They called it Bohemia. You wouldn’t find it on the city map, but for a long stretch of the late nineteenth century into the middle of the twentieth, if you crossed the iron bridge over the Cedar River and walked south on Third Street, you walked into a piece of central Europe. The bread came out of brick ovens. The talk in the saloons was in Czech. By 1900, more Czechs lived in Cedar Rapids than in any other city in America.
This is the story of the Czechs in Cedar Rapids, Iowa: how immigrants from Bohemia and Moravia turned an Iowa river town into the capital of Czech America, and what the city chose to keep.
Cedar Rapids, The Place
Cedar Rapids sits in Linn County in eastern Iowa, on both banks of the Cedar River, about twenty miles north of Iowa City. The city had a population of 137,710 at the 2020 census, second only to Des Moines in the state.
The Czech neighbourhood occupies the southwest side, low ground hard against the river. Czech Village is centred on 16th Avenue SW between the river and D Street, a strip of late nineteenth century brick storefronts. Across the river, the related New Bohemia district, known locally as NewBo, runs along 3rd Street SE down to about 14th Avenue. The two halves are stitched together by the 16th Avenue bridge, the same crossing immigrants used to walk to the slaughterhouses.
How Cedar Rapids Became Czech
Before the Czechs
Cedar Rapids was incorporated in 1849 as a milling town. Early settlers were New Englanders and Germans drawn by waterpower and farmland. When the town was reincorporated in 1856, it had roughly 1,600 inhabitants.
The southwest side of the river was farmland and floodplain. A few Russian, Syrian and Italian families took early plots along what would become 16th Avenue. They would soon be outnumbered.
The Czechs Arrive
The first Bohemian families arrived in 1852 and 1853. They had crossed the Atlantic in steerage from Hamburg or Bremen, taken a train inland, and finished the last leg by wagon. One of them, seven-year-old Thomas Korab, made the twelve-week journey from Moravia in 1854 with his family.
They came for the same reasons most Czechs left the Habsburg empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. Land was scarce at home, partitioned and re-partitioned across generations. Military service in the Austrian army was compulsory and long. The 1848 revolutions had ended in repression. Many were Catholic, but a sizeable minority were freethinkers or Bohemian Brethren, weary of being governed by a Catholic Habsburg in Vienna.
What pulled them specifically to Cedar Rapids was work. In 1871, the Irish immigrant T. M. Sinclair opened a meatpacking plant on the south end of Third Street, and a year later he relocated the slaughterhouse to a larger site nearby. Sinclair hired immigrants by preference. Czechs were strong, sober and arrived ready to work. Letters home did the rest.
Chain migration carried whole villages across the ocean. A man would arrive, find work at Sinclair, board with a Czech family on Third Street, save what he could, and send for a brother. By 1869 the new arrivals were organised enough to found the Reading Society, a Czech-language literary club that would later seed a theatre group and a brass band.
Czech Town at Its Peak
By 1900, a thriving Czech-speaking community ran the length of 16th Avenue SW. Bohemian families filled the small frame houses on the south side. Newspapers, in Czech, were printed on the same blocks they were read on.
The institutions came up in quick succession. St. Wenceslaus Bohemian Catholic Parish was established in 1874 with sixty founding families. The men of the parish built the first church themselves after their shifts, finishing it in 1882. By the early 1900s the parish had 1,200 parishioners and a new brick church, dedicated in 1904 at what is now 5th Street SE.
The first Sokol unit in Cedar Rapids was founded in 1873 as a gymnastics branch of the Reading Society, only the second Sokol club west of the Mississippi. Sokol, the Czech word for falcon, was a movement out of Prague that paired physical training with civic education on the principle that a free nation needed citizens fit in body and mind. The Cedar Rapids unit built its own hall downtown in 1908.
In 1879 the city’s first lodge of the Czech-Slovak Protective Society opened, a fraternal benefit society that paid out when members were sick and buried them when they died. Two more lodges followed within three years. They pooled their dues and built C.S.P.S. Hall in 1890 and 1891, a three-storey brick building on 3rd Street SE that became the social heart of the community. It is still standing, still hosting concerts and exhibitions, and still listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Cedar Rapids became, in this period, the unofficial capital of Czech America. Lev Palda, a freethinker writer and editor based in the city, was known nationally as a leader of the Bohemian secular movement. The community supported Catholic, Methodist and explicitly secular Czech-language congregations side by side.
Bakeries and meat markets clustered along 16th Avenue. The Kosek family opened a bakery there in 1903. Brothers Martin and Andrew Polehna took over a meat market in 1931 and started smoking jitrnice and klobasa over wood, a smell that hung over the corner for the next seventy years.
The Change
Decline came slowly. The 1924 Immigration Act cut new arrivals from southern and eastern Europe to a trickle. The slaughterhouse changed hands and changed scale. The second generation, fluent in English and educated in public schools, moved out to bungalows on the northeast side and the suburbs beyond.
Czech-language newspapers folded. The freethinker halls shrank. By the 1970s, the strip on 16th Avenue had quieted to the point that the remaining Czech business owners worried it would simply disappear. In 1974 they organised, rebranded the strip as Czech Village, and began promoting it as a heritage shopping and dining district. It worked, slowly. Sykora Bakery kept turning out kolaches. The CSPS Hall reopened as an arts venue in 1992 under Legion Arts.
Then, on June 13, 2008, the Cedar River rose to a crest of 31.12 feet, more than eleven feet above the previous record. Floodwater stood eight to eleven feet deep in the buildings on 16th Avenue and along 3rd Street SE. Polehna’s meat market took on so much damage that rebuilding it was estimated at $300,000. It never reopened. Sykora’s brick oven was destroyed. The Sokol hall, just then preparing for its 100th anniversary, lost a century of trophies and photographs to the brown water.
What happened next is the part of the story Cedar Rapids tells about itself. Federal disaster funds, Iowa’s I-Jobs programme, the state Main Street programme and private foundations flowed in. Preservation Iowa worked block by block with owners to repair instead of demolish.
Sykora Bakery rehung its old oven door on the wall as a relic and reopened with a new oven. The CSPS Hall was rebuilt. NewBo City Market, a year-round public market in a former warehouse at 1100 3rd Street SE, opened in 2012 in partnership with Project for Public Spaces. Within ten years the district was busier than it had been in decades.
The Landmarks of Czech Cedar Rapids
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library, 1400 Inspiration Place SW. Founded in 1995, the museum is the most ambitious institution any Czech-American community has produced. Its opening on October 21, 1995 was dedicated jointly by President Bill Clinton, Czech President Václav Havel and Slovak President Michal Kováč, with around 7,000 people in attendance. It was the first time three sitting presidents of three different countries had ever stood together in Iowa. The building itself was lifted and moved 480 feet in 2011 to higher ground after the 2008 flood.
St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church, 1224 5th Street SE. Founded in 1874 by Bohemian immigrants and built initially in 1882 by parishioners working after their packing-house shifts. The current brick church dates from 1904. It remains a Czech national parish under canon law: anyone of Czech descent can be a member. The parish marked its 150th anniversary in 2024.
C.S.P.S. Hall, 1103 3rd Street SE. Built 1890 to 1891 by the Czech-Slovak Protective Society as a fraternal hall and dedicated in June 1891. Three storeys of brick on a corner lot, with a stage on the second floor that hosted dances, plays and political meetings for generations. Now an arts venue.
Sykora Bakery, 73 16th Avenue SW. Trading at this address since 1903, when Charles and Anna Kosek opened the first Czech bakery in the building. Joseph and Clara Sykora bought it in 1927 and gave it the name it still carries. President Clinton ordered a cherry kolache here in 1995. Today it sells more than a dozen kolache flavours, from prune and poppyseed to apple and apricot, alongside Houska and rye bread.
Sokol Cedar Rapids. Founded in 1873 and still teaching gymnastics classes in 2026, 153 years on. The original 1908 hall downtown was flooded in 2008 and lost most of its archive. The unit still competes at the Sokol Western District’s annual Slet alongside teams from Minnesota and Nebraska.
NewBo City Market, 1100 3rd Street SE. Opened in 2012 in a converted warehouse as a deliberate act of post-flood civic reconstruction. The market houses small food vendors, an event space, and weekly programming. Czech bakers and butchers still appear among the stalls. Across the street, the New Bohemia historic commercial district has filled in with bars, breweries and design studios.
Czech Village, 16th Avenue SW and 3rd Street SW. Not one building but a ten-block district, formally protected since the 2008 flood when Preservation Iowa moved to expand the Bohemian Commercial Historic District to include both sides of the river. The village hosts Houby Days each May, a mushroom-hunting festival now in its 48th year that started, in the 1970s, when the local merchants decided the winter had been too long and they needed something to celebrate.
Where the Cedar Rapids Czechs Came From
The families who built Cedar Rapids came mostly from the western half of the modern Czech Republic. Bohemia sent the largest share: villages around Plzeň in the west, Tábor in the south, and Hradec Králové in the east. Moravia, the eastern Czech lands, sent the rest, with strong representation from the Brno region and the Wallachian hills along the Slovak border.
The pattern was rural and Catholic in the main, with a strong freethinker minority and a smaller Bohemian Brethren and Methodist contingent. They were peasants, smallholders, village tradesmen, and the second and third sons of farmers who couldn’t inherit a strip of land already cut too many ways.
The Korabs from Moravia, the Sykoras from southern Bohemia, the Polehnas and Koseks all came through this same funnel. Hamburg or Bremen, New York, the train west, finally a wagon to the southwest side of Cedar Rapids where someone they knew already had a roof.
Cedar Rapids Today
The Czech language is largely gone from daily life. The last fluent Czech-speaking generation is in its eighties and nineties. The third and fourth generations are full Americans, returning to Czech Village for Houby Days or a kolache the way other Americans go back to a parish church.
But the institutions stayed. That is the unusual part. Other Czech-American neighbourhoods, in Chicago and St. Louis and Cleveland, faded after the war and never came back as physical places. Cedar Rapids kept its village, its museum, its parish, its Sokol, its CSPS Hall, and its bakery. The 2008 flood almost erased the lot. The city chose, expensively and deliberately, to rebuild it.
The result is something genuinely strange in American urbanism: a working ethnic neighbourhood that functions equally as a living district and a memorial to itself. NewBo on a Saturday is full of young Iowans who may or may not have a Czech grandmother, eating klobasa, drinking Czech lagers, listening to a band on a stage where their great-grandfathers once danced to a polka. The journey continues.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Czechs settle in Cedar Rapids?
Czechs settled in Cedar Rapids beginning in 1852 because the city offered cheap land, factory work in the meatpacking industry, and a growing community of fellow Bohemians and Moravians. T. M. Sinclair’s meatpacking plant, opened in 1871, hired Czech immigrants in large numbers, and chain migration through letters home pulled thousands more from villages in Bohemia and Moravia to the southwest side of the city.
Are Czechs still in Cedar Rapids today?
Yes, although the community is now mostly third and fourth generation and the Czech language is rarely spoken outside heritage contexts. Czech Village and NewBo on the southwest side remain active heritage and arts districts, and the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library, St. Wenceslaus parish, Sokol Cedar Rapids and Sykora Bakery all still operate. Annual events like Houby Days and the Czech Heritage Festival continue to draw thousands.
What are the most famous Czech landmarks in Cedar Rapids?
The most significant Czech landmarks in Cedar Rapids are the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library at 1400 Inspiration Place SW, the Czech Village district along 16th Avenue SW, St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church at 1224 5th Street SE, the historic C.S.P.S. Hall at 1103 3rd Street SE, Sykora Bakery on 16th Avenue SW, and NewBo City Market at 1100 3rd Street SE.
Where in Bohemia and Moravia did the Cedar Rapids Czechs come from?
The Cedar Rapids Czechs came mostly from western and southern Bohemia, especially the regions around Plzeň, Tábor, and Hradec Králové, and from Moravia, particularly the area around Brno and the Wallachian hills along the modern Slovak border. They were predominantly rural Catholics with a significant freethinker and Bohemian Brethren minority, leaving villages where land was too divided and Austrian military service was compulsory.
When did Czechs first arrive in Cedar Rapids?
The first Bohemian families arrived in Cedar Rapids in 1852 and 1853, settling on the southwest side of the city near what is now Czech Village. By the time the town was reincorporated in 1856, roughly a quarter of its 1,600 residents were Czech. Immigration peaked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the 1924 Immigration Act cut new arrivals sharply.
If your family’s story passed through Cedar Rapids, or through any of the villages in Bohemia and Moravia that sent people to it, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hillside above Tábor to a brick storefront on 16th Avenue SW, to wherever you are today.