Czech Village's flood woes not forgotten

I just got a chance to sit down with the Sunday New York Times (yes, some weeks are like that, even if you do work in the news business) and was glad to see a hefty A-section article about Czech Village. If you missed it, too, you can read it here.

It was written by the paper's Kansas City Bureau Chief, A.G. Sulzberger, and while it can be a strange experience to read local news written by a national reporter, I thnk he did a pretty good job capturing the two-steps-forward, one-step-back struggle of flood recovery, especially in that neighborhood.

Ok

, yes, he made an awkward reference to Cedar Rapids' suburbs. Suburbs? Still, you've got to forgive the odd gaffe when you read observations like this:

"When the waters receeded

, questions that had quietly nagged for years reemerged with new urgency. Among them: How, if at all, can the community -- long filled with the smells and sounds of Eastern Europe, from the tangy notes of homemade goulash to the percussive chatter of a consonant-heavy tongue -- rebuild an eroded ethnic identity?

It's a question the article doesn't answer, of course -- that answer will continue to come slowly, brick by brick, business by business, block by block. But Sulzberger

does a fine job of exploring the question through locals' eyes.And it's nice to see that even with the countless disasters that have followed, years after floodwaters threatened to wipe Czech Village off the map, the neighborhood's troubles, and neighors' resilience, haven't been forgotten.