An Architectural and Historic Survey of the Drake University Neighborhood

History Pays!; Jacobsen, James

From executive summary: "The Drake Neighborhood historical and architecturally survey project had a number of goals, one of which was rather revolutionary in terms of historic preservation. That was to establish a comprehensive historic properties database, one that would potentially contain historical and visual information about every residence in the survey area. In support of that goal, the innitial project effort placed an emphasis upon gathering baseline information about every residence. The State Historical Society of Iowa’s survey files were searched to secure digital copies of all historical survey photos, dating from 1974 to the present day. The Drake University yearbook, the Quax, was searched and all historical photographs were digitally copied. Newspapers and other sources were searched to secure both historical information and historical images. In the end, the visual database was a huge one, containing an estimated 700-1,000 images. Most of these were already identified by address, while many others were not. Baseline historical information, in the form of a master building permits database, was also amassed. Municipal building permits survive from 1917 on. Earlier permit data, from newspapers was combined with the former, in a WORD table. Such a table can be sorted by column and could be sorted by address, house owner, date, builder/architect and so on. Volunteers worked to corroborate the permit data, particularly the incomplete entries (entries having no specific house number for example). The permits database provided accurate building dates as well as information about major residential modifications (such as adding apartments, exterior fire escapes). The next major goal was to deal with Drake University and its significance and impact on the survey area. A second goal was to develop individual property and historic district recommendations that are related to that Drake University association. This matter has been a problematic one since the early 1980s when the first residential historic districts in the Drake area were proposed. No progress was made for the next 30 years, apart from the National Register listing of the core original campus and a scattering of individual residences. It is the finding of this survey that Drake University was and remains the dominant influence in a variety of ways over the neighborhood area and the city as a whole. No other context comes anywhere close to that of the university. One direct measure of the university’s impact is the fact that over 500 area houses have been demolished or relocated, largely in response to campus expansion. This direct university influence does diminish with distance from campus of course, so it was incumbent upon this study to seek out other relevant historical contexts. The ususual suspects were investigated (transportation, commerce, religious institutions, municipal growth). Transportation ranked high in its impact on the survey area, largely due to the devastation that was unleashed on the southern edge of the survey area by the construction of the MacVicar Freeway (Interstate 235) in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The new arterial demolished a broad swath of housing, eliminated almost all of a substantial commercial node that flanked the east end of Cottage Grove Avenue (to the southeast of the survey area), and contributed directly to the deterioration of the housing and sense of community in the area to the south of the Drake campus." Project funding was provided in part by a 2010 Historic Preservation Fund grant to the City of Des Moines (project number IA-10-055) administered by the Iowa State Historic Preservation Office (grant number 19-10-21922) and the State, Tribal, and Local Plans and Grants Division, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. Des Moines, Iowa is a Certified Local Government.

An Architectural and Historic Survey of the Drake University Neighborhood

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