Spencer Square – Part I
2nd – 3rd Avenues; 19th -20th Streets The tale of Spencer Square is one that has a beginning, a middle, and, sadly, there’s also an end. But it’s a long enough story – and there are enough postcards scenes of it – to tell the story in different parts. The full block it occupied in … [ 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
Garnsey Square
5th – 6th Streets & 3rd – 4th Avenues We think of Rock Island as a city of parks, especially large rambling parks. But a century ago, parks and public spaces tended to be much smaller and more formal. This postcard, from around 1910, depicts such a park in its heyday. It is Garnsey Square, … [ Continued
Spencer Square, Part 2
2nd -3rd Avenues; 19th -20th Streets An earlier article told the first half of the story of Spencer Square in downtown Rock Island — how the square block between 19th and 20th Streets and Second and Third Avenues was given to the city for public use, and how it was converted from a weedy swamp … [ Continued
