Crescent Warehouse Historic District

About this property

The Crescent Warehouse Historic District is a 10.5-acre (4.2 ha) historic district in Downtown Davenport, Iowa, United States. The district is a collection of multi-story brick structures that formerly housed warehouses and factories. Most of the buildings have been converted into loft apartments. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003. The district is associated with the commercial and industrial development that happened on the east side of the downtown area between 1900 and 1950. This was a transitional period for the city's economy as it moved from a lumber-based economy to a more diverse industrial and commercial base. During this time new factories, warehouses, and railroad buildings were constructed in the district. This collection of multi-story industrial-based buildings is rare within the state of Iowa. The historic district is a roughly rectangular area with East Fourth Street on the south and East Fifth Street on the north, Iowa Street on the east and Pershing on the west. The southwest corner of the district widens to include the railroad viaduct over the intersection of East Fourth Street and Pershing Avenue. The area was located between two “crescents” that were created by elevated railroad tracks. The tracks that remain are the former mainline of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad and now belong to the Iowa Interstate Railroad. The second crescent was created by a branch of the tracks from the mainline to the Rock Island's railroad yards north of East Fourth Street. The second crescent and the yards have subsequently been removed. At the time of its nomination, the district consisted of 16 resources, which included 14 contributing buildings and two contributing structures. The Crescent Warehouse Historic District is located in what is known as LeClaire's Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Additions to the original city of Davenport, which lies to the west. The additions were part of a square mile plot of land given to city founder Antoine LeClaire by the Native American tribes who inhabited the region before American expansion into what is now the state of Iowa. That plot of land is known as the LeClaire Reserve. The city was founded in 1836 and its early economy was based on serving the settlers who moved to and through the area. The main business interests included flour mills, foundries, sawmills, and other small-scale manufacturers. In the 1850s the economy increasingly became based on woodworking operations. Logs from the pine forests in Minnesota and Wisconsin were floated down the Mississippi River and processed in mills along the riverfront. Other businesses such as planning mills, barrel factories, furniture factories, cigar box factories, and ladder factories joined the sawmills. Many were located along the Mississippi River and the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad tracks in the decades immediately before and after the Civil War.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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