Model T Touring Car – Rock Island to California
Second Avenue & 14th Street Sometimes there’s a postcard that allows our imagination to play. This is one such card. It was hard to identify, but there were clues. First, the sign hanging on the building says “Brown’s Business College.” Then there were the words someone had scrawled on the back of the unaddressed and … [ Continued
Black Hawk Watch Tower Amusement Park
Black Hawk Road near 17th Street Here is a peek at Rock Island’s own homegrown amusement park. Like Chicago’s Riverview, New York’s Coney Island, and the much later Disneyland, the Watch Tower amusement park was a destination for people from near and far in the early 1900s. It was located in an area that we … [ Continued
Twentieth Street South from Third Avenue
This circa 1910 postcard is identified only as “20th Street, Rock Island, Ill.” But 20th Street is long – how could we identify the photo more precisely? Since these are obviously commercial buildings, the geographical area was limited to downtown. And noting all the awnings, it was apparent that these buildings had to face either … [ Continued
Tri City Railway Car Barns
3448 Fifth Avenue They were known as street railways, and the streetcars that followed those rails were much like a train, except they were only one car long. For forty years they created a steel network that extended well outside of our major city limits. One could hop on a streetcar in Rock Island and … [ Continued
