Scenic Route Bakery
E Locust · 2 min
A warm croissant and coffee number one, two blocks from bed. The district before ten is all regulars and delivery trucks - the good hour.
03 / The comeback
The comeback.
Freight district. Empty floors.
A neighborhood finding its way back.
1885
Chapter one · the 1880s
Brick, rail & wholesale
Before it was anybody’s favorite neighborhood, the east side was where Des Moines did its heavy lifting - warehouses, factories and rail spurs running between the river and the Capitol. The brick blocks you walk today were built to hold freight, not brunch. That’s why the windows are so big and the bones are so good.
1957
Chapter two · 1957
The highway changes everything
Plans for Interstate 235 were announced in 1957, and with them the long slide began. Urban-renewal districts followed, investment stopped, and the neighborhood that moved the city’s goods watched the city drive right past it.
1980
Chapter three · the empty years
Lights off, bones intact
For decades whole floors along these streets sat vacant - some buildings unoccupied from the mid-seventies until renovations finally came in the late nineties. The saving grace: nobody bothered to tear much down. The district went to sleep with its architecture on.
1998
Chapter four · the late nineties
Somebody turns the key
Around the turn of the millennium the first renovations landed, and shopkeepers, galleries and restaurants started moving into rooms built for crates. The playbook that saved a hundred American warehouse districts worked here too, with one advantage most of them lacked: a gold-domed Capitol standing at the end of the street.
2019
Chapter five · the golden run
The best blocks in the state
What followed was two decades of compounding: Raygun printing the Midwest’s sense of humor at 505 E Grand, Wooly’s putting bands on stage most nights of the week, a bookshop, a tea house, a rooftop bar. In 2019 the district’s industrial heart made the National Register of Historic Places - official recognition for what the neighborhood already knew.
2026
Chapter six · now
New wiring, old street
418 East Grand opened this year - the newest building in the oldest district, with studios, alcoves and two-bedrooms named like a setlist: the Amp, the Pulse, the Current, the Spark. The Breakfast Club just opened on the ground floor; the rest of the neighborhood is out the door. The rest of this guide is what’s within a walk of it.
