Time Machine: The Commonwealth Apartments

CEDAR RAPIDS - A fairground with a horse racetrack and a baseball park, near the intersection of Second Avenue and 14th Street East, gave way to the development of Cedar Rapids' Central Park addition in 1886.

'There will not be a single vestige of the old fair grounds left in a month,” reported The Gazette. 'The future inhabitants looking upon a populous portion of the city in after years will be surprised to know that Central Park addition was once the scene of the contest for twine binders and game chickens, and beautiful flowers, and golden harvests, and races. A force of about sixty men are out in that vicinity at work with twenty or thirty teams, and are transforming the fair grounds, where representatives of all counties in Iowa once gathered ... This makes an end of the racetrack and the boys with their trotters are casting about to see where they can get a racetrack.”

Part of that site became a luxury apartment hotel in 1925.

The Commonwealth Inc. began as a corporation in 1924. Officers E.E. Wilcox, president; John B. Terry, vice president; F. Junkerman, secretary and treasurer; E.B. Cameron, O.C. Olney, Joe McRaith and William Chamberlain, directors, planned to build an apartment house that rivaled those in bigger cities. The structure designed by architects H.E. Hunter and Norman Hatton was built for $600,000 by general contractor O.F. Paulson. Made of brick, concrete and steel, its elaborate trims gave it charm.

When it opened in 1925, it provided the best for its residents and hotel guests.

'All the features of the big city apartments will be included in the Commonwealth,” related a 1924 article in The Gazette. 'A spacious lobby, women's room, men's room, children's play room, commodious storage room, a complete steam heating plant, a water softener, and a central refrigerator plant providing icing facilities and circulating ice water to all apartments, two passenger and one service elevators, and large laundries with clothes dryers will be provided. Light, gas and heat will be furnished. Heated garage accommodations will be erected in the rear.”

There also was a dining room, tea room, delicatessen, beauty shop and 104 apartments in varying sizes over seven floors.

A Gazette story in November 1939 described it as 'one of the show spots in Cedar Rapids and an apartment house which is set apart by a distinction acquired through constant effort to maintain the finest service and accommodations year after year.”

It was one of the largest apartment hotels west of Chicago. In the 1930s, its dining room had a reputation for delicious home-cooked foods. It was such a popular destination for dining out that reservations were encouraged. It also provided facilities for bridge groups and parties, often providing the use of a smaller dining room adjacent to the main room.

The building had 14 bachelor apartments (single rooms with or without dressing rooms and bath); four Pullman apartments with a kitchenette, dressing room and bath; 52 efficiency apartments with living room, Murphy bed and dinette; and 27 three-room units that added a bedroom. The six four-room apartments had dining rooms. A library and additional bedroom were features of the six-room apartments.

Six apartments were set aside for short-term guests who would be staying six months or less.

The tenants of the Commonwealth were served by a parking garage at 1400 First Ave. SE until the corporation sold it to Kenneth F. Childs of Streator, Ill., in June 1941 for more than $20,000. At that time the second floor of the garage was leased to Allen Motor Co. for storage and the first floor was used by guests at the Commonwealth and by the Ambulance Service. Childs, who owned a theater in Streator, remodeled the building into the Times Theater. The Times was demolished in 1992 to make way for an Arby's restaurant.

Fred W. Yanda, a Cedar Rapids native and owner of Law Publishers Inc., acquired the majority of common stock and became principal owner and manager of the Commonwealth in July 1942. Yanda remodeled the building's old dining rooms into much-needed single-room bachelor apartments and opened a new dining room and kitchen in the redecorated east wing in space that had been used as storage. The new dining room had entrances from both the lobby and Second Avenue. Yanda said that with the Commonwealth's waiting list, he could fill an additional hundred apartments in a week.

Edwin Boss of Des Moines was elected president of Commonwealth Apartments Inc. in July 1947 and the Boss family acquired the common and preferred stock of Yanda's widow. Boss operated several Iowa hotels, including the Savery and Randolph in Des Moines. The Boss Hotel Company found itself in the middle of a lawsuit with Cedar Rapids area rent director T.J. Wilkinson, who ordered the company to abide by the 1947 rent control act and refund money to tenants from rents raised by the Boss company on the premise the building was a hotel and not subject to rent control. Wilkinson ruled the Commonwealth did not qualify as a hotel and ordered old rents reinstated.

John Reilly, a member of the Boss family, was owner in 1983, when the Commonwealth still had the beauty shop, a resident masseur, a well-kept lawn and a huge lobby with garnished fireplaces and pillars, marble floors and arched windows. But by then it could no longer afford full time maids, laundry workers, cooks, waitresses and lobby workers. Even new lobby furniture or extra cleaning help were out of reach.

The Commonwealth was one of the downtown-area buildings that relied on Alliant Energy's steam heat from the Sixth Street power station. When that was lost in the Flood of 2008, the system had to be replaced with boilers at a cost of more than $300,000.

In 2014, Commonwealth Senior Apartments LP began a project to renovate the property into 86 senior apartments.