down the street, bread was always rising and hot wax forever cooling in jam jars. I used to press my dirty kids’ fingers in the hot wax and also was scolded for prematurely punching down the bread dough.
Our regular stops were Polehna’s Meat Market and, across the street, Sykora Bakery. Both were devastated by the 2008 flood. With the area under eight feet of water, not a single business on the Avenue went unscathed. Polehna’s closed for good in June 2008; Sykora reopened on April 18, 2009.
Mike Ferguson, owner of Polehna’s (est. 1931), lamented the loss. “Polehna’s not being in Czech Village or coming back is a shame. There’s nothing positive about Polehna’s not being there. It was a part of the Avenue, just like the museum, the bakery, the pillow shop, Arbuckle’s Tattoo, Czech Cottage, the Red Frog, and everybody. It was a part of it that made it work. There’s no sense in Mike Ferguson wallowing around in self-pity because his business got flooded. It sucked. And I hate it, but there’s nothing I can do but move on.”2
The owner of Sykora Bakery, John Rocarek, said that 160 volunteers from across the country came to Czech Village to help out. “The bakery has been here since 1903, so it’s going to continue to be a Czech bakery. We’re hoping to keep the tradition going.”3
One of the objects the flood could not wash away is the original limestone stoop that welcomes customers into the bakery. The stoop is worn down from the millions of footsteps that have entered the store over the decades. It gives me a warm feeling imagining Grandma’s bare feet momentarily cooling as she stepped from the stone into the bakery.
The importance of Czech Village, not only to Cedar Rapids but also to the region, cannot be understated. This is a rare cultural neighborhood and business district in an area of the nation that is known, unfairly, for its cultural homogeneity. Bohemian Day, observed on June 14, 1906, included a speech by Joseph Mekota, who noted that “Cedar Rapids is known as the Bohemian Athens of America.”4
Czechs still make up 10 percent of the city’s population. The impact the 2008 flood had on the neighborhood homes and 16th Avenue’s shops and the area’s anchor, the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library (NCSML), also cannot be underestimated. Postflood Czech Village and Little Bohemia, the neighborhood directly across the historic 16th Avenue Bridge—the “Bridge of Lions”—that spans the Cedar River, were in peril of disintegration.
The area meant a lot to my grandparents and to my mother and her two sisters. My family’s connection to the Czech community is contained, for example, in the obituary for my late Aunt Paulee Georgia Boisen: “Born Sept. 27, 1937, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Charles and Georgia (Klima) Uchytil, she married Robert L. Boisen Feb. 1, 1958, at St. Ludmila’s in Cedar Rapids . . . A graduate of Mount Mercy College, she taught first grade at St. Ludmila’s in Cedar Rapids, where her first class consisted of 54 students . . . ”
St. Ludmila’s is a Catholic church in Czech Village, not far from the Czech National Cemetery, and the venue for the annual St. Ludmila Kolach Festival.
If a socioeconomic blue-collar background defines Time Check, Czech Village is defined by its ethnic heritage. As historian Mark Hunter writes in the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library’s magazine Slovo, Bohemian immigrants first arrived to rural Linn County in 1852 and then began to move to Cedar Rapids after the Civil War. Bohemia is a region of what is now the Czech Republic. In 1872, when T. M. Sinclair relocated his meatpacking plant from downtown to Third Street East, “the nearby Bohemian immigrant population suddenly had a good source of longterm sustainable employment.”5
In the 1890s most of the Bohemian businesses were located in the South End neighborhood, or Little Bohemia. That changed with a shift of businesses to the other side of the river after 1900, such as the Douglas Starch Works. At the same time, much of the Czech settlement was displaced when downtown Cedar Rapids expanded. Soon 16th Avenue SW was the place to be; new schools and churches followed. The Czechs, in turn, supplanted a melting pot of Syrians, Lebanese, and Russians Jews on 16th Avenue.
Hunter writes, “As early as 1906, the ‘Industrial Club of 16th Avenue West’ was established. Later known as the 16th Avenue Commercial Club, the organization functioned as a chamber of commerce to promote and support the efforts of Czech businesses. These efforts paid off, and within a few years, 16th Avenue SW was established as a major shopping district for Cedar Rapids, second only to the downtown area between 1920 and 1960.”6
The year 1941 seems to be a pivotal business marker for Czechs in Cedar Rapids moving into professional occupations. In The History of Czechs in Cedar Rapids, Volume 1, author Martha Griffith compares 1880 with 1941. The growth in Czechs occupying professional jobs is impressive. By 1941, 10 percent of all the lawyers, 22.2 percent of dentists, and 20.2 percent of physicians and surgeons in the city were Czech. In 1880 there were no Czech dentists; in 1941 there were sixteen. “Thus by 1941 the Czechs had entered practically all of the businesses and professions in Cedar Rapids.”7
But I like the idea the Czech Village once had a potato chip factory, four meat markets, and two rival hand-rolled cigar companies.
In 1975 the area was officially named “Czech Village.”
My first visit to the 16th Avenue business district after the flood was four months later, in October. I arranged to meet John Berge, president of the Czech Village Association, in front of the flood-damaged National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library at the end of the Avenue. The NCSML, opened in 1995, attracts 35,000 tourists a year and is an integral part of Cedar Rapids’ Czech Village neighborhood. I remember visiting the museum with my father. The exhibits were stunning. On this autumn day a sign announces that the museum has been moved temporarily to Lindale Mall.
At the height of the 2008 flood, the museum was surrounded by ten feet of water. Inside, the level of muddy river water reached eight feet. An aerial photograph of the museum’s rooftop poking through the raging Cedar River became the defining image of the catastrophic Great Flood of 2008.
I notice that all the streets that fan out from the river’s edge in Czech Village are filled with vacant houses and keep out, no trespassing signs. The houses are the same modest, wood-frame structures that can be found in Time Check.
In the Summer 2009 issue of the NCSML’s magazine Slovo is an article on the museum’s oral history project. This story summed up the flood’s horrific effects:
Marie Cada, whose home in the Czech Village neighborhood was flooded. Born in Czechoslovakia and orphaned as a child, she survived World War II and then became fearful of the communist influence in her homeland. In 1948, Mrs. Cada, pregnant with her first child, escaped with her husband from communist Czechoslovakia by crossing a river under fire from military guards. They were refugees in Germany and Sweden, where their son was born, before coming to the United States. When asked what, among all the traumatic events of her life was the worst, she responded, “The flood was the worst. Out of all of it . . . Why? Because you lose everything.”8
The seventy-nine-year-old Berge is known as the “Mayor of 16th Avenue.” Like Jon Galvin in Time Check, John reminds me of the men Grandpa might have known—men not shy about manual labor and who knew how to fix anything. That might have been true about Berge, but I was surprised to learn that he owned the Two Star Detective Agency, a business on the Avenue. Berge is Norwegian, originally from Decorah, Iowa, not a Czech from Cedar Rapids, he jokes. He wears jeans, a plaid shirt, and old Wellingtons. He has lived in Cedar Rapids since 1952. He has a noticeable limp and asks if we can rest just a few minutes into our visit. I clip a microphone to his shirt pocket, and we begin our walkabout down 16th Avenue. Later when I listen to the tape I notice that Berge’s sentences are short, like haikus. Lots of “yups” and “yeahs.” Similar to Grandpa, he is a man of few words.
Me: Grandma was always barefoot and she would drive down here to Polehna’s. They had a sawdust floor.
Berge: Yup.
Me: She’d buy these hot dogs that were all strung together with skin, and she’d give me a couple in the back seat to eat on the way home.
Berge: Yeah.
Me: Do you remember the Uchytils?
Berge: No I don’t. You mind if we sit down?
Me: No.
Scattered teams of workers are hard at labor, gutting businesses and hauling flooded drywall and other materials to dumpsters. Piles of recent garbage still line the curbside by Ernie’s Bar. Even with the buzz of destruction and construction activity, a pall hangs over the street. Commerce is absent. Water lines on power poles and buildings mark the high-water level of the latest flood, around ten feet.
Except for the LIMITED ENTRY signs, most of the messages are hopeful. The Bohemian Cafe & Pub amazingly says, OPENING SOON.
At Polehna’s: DOWN BUT NOT OUT, THE $$’S IN THE FREEZER. THANKS EVERYONE, AMERICA RULES. MIKE + BARB (with a heart) There is a peace sign.
In the window of Berge’s Two Star Detective Agency is a line of muddy rubber boots and a sign that says, LOOKING FOR VOLUNTEERS TO FILL THESE BOOTS. He has owned the agency since 1979, as well as an antiques store next door.
Other signs proclaim: SAVE CZECH VILLAGE; SAVE OUR VILLAGE; and SEND VOLUNTEERS, NEED HELP.
Past the Czech Feather & Down, we stop and look in the darkened, empty Czech Quarters Pub, the kind of place where my grandfather would stop for a drink after work at the bus garage.
I ask Berge what will become of the flooded houses in the neighborhood. “I don’t know how many of them will be torn down. I know a lot of those houses have damage that is devastating. It would cost more to fix them than tear them down. I hope that after we get those torn down, we can, over time, get new housing built back in there.” He notes that few of the victims had flood insurance.
During the crest Berge went home to Decorah with his daughter. “On Friday the water was already in the area here. I went over to get on Interstate 380. Traffic was so bad on the interstate that it took me two and a half hours to gets from Wilson Avenue across town. I went to Decorah for a family reunion the next day, Saturday. I came back on Sunday and it was still a mess. I felt that I needed to get away from it. There was nothing I could do anyway.
“From the interstate I could look out and there was nothing but water. I mean, the water level was probably two miles wide—from right here, all the way across the way on the other side. It was devastating.”
Berge says his detective agency was operating right up until the flood. Gas was turned off two days before the June 13 crest, and electricity was switched off a day before. But his business was not the only personal loss his family suffered.
“My daughter lives over on 10th Street. She lost her house. It’s going to have to be demolished. But my granddaughter lives just around the corner from her, and they’re getting [their house] ready so they can move back in. But they were in the 500-year floodplain. The sad thing is, even with all the dikes we had, the water level was so high it still ran over the top of them.”
Me: Tell me about your detective agency. What kind of cases do you investigate?
Berge: I am primarily in the security end. I had about 125 people that worked for me.
Me: Before the flood?
Berge: Before the flood, yeah.
Me: Did you have to lay them off? Berge: Oh, yeah.
Me: They were full-time employees?
Berge: No, they were all part-time, but I lost all my equipment. I had over $50,000 worth of radio equipment that went down the drain.
Me: Did you have a good business?
Berge: Yeah, I had a pretty good business. I’m going to rebuild. I want to get back in there.
Me: I would imagine you had flood insurance.
Berge: No, I didn’t have flood insurance. You see . . .
Me: They won’t insure this town; I imagine this part of . . .
Berge: Well, you can get flood insurance. Me: For a lot of money. Berge: It’s apparently expensive, yeah.
Me: I see.
Berge, pointing to the plate-glass window in his own business: And this window got broke a couple months ago, or a month ago, when these people shot it. Shot it.
Me: These people?
We stop while Berge talks to various owners and workers, who still seem in shock, then he keeps up a short, running commentary on each business. “This was a saddle (or a feather pillow) factory. She’s over in Mount Vernon now, and I’m not sure if she’s coming back or not.
“The bakery . . . John Rocarek, the owner, is in the process of rebuilding. He’s hoping to be ready by Thanksgiving. And this building here . . . the same person owns both of these, so I don’t know what will happen. This window was broken in the flood, so . . . That’s brother and sister. She owns this, and he owns this . . .
“Al is going to wait until spring, I think, before he decides what he’s going to do . . . he’s not talking about redoing it; he’s talking about either renting it or selling it. And what he’s asking for sale, it’s going to be a long time selling . . . This one here I’ve heard may be a meat market, they may—have to see what’s happening. This one’s going to be a new Bohemian restaurant. They’re done inside, except they need a hood for the vent for the kitchen . . .
“This was a drugstore, a wholesale druggist, and he’s getting ready to . . . he’s been in operation, but he’s still finishing up now. Shirt shop, and I don’t know. I talked to Betsy, and she said she is coming back. But . . . ”
One owner, “D,” fills me in on flooding in other parts of the Midwest. She has family in St. Charles, Missouri, across from the often-flooded town of Grafton, Illinois, where the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers come together. I ask about some condominiums that were built right on the river in Grafton. She says that miraculously they were not flooded this time.
Me: Well, it won’t happen again for 500 years.
D: If it does, I’m out of here. Out. Gone. For sure.
Me: Move to New Orleans?
D: Ha! I’m going to Arizona, where it’s dry. It can never rain again as far as I care.
Berge: Well, we kind of need rain.
D: Yes, we do need a little bit.
Me: Just a little.
Berge: In proportion.
D: In proportion.9
We say goodbye and I wish her well.
Later I read this quote from Berge as part of the NCSML Oral History Project: “As far as the Avenue is concerned, yes, we’re coming back . . . It’s going to take awhile, but we will be back, all of it . . . I’m seventy-nine years old, but I can tell you this, I can cry over the fact of what happened. And I did shed a few tears. But people, the people down here . . . are coming back, and that’s the attitude.”10
After I leave Berge, I stop in at Czech Cottage, a shop filled with beautiful crystal and folk art. Owner Jitka Schaffer does not remember my grandparents. I write out their names: Charles and Georgia Uchytil. She recognizes the last name, “common in the Czech Republic,” but she pronounces it differently than I learned it.
“Have you been there?” she asks, meaning the Czech Republic. No, I think, 16th Avenue is my Czech experience and, for now at least, like much of Cedar Rapids, it is in tatters.11
Leah Wilson’s footsteps echo through the gutted corridors of the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library (NCSML), which is perched on the banks of the Cedar River, one foot above the hundred-year floodplain. It is now February 2009, almost a year since the worst flood in the history of Cedar Rapids, and the NCSML is empty except for an ancient printing press; a bronze statue of Tomás Garrigue Masaryk, cofounder and first president of the Republic of Czechoslovakia; a chandelier; and 600 boxes of salvaged books. The floors have the texture of sandpaper; the walls have been stripped to the studs. At the time of the flood, damage was estimated at $9 million. That number would rise to $11 million. Contributions poured in (one even from the 2008 Obama presidential campaign), including more than $400,000 from the Czech Republic.
Leah, director of marketing and communications for the NCSML, remembers her first thought when she and other staffers were finally allowed back into the structure on June 17.
“From a public relations standpoint, you are always supposed to carefully consider the descriptions you use. Well, I’m going to tell you, it felt hopeless,” Leah recalls as she looks around at the empty display halls dusted with grit and sand. “It really did. I was walking into an utterly unrecognizable landscape. The smell itself knocked me off my feet. And to realize that this scene wasn’t relegated to a small part of the city either, that it consumed over ten square miles—I was overwhelmed by a profound sense of loss.”12
Leah confesses that she is new to Cedar Rapids and has only been with the museum for a year. She recently completed a master’s degree at the University of Iowa. Like Christian Fong, Greg Eyerly, and Shannon Meyer, Leah is part of a wave of new, younger leadership that stepped forward during and after the flood. Leah has long brown hair and a calm, easygoing nature that instantly made me feel calm as well. She seemed the perfect person to talk to media types like me.
The Cedar Rapids Gazette’s aerial photo of the submerged museum, its red roof sticking up bravely out of the muddy Cedar River, became the image of the flood itself. And when one followed what was left of the structure down 16th Avenue, all that could be seen was an ocean of muddy river water.
Leah would write later about viewing the damage for the first time in the museum’s magazine, Slovo: “A heavy layer of silty sediment covered the ground and the air rising up from it produced an acrid, almost corrosive odor, resulting from a toxic swill of organic and inorganic substances. To this day, flood survivors talk about the unforgettable stench that stung the eyes, nose, and throat.”
As the staff made their way across the once neatly manicured garden, they found flower beds full of sand and assorted flood debris. That was nothing compared to the wreckage inside the building. Janet Stoffer, NCSML’s director of operations said, “I was stunned. I just couldn’t believe the magnitude of devastation. It looked like a war zone.”
The exhibits were destroyed. Cases were upturned; temporary walls built inside the exhibit halls had toppled. Years of work were undone in only a minute. “Curator Stefenie Kohn stood taking pictures, tears streaming down her face. ‘It looks like a tornado went through here,’ she said, shaking her head.”13
On June 11, two days before the crest, although experts said the risk was minimal, an incredible effort to save the NCSML’s artifacts, books and manuscripts, and gift store items was ongoing around the clock. The prioritized materials were loaded into two semitrailers. Other items were placed in the museum attic or in a nearby collections facility. As the river rose, museum staff and volunteers furiously sandbagged the perimeter of the structure, but it was ultimately hopeless. Leah recalls how she took a break and watched some Canada geese, which stood with their backs up against the terrace to face the rising water.
“A lot of geese congregate here, and I’d been watching them all spring as they started families along the river. I had even taken photos of them just days before the flood. By the time I left that afternoon on June 11, they were being forced to abandon the riverbank.”
The flood crested on Friday, June 13. The next day, Leah worked from home with her husband to set up a Web site for the NCSML, one of the first businesses in the area that put up photographic images. As recovery commenced, updating the Web site was at first all consuming. It became a critical link to the media, and journalists often mentioned that it compelled them to get the story. The following Monday the museum staff was already in its new temporary quarters; on Tuesday they were able to get into the museum for the first time.
Having seen images of the museum under feet of water, the staff understood the flood had dealt a devastating blow. “We knew we were not going to go in and scoop a little bit of mud off the floor,” Leah says.
Despite being intellectually prepared for the magnitude of the disaster, the aftermath was hard to take in. Books in the library were coated with a gooey film, and pages and spines were bloated with water. The thirty-four-year-old collection of 30,000 phonograph records and books was heavily damaged. But one artifact amazingly was left intact—a 400-pound chandelier made of 600 Bohemian crystals. Leah recalls that “it provided us a moment of relief amidst overwhelming loss.”
The NCSML was not the only cultural facility that was damaged. Across the Bridge of Lions, the African American Museum of Iowa (AAMI) was also underwater. Nine days earlier, exhibits assistant Vlisha Stanerson had finished a four-month project cataloging all the books in the research library. Tom Moore, the museum’s director, said, “We’ve had our pity party, but we’re past the point. Now we are focused on getting the museum back up and running. If we can’t work from the building and if people can’t come to us, we’ll go out to them.”14
Ninety percent of the museum’s collection was eventually salvaged, and the museum reopened in time for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2009.
The list of other affected “cultural assets,” as they were frequently referred to, included the Mother Mosque of America, Theatre of Cedar Rapids, the historic Paramount Theatre, Legion Arts, Indian Creek Nature Center, Science Station, and Ushers Ferry Historic Village.15
At the NCSML, recovery and restoration efforts began June 19, less than a week after the crest. Volunteers and professionals pitched in to organize and clean the museum’s books, textiles, glassware, letters, and other items. Leah used the word “triage” in describing the efforts. The Chicago Conservation Society took over the management of textiles. Library conservation professionals drove up from the University of Iowa to assess damage to the library items.
Amazingly, similar to Time Check resident Jon Galvin’s experience with his collection of carnival glass, the museum’s Royal Dux porcelain and much of its glassware were undamaged. The cases had floated on top of the water the entire time.16
Leah says that 80 percent of the collections had been spared. The remaining 20 percent was in the process of being restored.
As for the building itself, when we spoke on that early February afternoon, Leah says the fate of the beautiful landmark structure was still in limbo.
“An important thing to remember is that we had just announced plans to expand. We determined we needed to triple the size of the building. We had outgrown it. I think that’s a very important point that is easily forgotten.”
And of course, in the wake of the flood, the possibility of any international museum lending its priceless artifacts to a museum that had just experienced a destructive flood was pretty much nil.
In spring 2010 the NCSML relocated to the historic Kosek Building on 16th Avenue. This building supports the museum’s administrative offices, a modest space for educational programs, and an original exhibition appropriately titled “Rising Above: The Story of a People and the Flood,” the first major exhibition since the 2008 deluge. The Kosek Building is a new addition to the NCSML campus and will be a transition space until the new exhibition center and library is constructed—the final stage of recovery and expansion that is planned to be completed in 2012.
But months earlier, on the gray February day that I first met Leah, those plans seemed like a fantasy. Inside the Kosek Building we can see our breath. It’s basically a husk, and it’s hard to imagine it becoming a functioning exhibition hall with state-of-the-art bells and whistles. As we make our way toward the back of the bare-bones structure, Leah warns me that there are places in the building where it is possible to fall through the floor. I had already noticed.
“It doesn’t really look like it would be possible to have an exhibition in here does it? It is a mess. But like the other buildings on the Avenue, it will be turned around. It still has possibilities.” Technically, the Kosek Building still lies in the floodplain, and with the city’s plans for flood mitigation only in the theoretical stages of development, the structure is still vulnerable. So everything that goes inside this building is made to move out on a moment’s notice.
“It will be modular,” Leah continues, “so that in the event of a flood, it would all be able to be removed in a few hours. That was a requirement we put on the exhibit designers.”
“Rising Above” tells the story of the Czechs who settled Cedar Rapids and continues with the story of the Flood of 2008. Ultimately, it is a story of overcoming challenges.
A news release from the museum explains:
By installing the exhibit in the heart of historic 16th Avenue, the NCSML will incorporate Czech Village and New Bohemia as authentic 20th-century ethnic commercial districts common to many Czech and Slovak neighborhoods across the country, but hard to find intact today. Walking tours, interpretive signage along the street, school tours, motor-coach tours, festivals, and other interactive experiences are planned over the next few years to help make the visitor experience fully engaging.
President/CEO Gail Naughton said, “We want to employ all of the senses in the interpretation of this exhibition. People will get everything they expect, in terms of richly illustrated displays and artifacts in the gallery. And then we will take it a step further, by taking them out into the community where the history unfolded.”17
Upon entering the exhibition, visitors will be confronted by a huge aerial photo showing a vast swath of the Cedar Rapids cityscape that was completely inundated. In the lower right-hand corner of the photo, Czech Village is up to its neck. As visitors progress through the exhibition, they will view images and listen to personal accounts of the flood damage, cleanup, and recovery.
“Photos and video cannot sufficiently convey the scene. Overwhelming loss surrounded people entering their homes after the flood. Imagine the emotional and physical toil involved in shoveling the contents of your home into a dumpster,” said Naughton. “It’s unimaginable for most of us, and although no one can truly understand the magnitude of this disaster unless they lived it, we want to bring them as close as possible to the full experience. We hope it also provides flood victims with an opportunity to process what they’ve been through. As a museum, we want to help the city continue to mourn the losses and celebrate progress and recovery.”
Leah, who credits the vision of the exhibit to her director, Gail Naughton, says that this is a great opportunity to interpret history as it is being made.
“Gail has all the staff chanting, ‘A museum is more than the bricks and mortar,’” Leah says. “I guess the thing that inspires me the most is the dedication that the people of our museum have shown to our neighborhood. If it were just about our buildings, things would move more quickly. But what we see here is an opportunity to help our Czech neighborhoods and our greater community to come back stronger, and we’ve already taken our first steps.”
We leave the Kosek Building and walk back onto 16th Avenue. Looking down the street toward the museum and the river, Leah says, “It’s not just about taking photos and preserving artifacts. It’s about engendering a sense of place. It’s about recognizing the importance of this unique ethnic neighborhood and understanding that if we don’t attend to its future, it will be lost forever. So the NCSML is taking a very active role in preserving it for future generations.”
Leah, who has a background in physical geography and environmental studies, was the only person I interviewed who accepted the flood as a natural act brought on, in part, by our attempt to alter the environment. I found her perspective—taking the long view of nature—refreshing. She spoke eloquently about the negative impact we have had in riparian areas and how floodwalls built upriver invariably impact communities downriver. Even with an eye to improving those riparian areas, Leah was saddened at the possibility of losing the historical significance and long-standing neighborhoods of Time Check and Czech Village to green spaces.
“A flood is fundamentally a force of renewal. It brings nutrients to the soils in the floodplain. Richer soils grow healthy plants and, in turn, healthy animals. It’s an important natural process. But humans are bent on harnessing nature, so we build things that get in the way; we alter natural systems and force them out of balance. You can’t drain the wetlands and pave surfaces, tile agricultural fields, and constrain the flow of the river and not have consequences.”
It is no secret that Iowa and the rest of the Midwest contain some of the most altered landscapes in North America. Agriculture has played a huge role in that transformation. Suburbia has played a largely negative role too. Even with all the well-documented plowing away of water-preserving, biodiverse prairies to plant monocrops, rivers such as the Cedar and Iowa remain part of a greater bioregion.
Ernest Callenbach writes that watersheds define bioregions and that “a large watershed may contain several bioregions. The Mississippi’s watershed originally included both woodlands to the east and prairies and plains to the west, with different soils and rainfall patterns that supported quite different groups of plants and animals.
“Like other organisms, we humans adjust to a bioregion’s biological resources and other features. The way of life of people in long-established societies is closely correlated with their bioregions: They gradually develop agriculture, technologies, social structures, folkways, and mythologies that enable them to survive well there.”18
Using Callenbach’s concept of adapting to a bioregion, I would say that Midwesterners have adapted a bit too well. Yet, because of climate change, further adaptations might have to come more quickly.
According to the executive summary of U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States:
Society and ecosystems can adjust to some climatic changes, but this takes time. The projected rapid rate and large amount of climate change over this century will challenge the ability of society and natural systems to adapt. For example, it is difficult and expensive to alter or replace infrastructure designed to last for decades (such as buildings, bridges, roads, airports, reservoirs, and ports) in response to continuous and/or abrupt climate change . . . Humans have adapted to changing climatic conditions in the past, but in the future, adaptations will be particularly challenging because society won’t be adapting to a new steady state but rather to a rapidly moving target. Climate will be continually changing, moving at a relatively rapid rate, outside the range to which society has adapted in the past. The precise amounts and timing of these changes will not be known with certainty.19
The report also predicts an increase in floods. “Floods and water quality problems are likely to be amplified by climate change in most regions.” It gives one pause to consider that the Midwest has experienced two “500-year” floods in fifteen years, a time frame that is less than negligible in geological time.
On November 12, 2009, Leah sent me a news release with the headline, “National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library Board Announces Plans to Move and Elevate Building.” The decision was made to move and elevate the fifteen-yearold building as part of a “new and expanded facility.”
When the $25 million project ($10 million from the State of Iowa) is completed, the main floor will be three feet above the 2008 flood level. “The moved and expanded museum and library is planned to be 50,000 square feet, which will include larger permanent and temporary exhibition galleries, an expanded research library, educational programming space, a new museum store, collection storage, and work space.”
“We are very excited at the prospect of preserving the history of this museum and the people it represents by moving and protecting it,” Board Chair Gary Rozek said. “We have investigated the technical complexities and are confident that such an engineering feat is, indeed, possible.”
“This museum represents and tells the story of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their history. It is a symbol of the courage and vision of Czechs and Slovaks around the world, and it will be the symbol of rebirth for Cedar Rapids,” President/CEO Gail Naughton said. “We are eager to move forward with our plan.”20
“Rising Above,” indeed.
GRANDMA GEORGIA UCHYTIL’S APRICOT KOLACHKY
Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
Ingredients:
1 cup butter, slightly softened
1 8-ounce package cream cheese, slightly softened
2 cups white flour
1 6-ounce container apricot filling, or any fruit filling Confectioners’ sugar
Blend butter, cream cheese, and flour. Form into long rolls, 2 inches in diameter. Chill overnight.
Slice chilled dough into disks ¼-inch thick. Arrange disks 2 inches apart on a greased cookie sheet. Push down with your thumb into the center of each slice. Fill each indentation with one teaspoon of apricot (or other fruit) filling. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes, or until golden brown.
Cool on wire rack. Dust the top of each kolachky with confectioners’ sugar.
Makes three dozen.21