The capital of Iowa has long had a reputation as one of the least hip, least interesting and least dynamic cities in the Western world, a dull insurance town set amid the unending corn fields of flyover country, a place Minneapolis looks down on and the young and ambitious flee as soon as they graduate. “Usually you are born here or marry into here or get transferred here,” says local entrepreneur Mike Draper. “Not many people come to chase their dreams. If they did, you’d be like, ‘What, you want to be an actuary?’”
But unbeknownst to many outside the Midwest, over the past 15 years Des Moines has transformed into one of the richest, most vibrant, and, yes, hip cities in the country, where the local arts scene, entrepreneurial startups and established corporate employers are all thriving. Its downtown — previously desolate after 5 p.m. — has come alive, with 10,000 new residents and a bevy of nationally recognized restaurants. A few blocks away, the uber-cool Des Moines Social Club draws 25,000 people a month — more than a 10th of the city’s population — to take part in everything from Shakespeare and avant-garde theater to live music and aerial gymnastics classes. Former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne showed up at its opening in 2014 because he thinks a city once called “Des Boring” may be America’s next creative hub.
The city that a legion of presidential campaign staffers and journalists are now swarming over is not the one many of them might recognize from cycles past. No longer just a drab dateline from the first battleground state, this metropolis is riding high in the polls. In recent years Des Moines has been named the nation’s richest (by U.S. News) and economically strongest city (Policom), its best for young professionals (Forbes), families (Kiplinger), home renters (Time), businesses and careers (Forbes). It has the highest community pride in the nation, according to a Gallup poll last year, and in October topped a Bloomberg analysis of which cities in the United States were doing the best at attracting millennials to buy housing. “Never mind California or New York,” Fast Company declared two years back. “By some important measures, Des Moines is way ahead of its cooler coastal cousins.” Not bad for a metro area of half a million located hundreds of miles from either mountains or the sea.
Cities don’t, as a rule, change their identities. They might accentuate a characteristic they already possess, but plow horses don’t become thoroughbreds. So how did Des Moines pull off the urban equivalent of a Triple Crown win?
Call it radical cooperation. Des Moines tapped the latent power of the heartland — a cultural ethos of working together and good manners that’s helped account for Iowa’s stability — and harnessed it to an ambitious plan to jump-start downtown by building cultural amenities, attracting creative class types and retaining big employers. Des Moines’ civic leaders realized the city wasn’t going to transform itself without a clear long-term vision, so in an almost hyper-Iowan way they did something almost unheard of. They took it upon themselves to bring in an outside visionary and then tied together the destinies of the various projects he envisioned, forging an almost ego-less, private-sector-driven renaissance that has continued to flower over the past decade.
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Seventy years ago, a Saturday Evening Post profile likened Des Moines to “a decent kindly man with a fixed income [who] has learned his station.” Even before the I-235 punched its way through the north side of the city, encouraging a late-1950s commuter exodus to suburban West Des Moines and Altoona, nobody had lived downtown, even though most everyone worked there.
“There were women in hats and white gloves at the tea room or the department stores during the day, and men in hats and ties working in the insurance companies and banks,” Michael Gartner, owner of the city’s Triple-A Iowa Cubs baseball team, recalls of his childhood in the late 1940s. “At 5 o’clock they would get onto their buses and go home.”
Highways killed the downtown department stores, and by the late 1960s the central city had become little more than an office park for its leading industries: insurance, agricultural support services, and government. In the 1970s and 1980s, the city tried to turn things around by installing suburban conveniences, including an enclosed system of skywalks, allowing people to get from building to building and through new indoor shopping malls without putting on their coats, which only furthered the abandonment of the sidewalks and the storefronts. On Friday and Saturday nights, bored teenagers raced their cars through the empty streets, circling the downtown loop from Grand to Locust Avenue over and over again. “This was supposed to be a menace to society,” Des Moines Register columnist Rekha Basu recalls. They would have been perhaps a greater menace had there been some risk of hitting a pedestrian.
By the late 1980s, the city’s leaders realized they needed to do something uncharacteristically bold. The big private employers — the insurance companies Principal, Nationwide, EMC and Wellmark; publishing giant Meredith (Better Homes and Gardens); Wells Fargo — had a lot riding on the central city, where they maintained offices for tens of thousands of employees. “They said, 'Look, we have a tremendous investment here and we want to be able to attract and retain people,'” says Mary O’Keefe, who was Principal’s vice president for marketing for 25 years. “The business community here is really strong and responsible and they took leadership on these things out of enlightened self interest.” They also realized they needed fresh ideas.
Ironically, the critical link was made by art collector Melva Bucksbaum, whose husband, Martinpioneered the suburban shopping center, founding General Growth Properties, the mall-making behemoth behind everything from Tyson’s Galleria in suburban Washington, D.C. to Chicago’s Water Tower Place. In the spring of 1987, Bucksbaum took a well-timed call from a friend of hers, architect Bruce Graham, whose buildings — including the Sears Tower and John Hancock Center — had transformed Chicago’s skyline. Graham had a colleague to recommend, an innovative urban thinker looking for a Midwestern city to experiment on. Bucksbaum was thrilled. Soon that visionary, Mario Gandelsonas, found himself in a car hurtling up Fleur Drive from the Des Moines International Airport, headed for downtown.
He was horrified at what he saw.
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In the summer of 1987, Gandelsonas was a 49-year-old professor at the Yale School of Architecture. Born and raised in Argentina and educated in Paris, he’d long had a fascination with Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations on the social groups and civic associations that give American democracy its distinct bottom-up power. “This civic spirit still exists,” Gandelsonas said, “but I think they are much more visible in a small city in the heartland than in a place like New York.” Graham, his mentor, suggested Des Moines might be the perfect place for him to put into practice his theories that the future of cities might lie in such unlikely places. Des Moines had strong cultural associations, an engaged leadership eager for new ideas and was surprisingly wealthy, meaning there were resources available to implement a good idea.
Gandelsonas’ urban planning philosophy was simple: don’t treat a city like a map that needs to be redrawn and corrected, but as a living organism with its own purpose, personality and innate characteristics. Successful interventions are ones that enhance and enable the organism’s socio-economic metabolism by removing blockages or creating new centers of potential growth. Instead of producing a total and comprehensive master plan for a city, Gandelsonas sought to identify a series of “moments,” civic projects that would enhance its fabric and unleash its potential. Or so the theory went.
The car ride in from the airport was sobering. At the central city’s gateway, what Gandelsonas called its “front yard,” travelers were greeted by a gas station and seven blocks of car dealerships set among radiator shops and pawn brokers. Downtown itself “looked like science fiction,” he recalls. “It was mid-morning and there were no people on the streets. At lunchtime, the streets were still empty, but for about an hour the skywalks were full of people. At 4:30 they started filling up again as everyone rushed to the nearest parking structure and then for half an hour there was a full-on traffic jam as 50,000 people tried to get to West Des Moines. Then the city was empty again. For me this was the perfect picture of a place that was totally dysfunctional.”
Its civic life, however, was anything but. Central Iowa was and is a remarkably collaborative place, benefiting from a pluralistic, communitarian-minded heritage that’s hard-wired into the culture of a great swath of the Midwest, and Iowa in particular.
“I’ve lived in a few different cities, but Des Moines is really amazing in this regard,” says Mary Sellers, president of the local United Way chapter, which benefits from the highest rate of giving per employed person in the country.
In the civic realm, Republicans work with Democrats, corporate executives with entrepreneurs, suburbs with the city and the county with all of them. Out-of-towners seeking to meet with the largest companies in town are often shocked to find themselves seated across the desk not from an associate vice president, but the president or CEO. “People come to the table and they leave their ego and logo at the door,” Sellers says, “and they focus on what’s good for the community.”
All this worked to Gandelsonas’ advantage, and he and a team of students were soon embedded with the city planner and architect, assembling their analysis of the city with the funding of the business community. “I didn’t believe that in America you can do the European centralized-planning thing,” he recalls. “So I formed a very close relationship with the business community and told the city the only way this would work was to do it through private-public partnership.”
Jim Cownie, a venture capitalist who had recently sold his Heritage cable television company for $880 million, championed Gandelsonas’ ideas with fellow business leaders. “Iowa is funny in that we are very conservative in the behavioral sense in that we don’t move rapidly or dramatically,” Cownie says. “So we don’t make a lot of mistakes in our civic and business lives, but it also means we don’t have a lot of huge victories. But at that point, we needed to do something big.”
So one day in the spring of 1990, Cownie, and a handful of city leaders gathered at the Embassy Club atop the 36-story Ruan Center, then the city’s tallest building, as Gandelsonas cast his vision on the urban panorama below. He began to tick off his ideas.
The central riverfront should be transformed into a usable public space connecting downtown with the east side beyond. The latter, a dilapidated neighborhood between the river and the gold-domed State Capitol, should evolve into a “Red Brick City” of storefronts and apartments. Between the river and the Ruan building, he envisioned a revitalization of the Court Avenue entertainment district, with more housing rising near the railroad tracks just to its south. To the west, a lakefront on the road from the airport would be made into a park and the car dealerships and dilapidated one-story buildings that had first greeted him would be demolished to make way for an expansive city park.
“It was an outlandish idea,” Cownie recalls. “It was 10 blocks of our downtown between our two primary streets and he wanted to knock it all down to make this ‘Western Gateway’ to the city.”
Ultimately, Gandelsonas would suggest the Des Moines Public Library build a new structure to anchor the east end of this proposed park, while the Meredith Corporation built a headquarters on its western side. Others would champion additional “moments”: a civic center on the river, a new science center near Court Avenue, the existing library building transformed into a palace for the World Food Prize, and a renovated ballpark. Des Moines, Gandelsonas said, could become a model for 21st century planning.
“If in the 1990s, if you’d said we’ll do a science center, a library, a convention center, improve the river area, help the ballpark, rehab the old library, build housing, and create a new park and we’ll do all of that in a relatively short period of time, people would have said you were crazy,” says U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who was Iowa’s governor from 1999 to 2007. “But that’s exactly what happened.”
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Lots of cities come up with grand plans. Very few actually complete them. Almost none do so with virtually no opposition and, in the end, widespread approval. Des Moines did.
The idea had broad support and little opposition, in part because fewer than 1,000 people lived downtown and the envisioned changes would displace none of them. But the task ahead was daunting: get a new, 2,000-unit downtown neighborhood built; expand the entertainment district; transform the riverfront and Gray’s Lake into top-notch recreational areas; build a civic center, science center and all the rest. That’s when the state of Iowa stepped in, offering to provide funding, but with conditions that would force the business and philanthropic communities well out of their comfort zone.
Gov. Vilsack had an idea to fund game-changing civic projects across the state using racetrack and casino revenue. Passed by the Legislature with bipartisan support in 2001, it was called Vision Iowa, which over the next eight years awarded $228 million in state subsidies to 393 public projects across the state. “The idea was to send a jolt into the community, to show them what was possible through proper planning and the leveraging of resources,” Vilsack says.
And leverage it did. The board limited the state’s contribution to roughly a fifth of the total cost of a given project and local government and stakeholders were responsible for the rest. Projects had to be completed as designed, not scaled back if matching funds fell short, and municipalities weren’t allowed to raise property taxes to come up with their share. “The design of Vision Iowa was quite good,” says Iowa State University economist Peter Orazem, who has calculated the state’s commitments spurred $2 billion in investments statewide, earning nearly 12 percent annually from increased sales taxes. “Because the local area had to absorb a disproportionate amount of the costs, it was less likely to do something really stupid,” he notes.
Vision Iowa’s board pushed Des Moines particularly hard.
“The city fathers felt they were due $75 million to put up an arena and convention center,” recalls Michael Gartner, who chaired the board. “We believed it was just a real estate deal.”
Gartner’s board insisted on doing something transformative, a single deal providing funds not only for the civic center, but for several of the key projects that had been kicking around: the new science center and public library, the World Food Prize headquarters, and an education center on Gandelsonas’ park. So Gartner came up with an innovative idea: handcuff the projects together. None of them would move forward without the others, meaning everyone suddenly had a vested interest in raising funds for everyone else.
The reaction was swift: a steady stream of luminaries called on Gov. Vilsack, demanding Gartner be overruled. “He was true to his word and stayed out of it,” Gartner recalls.
Gartner’s coercion worked.
Mary Sellers, then the head of the aging science center, recalls going to the Vision Iowa board to defend a $15 million request, even though she didn’t have any matching funds lined up. “It felt like I had come before the great and powerful Oz: ‘How dare you come forward,’” she remembers. “I was told I had to raise a like amount before the board’s next meeting — in 3½ weeks!” But the city’s leadership was mobilized and later that month she had raised $18.2 million.
“In the end it wasn’t so much about the money, it was about prompting people to think up ideas and to work together to get them done,” Gartner says.
Simultaneously, Principal, the insurance company, was taking the lead on a $70 million refurbishment of the downtown riverfront, to which it would ultimately contribute $18.5 million. The project, announced in 1999, featured a mile-long walking trail, two pedestrian bridges, an ice skating rink, and amphitheater, and took a decade to complete. “At one point early on, my boss at the time asked if we couldn’t have more leverage investing in education,” says O’Keefe, who was in charge of Principal’s effort. “I said I didn’t think we’d find anything that would have the impact to our investment as this one. Making use of your natural amenities is just the fastest and easiest way to further a city’s development.”
Meanwhile, the metro region’s chambers of commerce, downtown development groups, and major landholder alliances merged into a single superentity, the Greater Des Moines Partnership, which became an essential vehicle for region-wide cooperation. “Business leaders were tired of going to multiple meetings of people trying to do the same thing,” recalls Eugene Meyer, who was mayor of West Des Moines throughout the 2000s and is now president of the Partnership. “For suburbs like ours, there was the recognition that we relied on having access a science center, a great symphony orchestra or a AAA baseball park, things that enhanced the quality of life but that we couldn’t build, support or replicate ourselves.” The Partnership’s CEO, Jay Byers, puts it this way: “The entire region adopted central Des Moines as their downtown.”
Then, with surprising speed, things began to happen on their own.
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In the early 2000s, as construction cranes sprouted around downtown Des Moines, Richard Florida’s “creative class” theories were taking the urban planning world by storm. Florida, an urban theorist who now heads the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, argued that cities prosper when they are attractive to the knowledge workers, intellectuals and artists that power the post-industrial economy. Build amenities, the argument went, and they will come, and their presence will naturally attract the industries that need them. Des Moines was in effect running a large-scale experiment for his theories.
During the first decade of the new century, Des Moines’ net employment grew by 7 percent and the overall population by 18 percent. Many of the newcomers were young, educated, and, yes, creative types drawn by the changing downtown landscape. “People started wanting to come downtown because there were more and more entertainment options coming up, and that spurred them to think, let’s not drive out to the suburbs afterward and then drive back for work,” says developer Gerry Neugent, now CEO of Knapp Properties, who had a front-row seat. “What if we lived here? That spurred housing and then they just started feeding off each other.”
The Western Gateway park — with its David Chipperfield-designed library and a $40 million sculpture garden donated by local philanthropists John and Mary Pappajohn — succeeded in its short-term goal of keeping major employers anchored to downtown. On its borders are the new headquarters of Wellmark, Nationwide, Meredith and, under construction, the Kum & Go gas station chain, whose $151 million facility was designed by Renzo Piano, architect of the New York Times building and London Bridge Tower. Taken together, they represent an $800 million investment and thousands of new jobs. But it also drew restaurateurs, clubs, brewpubs and high-tech firms, which moved into the historical buildings that remained.
One of those buildings was the old Masonic Temple, a 1913 Beaux Arts edifice that at the end of the 1990s housed a pawn shop and bail bond offices. It was saved from the wrecking ball by local developers Pam and Harry Bookey and three restaurateurs, who had a plan to open a theater, cafe and high-end restaurant. “Everyone thought we were nuts,” Michael LaValle, one of the restaurateurs, later told the Register, noting that nobody went downtown for dinner. “There was no parking, no skywalk and no precedence for this.” But when the Centro restaurant opened in 2002, there was a line out the door, and demand never let up. The Des Moines Symphony moved into the theater space and Starbucks located on the ground floor instead of the suburbs as they’d planned. “Centro kind of silently conveyed to people that there was a different way to approach development projects,” Mike Draper, one of the new wave of small businesspeople that would soon descend on the city, recalls. “They really got it all started.”
Others opened a coffee shop, English pub and music venues in the Court Avenue neighborhood, just north of the new Science Center construction site, once the exclusive domain of sports bars. Amedeo Rossi, the guy behind the smoke-free bar Lift and Vaudeville Mews club, helped organize an annual music festival that drew Wu Tang Clan, David Byrne and Death Cab for Cutie to play the Western Gateway before the sculpture park moved in. New restaurants and independently owned retail stores started opening up on the east side of the river, in the area Gandelsonas had dubbed the “Red Brick City” but was now being called the East Village.
And everywhere, suddenly, was new housing. The success of the first project, the 1999 renovation of a brick warehouse just north of the ballpark into comfortable lofts, surprised even its owner, Michael Gartner, who had bought the structure solely for its ample surface parking spaces, which his Iowa Cubs desperately needed. “I didn’t want the warehouse and didn’t know what to do with it, but some developers came and said, let’s put apartments in there,” he recalls. “It was fully rented before we even opened.” Over the next four years, the entire area transformed into a residential neighborhood of new lofts and repurposed commercial buildings. The population of downtown doubled, then doubled again. Today, it has an estimated 15,000 residents, up from 1,000 in the 1990s, and 2,000 more units under construction.
By 2005, Iowan expatriates began to take notice. Draper, who had gone away to college at the University of Pennsylvania in 2000 and was trying to make a go of it as a T-shirt designer in Philadelphia, was struck by the new feel when he’d visit.
“Friends would have us meet at these new hang outs that were nothing like the city when I was growing up,” he recalls. “I thought: maybe I can just build my business here. It would be a lot easier and I’d move up the ladder faster. Turns out a lot of people who weren’t in touch with each other got this idea at the same time.” He moved his family into one of the new lofts on the river. In the heart of the East Village, he opened Raygun, a 7,000-square-foot store, selling Iowa-themed T-shirts and clothing that bills itself as “the Greatest Store in the Universe”. (“Des Moines, Iowa:,” one of his shirts reads, “Let us exceed your already low expectations.”)
High-tech startups began popping up on 6th Avenue just south of the loop, which soon became known as “Silicon Sixth.” Geoff Wood, a GIS engineer in his late 20s with a newly-minted MBA, moved back to cover the scene for Silicon Prairie News, the Omaha-based newsletter, and watched a University of Northern Iowa dropout named Ben Milne build Dwolla, an inexpensive payment transfer service, from “two employees and an idea” to a 70-person enterprise said to pose a threat to rivals PayPal and even Visa. Now Wood, 37, runs Gravitate, a co-working space occupying several floors of the renovated Midland Building on 6th Avenue that’s widely regarded as the hub of the startup sector. “We wanted to have an entrepreneurial center of gravity where creative class individuals could get the benefits of working alongside other people,” he says.
“There are a lot of Iowans coming back, but our biggest opportunity will be engaging people who’ve never been to Iowa to come here.”
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Twenty years to the month after Gandelsonas’s ride in from the airport, a 29-year old Brooklynite named Zachary Mannheimer pulled his car into a Motel 6 on the city’s outskirts. A survivor of New York’s political theater scene, he’d despaired that he could make change in a place so expensive, politically homogenous, and theatrically oversaturated.
“The ability to pioneer or do anything new in New York or Chicago is virtually impossible and would take the rest of your life and cost you millions,” he explains. “I wanted to find a place where you could help create a real arts scene.”
So in that summer of 2007 he loaded up his Hyundai Elantra and set off on a 22-city road trip, searching for that perfect place. Des Moines, however, was just a place to sleep en route from Minneapolis to Omaha. “Prior to coming, I was thinking this would be the most depressing place ever,” he recalls. His first foray into the East Village — on a late weekday morning — yielded empty streets, closed restaurants, and a lousy slice of pizza. “I said: ‘This place sucks. I’m out of here in the morning.’”
The next day he checked out of his hotel, drove to a coffee shop for breakfast and had second thoughts. “There was tons of activity, the shop was bustling, and then a Pride parade went by,” he says. “I went to bars by myself and engaged the bartenders and told them my idea for a theater venue supported by a restaurant. In other cities, people were like ‘Maybe, OK.’ But in Des Moines, everyone was enthusiastic. They had creative people, but there weren’t any venues, galleries, and theaters and clubs, so the actors and musicians were on the road a lot and the artists’ shows were hung in other cities. I was like: This is it!”
A few months later, Mannheimer moved to Des Moines, took a job as a maitre d’ at the club atop the Ruan Center — the same place where Gandelsonas had outlined his vision for city leaders years before — and began lobbying for what would eventually become the Des Moines Social Club, an incubator for the local arts scene featuring a theater, club, art gallery, classroom spaces and office space for theaters and non-profits. Iowa’s openness eased the way.
“I waited tables in New York for years and served some superfamous people, but I couldn’t talk to them; I’d have been fired,” he says. “Here it was the total opposite: the CEOs would ask me to tell them about myself and then they’d say: ‘Come have coffee and tell us about your idea!’” That’s how he got his first grant, enabling the Social Club to open in an old two-story brick building on the Western Gateway park, “a piece of shit being held together by dirt and full of cat shit” — that’s now the swank home of Microsoft.
Mannheimer was soon sure he’d made the right move. His staff was putting on their own shows and hosting poetry readings, but an early, unlikely anchor tenant was 3XWrestling, which held WWE-style wrestling spectacles the first Friday of every month.
“They drew 100 or 150 people a night, and it happened at the same time as poetry and jazz night down in our bar,” he recalls. “You could immediately tell who was who, and the first month they stayed separate. But then there were a couple of wrestling fans who looked around to see if anyone was listening and said they both wrote poetry, could they read at the club? Pretty soon some of their friends would come in to hear them and after a few months we had to stagger the show times because everyone was going to the other’s event.”
This was just before the 2008 caucuses, and resulted in civil and gratifying political discussions at the bar, which for Mannheimer was the dream come true. “We decided to try to do it every evening so it drew as opposite crowds as possible and gets them to interact.”
The business community loved the Social Club, a place they could take potential recruits to help convince them that moving to Iowa wasn’t like being sent to Siberia. (Baby boomers are retiring, so companies need to attract lots of new talent to replace them.) That helped Mannheimer and his colleagues raise $8 million to buy and renovate the club’s permanent 30,000-square-foot headquarters, a 1937 art deco fire station complex perched in the shadow of the insurance companies’ downtown high-rises. When the complex opened in May 2014, David Byrne showed up gratis to tell the crowd assembled in the open air courtyard that it was on their city, not Manhattan, that his hopes for a “creative explosion” were staked. “I’m looking forward to hearing and seeing what happens.”
The club organized a food truck festival in the courtyard that drew 10,000 people, ten times what organizers had expected. It hosts classes and events that pull 25,000 people a month through its doors, and its black box theater has three resident theater troupes and is booked two years in advance. People who’ve performed in its downstairs lounge have gone on to open clubs and performance companies of their own. “I see us first and foremost as an incubator,” says the club’s programming manager, Mickey Davis. “This is a space for new ideas, and whenever new ideas manage to catch on in this town they really reverberate.”
That said, Des Moines has a long way to go before anyone will call it the next Austin, Texas. Most people coming here are still Iowans or those married to them. Visitors checking into downtown hotels at 9 p.m. on a Sunday are still told their only dinner option is to order in from the Dominos at 4th and Grand. The state of public transportation is such that you can’t really live in the city without a car, a burden many millennials avoid. An airport terminal expansion has been talked about for years, but the $420 million effort remains in the planning stages. The new arena and convention center were supposed to attract private capital to build an associated convention hotel, but instead the city and county had to step in to secure financing for the $100 million project. (“If the market was going to support this hotel, they would have stepped up to build it,” says Draper, a prominent critic of the new plan.)
But out-of-towners are taking notice, says Republican political consultant Tim Albrecht, who confers with a great many when the presidential caucuses roll around, including the political reporters deployed by the national news organizations. “I used to say to them that Des Moines isn’t so bad and that I think they’d like it,” he says. “This time around I told them the same and they would respond: ‘We know, we asked to come here.’ That’s a big difference.”