Historic hotel near Palisades-Kepler checks out for good

Built in 1884, the Cedar Springs Hotel was a hidden gem up the Cedar River from Palisades-Kepler State Park.

Flooded in 2008, the dilapidated, long-vacant resort will soon be demolished.

About 20 years ago, third-generation owner Pat Biderman sought help, to no avail, in preserving the 11-room hotel on 19 acres overlooking one of the more scenic areas of the river.

“I figured $50,000 then to seal up and save the hotel,” she says. “Now it would take several hundred thousand dollars.”

Alas, the hotel that housed visitors as diverse as the infamous Cherry Sisters to photographers from National Geographic was beyond saving, even before floodwaters surrounded its limestone foundation and “waved” across its main floor.

This spring, with the end in sight, Kerry Koch of Marion hoped to uncover mementos of value. As an amateur metal detector, the director of finance and IT at Paladin in Cedar Rapids asked Biderman if he could scour the grounds. She said OK and then gave him a tour of the old hotel. He became hooked on its history.

“As it turned out,” says Koch, 49, “the metal detecting was kind of a bust. Somebody had already been through it.”

He found only a locket and some wheat pennies.

“You'd need something that would go down a ways,” Biderman says. “This place has been flooded many times.”

She ticks off the years - '53, '61, '63, 67, once in the '70s, '93. The Flood of 2008 was the last straw. Linn County officials condemned the place.

“It is sad,” says Biderman, 64, who lives in a non-damaged house near the hotel. “This has been my home my whole life. I just hate to see it go.”

Some doors and decorative molding have been removed, but you can't erase three generations of memories. Biderman has salvaged the brass cash register, a hotel register dating to 1919, old photographs, yellowed newspaper clippings.

The hotel was built by the Northwestern Railroad for workers in a nearby rock quarry.

Her grandfather, Adolf Biderman, started working at the hotel in 1898 for 25 cents a day. He bought it in 1914 and remodeled what became the Upper Palisades Hotel.

The hotel soon became a popular honeymoon and vacation spot. Visitors took the train from Cedar Rapids to be picked up by horse and buggy near today's Highway 30. Adolf Biderman died in 1957. Ownership passed to son Ben and then to his daughter, Pat.

By 1938 the hotel closed, but it was a restaurant known for chicken dinners until 1965.

It was later leased as a private residence.

“When I was a kid, my grandfather would bring out tons of fireworks, and we'd shoot them off over the river,” Pat Biderman says. She also recalls parties where “they floated kegs of beer in horse troughs.”

Around the hotel, you find remnants of an old ice house. At the river's edge, trees have overgrown parts of a wooden merry-go-round and the old dance pavilion foundation. A few outbuildings, including a guest house, motel and tinkering garage, stand but will be demolished, too.

Biderman's mother, Eleanor, who died in January at age 94, lived in the house below Biderman's, a house that had 18 inches of water on the main floor.

“My grandfather had built it 10 feet higher than water had ever been,” Biderman says. “He should have gone higher.”

Higher wouldn't have saved the hotel, though. Its golden days are long gone, its demise inevitable.