116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Time Machine: A teachers’ co-op
4 Cedar Rapids women built a home together in 1955
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Four Cedar Rapids teachers in 1955 decided they’d had enough of paying rent for apartments they didn’t really like.
The four – Lillian Dinsdale, art teacher at Arthur Elementary; Alfhild Brandt, math teacher at Kenwood Elementary; Florence Leiter, English teacher at Franklin High School; and Bernice Miller, art teacher at Cleveland Elementary – came up with a relatively rare concept: a cooperative four-plex.
They began building it in the 2700 block of Eastern Avenue NE. Each resident had an interest in the building’s equity, and they drew up legal documents giving each the right to buy an apartment if one of them decided to sell and move out.
The building, designed for them by architect J. Bradley Rust of Iowa City and built by Charles T. Kennedy, was considered “housing history” by The Gazette’s building and home furnishings editor, Naomi Doebel. It was the first owner-built cooperative apartment in Iowa.
Each unit – two were 649 square feet and two were 574 square feet – had the same floor plan: a large living room, an efficiency kitchen, and a large bedroom with an adjoining tiled bath.
The building originally had wings at each side of an open court. Each wing was a carport for two cars.
The full basement was considered community property. While it was mainly used for passage between the apartments to save going outside when the women visited each other, they thought they might eventually have a rec room down there.
They moved in after Oct. 1, 1955.
“As owner of her own apartment, each woman has homestead tax exemption. Cooperative apartments are an innovation in Iowa, so it was necessary to get a special ruling on the tax question,” The Gazette reported.
Furnishings
Each teacher found furnishing her unit a challenge on a teacher’s salary.
“It’s surprising what you can do with an apartment when you have friends and relatives but very little money,” Leiter said candidly. Her chairs were rescued from a friend’s porch. She re-cushioned her sofa with a salvaged feather tick for which she made a slipcover.
Her dining table and chairs were taken out of storage in her brother’s garage. Leiter refinished the pieces before placing them in her new unit.
Over them hung an original painting of a shack in the Upper Michigan peninsula painted by former Cedar Rapids art teacher Margaret Danielson.
In 1960, when Brandt retired in August, the phone directory listed Leiter and Miller at 2717 Eastern Ave. NE, and Dinsdale and Brandt at 2723.
Matter of taxes
Around 1976, the Iowa Department of Revenue decided that the people owning a property with multiple units had to share one homestead property tax credit for the whole property instead of one for each dwelling. By then, another two-unit cooperative had been built on Harbet Avenue NW that faced the same circumstance.
In 1977, state Sen. Robert Rush of Cedar Rapids asked the state attorney general to research the property tax question, “as a favor to his former English literature teacher,” Florence Leiter.
Rush said he didn’t feel it was fair that condo owners got individual homestead tax credits, but co-op owners wouldn’t. The attorney general agreed.
“He said he was pleased that the Department of Revenue has decided to concur with the attorney general’s opinion … to provide the credit for such persons,” The Gazette reported Feb. 10, 1978.
The property owners would get a substantial break in their property taxes.
Could the owners get retroactive refunds?
Mike Cox, head of the Revenue Department Property Tax Division, said that would be possible if the owners had filed homestead tax credits for each of the years their property tax credit had been reduced.
“Jim Sharpe, assistant Cedar Rapids city assessor, said today (Feb. 10, 1978) those claims have been filed,” The Gazette reported.
Now condos
The four original owners were gone by 1996, but their dwelling remained a four-unit co-op with new owners, though the units are now described as condos on the city assessor’s website.
Lillian Dinsdale died in August 1977. She was buried at Dinsdale in Tama County. Florence Leiter died in February 1983 and was buried at Leiters Ford, Ind., her hometown.
Alfhild Brandt Nelson died in December 1996 at age 95. She is interred with her husband, Edson Nelson, at Cedar Memorial Mausoleum.
Bernice Miller still lived in her unit in September 1991, when she served as vice president of the Bernice Pratt Circle of the International Order of King’s Daughters and Sons. The following year she sold her unit at 2717 Eastern Ave. NE and moved to Watertown, S.D., where she died in December 1995.
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