CedaRound: Kingston Square

Incorporated on the west side of the Cedar River as the town of Kingston in 1852 and annexed by Cedar Rapids in 1871, this long-neglected neighborhood is making a slow but gorgeous recovery after drowning in almost 10 feet of water in the 2008 flood.

 
There is a layered boxiness that visually links the architecture in the area, from the 1911 People's Bank Building designed by Louis Sullivan in his fortressy "jewel box" style to the post-war brutalist commercial spaces clad in corrugated concrete to the new mixed-use residential construction profiled with broad crenellations and proud cornices.

 
That boxiness creates a relentless horizontalness to the neighborhood's rooflines and setbacks, and someone somewhere in the neighborhood's recent revitalization decided to trace all that horizontal geometry with simple lines of bright white lights. And the effect at night is at once austere, majestic and stunning. So stunning, in fact, that I go out of my way to drive through the neighborhood every time I'm in the area at night. I've stopped and parked and wandered around with my iPhone a couple times to try and capture the magic, but I could never find the right spot to frame the full expanse of everything I find so beautiful.

 
But I finally captured it a year ago tonight when I discovered I was parked in an ideal location to capture most of it, which—since I've finally accepted that all that grand horizontalness is just too horizontal to squeeze into one picture—is still perfectly breathtaking.

The lights are a small touch, but they beautifully unify a relatively small neighborhood and help make it a smart district set along the river and embedded in our modest but friendly skyline.