YOUR VILLAGE
I remember there used to be a strip club in Coralville, but it closed down. How could the only strip club near a big university go out of business? —Anonymous
T
here are lots of ways for a strip club to go out of business, but Dolls Inc in Coralville is probably the only one driven to extinction by a rainforest. Or rather, plans for a massive indoor rainforest. It was going to be a wonder of the world. A giant terrarium—4.5 acres—filled with free-roaming monkeys and tropical birds, as well as some unspecified prairie-dwelling animals (jackrabbits? Lesser prairie chickens?) in a separate section. In 2004, city leaders were convinced it would make Coralville an international tourism hotspot. “Visitors could stroll on suspended wooden bridges 100 feet in the air, through the tops of hundreds of towering Brazilian beautyleaf and American mahogany trees,” the Des Moines Register wrote in 2004, describing what was supposed to happen if the dream became reality. “The 20-story enclosure would look like a giant foil-covered caterpillar to motorists next door on Interstate Highway 80.” “Children would learn, researchers would study and tourists would roam through prairie, rain forest, an aquarium, an amphitheater or an IMAX-style theater in a kind of prairie-meets-the-Amazon setting.”
BY PAUL BRENNAN
Next to Earthpark—the name eventually attached to the rainforest/ prairie/IMAX/whatever complex—would be a new hotel and convention center. The city decided to call the whole thing the Iowa River Landing Project. Many Coralville citizens never bought into the Earthpark idea. But city leaders did. After all, a very rich man was behind the project. Ted Townsend of Des Moines started working on plans for a tropical rainforest in Iowa in 1996. Townsend’s father had been a successful inventor of meat-processing equipment, “including a profitable device that could strip rind from pork and stuff a hot dog at fantastic speeds,” journalist Peter Rugg wrote in his history of Earthpark. “At one point, 95 percent of all U.S. hot dogs were plumped with Townsend’s pork. The family became very wealthy.” Peter Sollogug, a Boston architect who worked on the rainforest project in its earliest stages, told Rugg that Townsend was a selfless philanthropist who wanted to improve Iowa by giving it a rainforest like the ones he’d seen on trips to Africa. “He never even wanted his name to be on anything, ever,” Sollogug said. “Never once mentioned calling this ‘The Ted Townsend Project.’ That’s one of the reasons they settled on the name ‘Iowa Child Project,’ really selling that this was about education.” That name didn’t last. The name changed to the Iowa Environmental/ Educational Project and then to the Iowa Environmental Project, before it became Earthpark. Normally, all those name changes might seem like a cause for concern, but it didn’t worry Coralville leaders.
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319-248-0561 andrewmartinconstruction.com 32 Feb. 5–18, 2020 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV278
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