The Figge also stages events and educational activities. The museum shows off some of the University of Iowa’s fine collection of painting and sculpture, the only self-portrait by American Gothic artist Grant Wood, and an excellent assembly of WPA-era art and Frank Lloyd Wright furniture. 2nd St., 563/326-7804, Tues.-Sun., $10), overlooking the Mississippi, is housed in a beautiful glass gem designed by noted British architect Sir David Chipperfield. If you come to the Quad Cities looking for a slice of old-fashioned middle-American humdrum, you’re in for a surprise: one of Midwest’s most impressive municipal art museums stands at the heart of unassuming Davenport. Today the railroad crosses the river on the upper deck of the old iron Government Bridge, which swings open for the tows entering the locks cars crossing between Rock Island and Davenport can ride the humming lower deck or take the modern concrete highway span below the dam.

The plaintiffs argued that bridges violated their navigation rights the defense lawyer’s elegantly simple-and successful-rebuttal was that a person has as much right to cross a river as to travel upon it. The railroad was promptly sued by a steamboat company, which had a craft that was mortally attracted to the bridge piers. The first railroad bridge over the Mississippi linked Rock Island and Davenport in 1856. 15, where the operation of the locks can be seen from a penny-pitch away. winter, free) right next to Lock and Dam No. Besides an arsenal museum and Civil War cemeteries, there’s a good Mississippi River Visitor Center (daily summer, Tues.-Sat. Map of the Great River Road through the Quad Cities.Īlong the river at the heart of the Quad Cities, adjacent to downtown Rock Island, is the former namesake of that city, now called Arsenal Island for the U.S. While much of the cityscape is dominated by heavy industry, particularly on the Iowa side, points of interest are sprinkled throughout. Straddling the Mississippi at its confluence with the Rock River, the Quad Cities-Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa-encompass an enormous sprawl of some 400,000 residents.

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