Little Bohemia: The Czech Village

The southwest quadrant of Cedar Rapids holds a distinction that few American cities can match. Cedar Rapids is home to one of the best known Czech communities in the United States. That fact has a specific origin story, and it begins with a meatpacking plant and a revolution.

Czech immigrants began trickling into Cedar Rapids as early as eighteen fifty-two, drawn by cheap Iowa land and an appetite for labor. The community grew further in eighteen seventy-one, when Thomas Sinclair opened his massive hog-slaughtering complex along the Cedar River. Within a few years it was one of the largest meatpacking plants in the country, and it needed workers.

Word traveled through Bohemian communities in Chicago and beyond: Cedar Rapids was hiring. The undeveloped land between downtown and the Sinclair plant filled quickly with Czech immigrant housing, and a neighborhood took shape that its residents called Little Bohemia. By nineteen hundred the community along Sixteenth Avenue Southwest had its own Czech-language newspapers, fraternal lodges, Catholic parishes, and bakeries.

One of the more striking arrivals was Josef Sosel, reportedly the first Czech lawyer in the United States, who had been smuggled out of Bohemia in a barrel after revolutionary activities and built a legal career in his adopted city. Today that corridor is formally known as Czech Village. The old storefronts have been restored.

Czech-owned bakeries still sell kolaches. The National Czech and Slovak Museum stands nearby, a Smithsonian affiliate and the institutional anchor of one of the most intact ethnic heritage districts in the Midwest. The neighborhood carries the particular gravity of a place that remembers where it came from.