A sketch of the Iowa Exposition Building as it looked when it opened in 1876. By Dave Elbert The Iowa Exposition Building was a unique, palace-like structure that was built 150 years ago on the southwest corner of Eighth and Walnut streets. It was also known as the Centennial Building, since it was erected during the country’s centennial celebration, in 1876, and was known as the Shops Building by the time it was demolished in 1997. Over the years, the site has had many uses, owners and tenants. The building covered a quarter of a city block, 132 feet on each side, and was said to be the city’s largest building when it was completed.  A sketch from the time shows a three-story, whitewashed brick building with corner turrets separated by a majestic three-tiered tower. The site was reportedly “donated by public-spirited citizens.” Its location a half mile from the downtown riverfront prompted a newspaper critic to grumble that it was “so far out from the trade center, it failed to realize its purpose.” That original purpose was display space for Iowa’s agricultural and manufacturing bounty. The interior featured a central atrium, which was later surrounded by additional balconies as floors were added. It cost $72,000 to build. The architect was a builder named William Foster, who later owned and operated opera houses. In 1881, the Exposition Building was sold for $30,000 to Frank Mills, a printer who operated four newspapers and a contract printing business on the site for a decade. Mills sold the property in 1892 for $100,000 to D.B. Lyons and T. A. Harding, who removed the towers and rooftop ornaments, added two floors and reopened it as the Iliad Hotel, the city’s first residential hotel. (Meanwhile at the turn of the century, the Younkers brothers had opened a five-story department store one block east, and its success was encouraging additional retail on Walnut Street.) In 1906, a New England-based syndicate with Des Moines connections wanted to convert the hotel to a department store and sold shares locally to finance the $277,000 purchase. The November 1907 gala opening of the Des Moines Department Store, “the largest store in Iowa,” attracted an estimated 20,000 people. But finances were shaky, and the plans crumbled. Creditors forced a bankruptcy in early 1908. That’s when T.I. Stoner, a wallpaper manufacturer and department store tenant, recruited merchants from St. Paul to lead a second effort. The Minnesotans added a mail-order department, moved the grocery section from the fifth floor to the street level and made other cosmetic changes. In November 1908, they reopened the building as the Grand Department Store. This time things worked out better, at least for a while. But by May 1912, the St. Paul financiers wanted out. They sold their Des Moines stock of consumer goods to Younkers at deep discounts, saying they would concentrate on business in Minnesota. That left a handful of independent merchants in the building. The following August, the building changed hands again. Des Moines-based Anchor Fire Insurance, which held the title after the 1908 bankruptcy, traded it to a Des Moines investment group headed by Richard Rollins. The building was exchanged for $60,000 and the seven-story Security Building (on Seventh Street between Locust and Grand, now the site of the Downtown Marriott Hotel), which the Rollins group had built two years earlier. The group considered converting the building back to a hotel before announcing in October 1913 that they would try retail one more time with a different model. Both earlier failures had relied on a single merchant entity, which operated most of the store with limited space leased to independent retailers. This time, the Rollins group would be a traditional landlord and would not engage in retail sales. Instead, they would lease space to small merchants and call the property the Shops Building. Tenants would be individual retailers selling a variety of goods ranging from clothing to jewelry, shoes, furniture and musical instruments. As before, there also would be restaurants and meeting rooms for clubs. This time the retail risk would be spread over a much wider group of small business owners. The original plan excluded professional tenants — doctors, lawyers, insurance agents and such. But within a few years, commercial offices were also operating from the Shops Building. A signature tenant was the Chamber of Commerce, which signed a five-year lease in 1914 for a large part of the fifth floor. A restaurant took up most of the rest of the top floor. From left, a 1906 rendering of the Des Moines Department Store, an exterior photo of the building 1913 and an interior photo of the central atrium from the same year. In 1919, when the Chamber lease was up and the group was moving to the new Savery Hotel, the Shops Building was sold again. Iowa Guarantee Mortgage paid $100,000 for the building and obtained a 99-year lease on the land, which it later acquired in 1932 for an additional $400,000. Iowa Guarantee Mortgage was a lucrative lending business created in 1917 by Julius Adelman and others to lend money for purchases of automobiles and farm implements. Both were in high demand because of the technology revolution sparked by the invention of the internal combustion engine. Following Adelman’s death in 1939, a newspaper article said “a considerable sum was spent remodeling and improving” the Shops Building before it was sold in 1941 as an investment property to Central College of Pella. The college collected rents until 1969, when the Shops Building was sold to investors John G. Graham, Edwin R. Hunter and John C. Hunter. In 1987, the Graham group sold to Norwest Financial, which was later acquired by Wells Fargo. The Shops Building was demolished in 1997 and replaced by a Wells Fargo office building in 2002. Like the original Exposition Building with its fairytale facade and central atrium, Wells Fargo’s 11-story office building has two unique features. One is a rooftop, two-story, circular glass “lantern” used for conferences and other gatherings. The other is the city’s tallest skywalk, where an eight-story hallway ceiling connects with an adjacent office building, where Marriott plans to build a 157-room boutique hotel. Longtime local business columnist Dave Elbert ate lunch at Moran’s Cafeteria in the lower level of the Shops Building and had his grandfather’s pocket watch repaired by a tradesman in the building. Read more of his Backstories here at dsmmagazine.com. ...read more read less