dsmWeekly - July 2, 2025

By Dave Elbert

Two components of the 20-year-old Iowa Events Center were renamed this week. As of Tuesday, Wells Fargo Arena is now Casey’s Center and Hy-Vee Hall is EMC Expo Center.

This is not the first, and surely not the last, change for Des Moines’ performance venues. The first three major ones — the Auditorium, Coliseum and KRNT Theater — no longer exist.

The Auditorium
The city’s first big space for events was the 3,000-seat Des Moines Auditorium, built in 1899 at 516 Fourth St., two blocks south of today’s Events Center. That building still stands, minus most of its 19th-century architectural features, as a garage and warehouse.

When the Auditorium opened in August 1899, it had two balconies and a stage that could hold as many as 500 performers. Supporters claimed only one opera house in the country, in Chicago, was larger. Opening night featured music and speeches by Gov. Leslie M. Shaw and Mayor John MacVicar Sr.

It took three years to raise the $35,000 to finance the three-story building but only 55 working days to erect it. According to materials from the chamber of commerce, officials hoped the Auditorium and the city's early adoption of electric street lights and “dry roads that are available for bicycling,” would attract tourists and conventioneers.

They did. More than 80 conventions were held in Des Moines the first year the auditorium was open, including a Mothers’ Congress and a national gathering of music teachers.

The Coliseum
The rapid increase of conventions required a larger venue, and in 1908 a fundraising goal of $100,000 was set for a Coliseum that would hold 10,000 people.

There were a few stumbles, and the cost climbed to $125,000. But by the end of 1909, the new Coliseum stood more than three stories tall on the west bank of the Des Moines River, north of the new 1903 library and directly across the river from where a new city hall would be built in 1912.

The Coliseum opened with an agricultural exposition that featured a 3-foot ear of corn from Peru and a state-of-the-art biplane. Six-day bicycle races were held inside during the early years, and on Sept. 11, 1941, the Coliseum hosted Charles Lindbergh’s famous anti-war speech during the America First movement before World War II. It drew a crowd of 8,000 who alternately booed and cheered both Lindbergh and President Roosevelt, whose nationwide radio address preceded Lindbergh’s talk.

The Coliseum had been advertised as “fireproof,” but it burned down in 1949 and was replaced in 1955 with Veterans Memorial Auditorium. Built on a hill overlooking downtown, the new $5.25 million auditorium could hold more than 15,000 people.

KRNT Theater

The Auditorium was replaced in 1927 by the Shrine Temple Auditorium at Ninth and Pleasant streets. Backed by local Masons, the theater cost $1.3 million and could seat 4,200. The humorist Will Rogers performed at its opening, on April 6. (Photo courtesy of the Des Moines Chamber of Commerce.)

Following World War II, the Shrine was renamed KRNT Theater for the radio station that had broadcast from its stage since the 1930s. (The station’s owners, the Cowles family, chose the call letters RNT as a nod to their newspapers, the Register and Tribune.) The newly renamed theater hosted Des Moines’ first Broadway musical, “Oklahoma!” At the premiere on Sept. 9, 1946, the governors of Iowa and Oklahoma arrived in a “surrey with the fringe on top.”

The KRNT Theater was replaced in 1979 with the $9.7 million Des Moines Civic Center at 221 Walnut St. The old theater was acquired by Principal Financial Group in 1983 and torn down.

Today, the 2,700-seat Civic Center is one of several venues owned and operated by Des Moines Performing Arts, along with Cowles Commons across the street and the Temple Theater in the beautifully preserved Temple for Performing Arts, which Masons built at 1011 Locust St. in 1913.

After 46 years, the Civic Center remains an essential part of Des Moines cultural life. The former Auditorium is now storage space, the long-gone Coliseum has been replaced by the new federal courthouse, the KRNT Theater is now a pocket park — and the newly renamed Casey’s Center serves some of Iowa’s most popular pizza.

Dave Elbert has covered Iowa business news and local history for more than 40 years, first for the Des Moine Register and then the Business Record. Read more of Elbert’s Backstories at dsmmagazine.com.

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The Independence Day parade winds through a farm at Living History Farms, showcasing historical men and women. (Photo: Living History Farms)

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Celebrate an old-fashioned Independence Day

This weekend at Living History Farms, you can celebrate Independence Day the way Iowans did when the United States was just rounding out its first century.

Festivities kick off at 9 a.m. Friday. You can pick up a copy of the Declaration of Independence, hot off the press at the print shop and then follow along during a public reading at 11:30 a.m. — shortly after the 11 a.m. pie-eating contest.

You can make crafts, play croquet and other lawn games, and even learn about the latest cure-all elixirs during a medicine show. Watch the parade at 3 p.m. and then hustle over to the ballfield at 3:30 p.m. to root for the Walnut Hill Bluestockings in a genteel game of Victorian baseball. (No swearing or spitting, please.)

The Week Ahead

The Nadas, 6-9 p.m. Thursday, Jasper Winery. The winery's free weekly summer concert series continues with the popular local band on the lawn just south of Water Works Park. You can buy burgers and brats on site, as well as beer, cider and, of course, wine.

Yankee Doodle Pops, 8:30 p.m. Thursday, State Capitol. The Des Moines Symphony kicks off its 31st annual Independence Day celebration on the west terrace with a patriotic concert before fireworks erupt over downtown.

Goodguys car show, Friday through Sunday, Iowa State Fairgrounds. The 34th annual Speedway Motors Heartland Nationals features more than 5,000 cars that are at least 25 years old — hot rods, trucks, customs, muscle cars and classics from across the Midwest.

Twin Cities Bronze, 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Des Moines Art Center. The 13-member handbell choir's Midwest tour includes a concert in the museum's acoustically resonant I.M. Pei wing. It's free, but registration is required.

Jazz in July, 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Hoyt Sherman Place. Bring your blankets or lawn chairs to enjoy free outdoor concerts on Tuesday nights in July with musicians from around town and the Midwest. The weekly series begins with the Valley High School Jazz Combo and Mike Conrad's Hard Bop Express.

Celebration in Brass, 7 p.m. Wednesday, July 9, Ankeny Northview Middle School. The annual drum and bugle corps showdown features nine teams from Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming. They’ll compete for glory as the sun sets over the stadium.

Healing art: Community Support Advocates hosts “Rooted in Hope,” a free public art showcase, from 5 to 8 p.m. July 10 at its West Des Moines headquarters. The event features work by local artists Jill Wells, Katie Gazzo and Jack Marren, each of whom is connected to CSA’s Momentum program, which supports artists with disabilities. Guests can explore the new facility, meet the artists, enjoy food and music and participate in family-friendly art activities. Learn more about the Momentum program in this dsm story.

Bravo boost: Bravo Greater Des Moines recently awarded more than $400,000 in grants to local cultural nonprofits for facility upgrades and improvements. Among the recipients, the Japan America Society of Iowa plans build an outdoor shelter for its Yamamoto Tea House and move it to a more publicly accessible location. Des Moines Film plans to replace the roofs on the Varsity Cinema and adjacent Film Center and Lofts as part of a broader plan to expand film education, artist residencies and affordable creative housing. See the full list of 2025 capital project grant recipients.

By Shelli Ethier

It’s the end of an era, the end of an icon: Joann, formerly known as Jo-Ann Fabrics, closed its last local store on May 28.

The sound of the closing doors at 9999 University Ave. was bittersweet. The last few months were rough for employees, like me, and even though we never wanted the company to close, the end of the process was a relief. We’d spent months answering the question, “Where will I buy fabric now?”

A few other big-box stores sell a smattering of fabrics, but none of them rival Joann’s array of home décor, apparel, fleeces and flannels. Local quilters can still find at least seven quilt stores within a 25-mile radius of downtown Des Moines, but their inventories are more specialized and none stay open in the evenings. You wouldn’t believe how many frazzled parents came into Joann after 8 p.m. on a Tuesday to buy the two things their kid needed to make a tote bag or pajama pants for a school project that was due the next morning.

I was a student myself, just 14 and a half years old with a fresh work permit, when I got my first job at House of Fabrics in Tracy, California. I remember walking down the aisles and running my hand across the fabrics that had been draped over the ends of the bolts. I remember buying knit ribbing, a tubular fabric for sweatshirt hems and cuffs, and thinking how it could make a great miniskirt without any sewing. (I wore it only once.) I still have House of Fabric-branded buttons and thread, including some that still have their price tags.

The history of Joann started in 1943 with two families who’d fled Germany and settled in Cleveland, Ohio. The Reichs and Rohrbachs teamed up to open the Cleveland Fabric Shop, which was renamed Jo-Ann Fabrics 20 years later to honor two of the founding families’ daughters, Joan and Jackie Ann.

By 1969 the company had 169 stores. It went public in 1976 and was known on the New York Stock Exchange as Fabri-Centers of America, Inc. In the 1990s, the company acquired both House of Fabrics and Clothworld, a chain with 340 stories in the South. By the time Joann turned 60, in 2003, it oversaw more than 20,000 employees in more than 900 stores that sold materials for all manner of crafts and hobbies.

But economic fluctuations, the decline of home economics classes and the rise of fast fashion started to fray the company’s success. At the end of 2023, Joann filed for bankruptcy and announced plans to close 500 of its approximately 800 stores nationwide.

The downsizing enabled Joann to operate till early 2025, when a second bankruptcy was imminent. To maintain its legacy brand and a share of the market, Joann opted to close two-thirds of its remaining stores to help the company attract a buyer. Unfortunately, the highest bidder chose to shut down operations and began closing the last stores in early March.

That wasn’t just the end of Joann. It was the end of Clothworld, House of Fabrics, the Cleveland Fabric Shop and all the other fabric stores that were part of Joann’s corporate patchwork.

When the last local store closed, we didn’t just lose a big-box retailer, we lost an employer, a meeting place and creative space to swap ideas. The big space echoed after we emptied it out, but the memories of the aisles and aisles of colorful choices will live on in every crafter’s heart. That creative love can never be lost.

Shelli Ethier is an accounting associate for Business Publications Corp., which publishes dsm magazine. She worked part-time for Joann for 3 years and continues to make quilts and fabric art.

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