Community
Chad Rhym / Little Village
Iowa City: The Hall Mall
The Upstairs Underground An iconic Iowa City haunt is fading away. Can its spirit live on in Keokuk? BY JAY GOODVIN
“I
came up with the Hall Mall name,” Kirk Stephan said through chuckles as he recalled opening what would become Iowa City’s original incubator of small businesses in the early 1970s. “I wanted to have a longer one, but it turned out that advertisers charged more money the more letters you had!” More than a century ago, the Schneider Building in downtown Iowa City was home to Schneider Brothers Furniture, Carpet and Rugs. By the ’60s, its second floor office space (114 ½ E College St) housed lawyers, lenders, a stenography business, the Johnson County Democrats and offices for the now-enormous asphalt company L.L. Pelling. Meanwhile, Iowa City was crawling with folks who lived and breathed the arts and sought spaces to sell their wares, ink clients, make music with friends and shop. Stephan opened a jewelry shop, Emerald City, in the space he dubbed the Hall 44 August 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV297
Mall, followed by other countercultural vendors. “The hippies started moving in and all those other guys started moving out!” Stephan said. From the sounds, smells and sights to the creative people who gathered there, the Hall Mall became a decades-old homage to local weirdness and art. Some Hall Mall occupants (Daydreams Comics, White Rabbit) went on to become downtown institutions in their own right. “It’s very much a living, breathing building,” former manager Joe Murphy said. But the COVID-19 loop we’re still living in hasn’t been kind to brick-and-mortar retail, including the Hall Mall. In December 2020, amid the woes of a pandemic economy, Murphy relinquished leasing and management of the Schneider Building—including the Hall Mall and TCB Pool Hall on the ground floor—to Iowa City-based Barker Companies. Asked about their plans for the space, Barker said only that they’re in a transition period and uncertain about its future. “I’m glad to say that I was there for part of it,” Murphy said, remembering “a lot of giggles” in the Schneider Building over the years. Stephan certainly laughed many times while he talked of his Hall Mall days. “Red Rose was the second shop to open up, with used clothing,” Stephan recalled. “There was a sandwich and soup place, and a man named Bear opened a zoo! One day he disappeared and, well, the monkeys went monki-fied!” A few years after opening Emerald City, Stephan left to live in Belize, where he stayed for over a decade. But when he returned to Iowa City, he opened his next store right back in the same place. “I never expected to see the Hall Mall go so long,” he admitted. “It’s the end of an era. So many great people. I would love to hear from any of them.” “I loved meeting [previous] tenants that would come back and talk about their shops and what was in each unit when they were here,” Murphy reminisced. “And where else
