Time Machine: The ‘Black Block’

CEDAR RAPIDS — The four-story Washington High School opened in August 1891, replacing its much smaller predecessor. It stood where the Cedar Rapids Public Library now stands on the Fourth Avenue side of Greene Square.

Beyond the high school was an open area called High School Place. By 1900 there was one rooming house there at No. 22, soon to be followed by three more rental properties at 24, 26 and 28. Circus trains could unload in the nearby area and begin herding animals to the circus grounds.

Early tenants of High School Place were seamstresses, housekeepers and other working people. Frank C. Mally, a real estate developer, erected nine houses.

The school board began looking into expanding Washington in 1909 because of overcrowding. Mally offered the use of his home, just across the alley from the school, for overflow classrooms until the school addition could be built. He remodeled the house and charged the district $35 per month until the new addition was finished.

In 1910, excavation began for the addition between the school and the Fourth Street tracks. Completion of the addition pushed back the high school's start date by a week in 1911, to Sept. 18, while grade schools started on Sept. 11.

The now larger school effectively hid the neighborhood behind it from the rest of the city. As the years went by, the area's crime rate rose.

In 1925, the School Board sought to do something about High School Place, which had become known as the 'Black Block.' The board described it as a 'social cancer.'

Surprise raids by police and sheriff's deputies began the night of Feb. 15, 1925. County Attorney Walter J. Barngrover ordered the 'tour of inspection,' and Police Chief W.J. Benesh and Sheriff Thomas Avery carried it out. Four places were raided simultaneously that night: Chink's Palace, operated by H.M. 'Chink' Smith, at 416 S Fourth St., known to police as 'Chinatown' and 'The Palace of Sin'; Carr's eating house next door; and the homes of Dan O'Neal, who was being held in jail on suspicion of being involved in a murder, and W.H. Williams. Both O'Neal and Williams were believed to be members of a gang.

No arrests were made, but the officers reported to Barngrover that conditions in the buildings were not sanitary. After an inspection, the Board of Health recommended that the 'obnoxious houses' at the rear of Washington High School be torn down as soon as the property owners were notified. A city ordinance stated that if a building had depreciated to less than half of its original value, it was deemed a hazard and must be destroyed. All of the houses met that criterion.

The property owners, identified as Frank Mally and Coe Professor C.O. Bates, were served with a city council resolution ordering the properties cleaned up and the houses demolished. Mally and Bates wasted no time in hiring the law firm of Patterson and North to restrain the city's commissioners from carrying out those orders.

When Mayor Rall was served with a notice that an injunction was pending, he instructed City Solicitor Charles A. Penningroth to 'marshall the forces and prepare for action.' The mayor said that, unless the court prevented it, the Black Block would be cleaned up, as ordered.

Mally and Bates owned 415-416 Fourth St.; 28, 26 and 24 High School Place; 405, 408, 410, 414 and 416 Fifth Avenue. The tenants were ordered to vacate. Mally said that the tenants of the nine houses, one a duplex, had all paid rent through March 1 or longer. He maintained that evicting them in a matter of days was harsh, giving them very little time to find new places to live.

Mally laid the blame for the legal action on the school board, saying that the property was appraised at $42,000 and he was willing to sell it to the board for that amount in spite of improvements that he had made. Instead, the board offered to pay him $5,000 and trade for property in the Elm Park addition on the city's west side. Mally refused that offer.

Frank Mally was in his office the night of Aug. 29, discussing the conditions at High School Place and the city's demand for a cleanup with a Gazette reporter, when he began coughing. He suffered from asthma and had complained earlier in the day of being short of breath. The coughing fit proved fatal. Mally was 64 and was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery. He left Bates and his widow, Frances Mally, to carry on the fight to preserve the properties.

A grand jury was convened in September, the fate of the Black Block one of the items it was to consider.

On Oct. 15, the ruling came. The grand jury said, 'The evidence placed before the grand jury showed that during the last eight or nine months the sanitary conditions there have been greatly improved and while they are still not by any means ideal, the grand jury has been advised by the health authorities of the City of Cedar Rapids that conditions comply substantially with the state housing law and the state health laws. Further, the evidence before the grand jury indicates that a great number of crimes have been committed in this district within the last five years, about eighty arrests having been made there on various charges, of which between sixty and seventy resulted in convictions.'

Because charges ranged from gambling to simple assault to manslaughter and because 30 convictions resulted from charges of disorderly conduct, prostitution, lewdness and similar crimes, the grand jury advised the county attorney to bring an injunction to close the Black Block.

On Oct. 22, Deputy Sheriff Max Avery served notice to owners and renters of six of the nine houses on the Black Block that they would be closed as nuisances. The rest would follow later.