Cathedral Floor Plans

Open House to be Held to Remember Allis-Chalmers

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) Visitors often go silent when they walk onto the empty factory floor of the old Allis-Chalmers plant that Raining Rose Inc. acquired this year at First Avenue and 30th Street SE, according to Raining Rose CEO Chuck Hammond.

With its 35-foot-high ceilings, and huge windows made up of many small single panes, "It's like an industrial cathedral," Hammond said. The eyes tend to wander up to the massive cranes overhead as they search for the right words.

Huge motor scrapers and bulldozers once rolled off the plant floor to make the nation's roads and highways. It was one of the leading companies in a road machinery industry that employed 5,000 and produced $52 million worth of equipment annually in Cedar Rapids, according to a 1948 Gazette article.

The main Allis-Chalmer factory, along with three factory-related buildings, will be coming down next month to make a new production facility for Raining Rose, a fast-growing body care products company. More than a dozen businesses that leased space in the factory, mainly for storage, have been moving out over the past several weeks.

The site's rich past won't be forgotten in the rush to build a new Raining Rose facility, however.

After hearing many former workers recount their memories of the factory, general contractor Bart Woods of Primus Construction suggested that Raining Rose hold an open house for the former workers who remembered the place instead of just a groundbreaking.

"Every week I meet someone who says, "I used to work there when it was Allis-Chalmers, or "my father worked at Allis-Chalmers," Woods said.

Hammond liked the idea. He has come to revere the industrial history of the place, since divided into a bizarre hodgepodge of cluttered tenant spaces.

Most people remember the old 7.75-acre factory complex as Allis-Chalmers, which operated it in the 1950s and 1960s, but Hammond is most interested in its early history under the original owner, LaPlant-Choate Manufacturing Co.

Cathedral, The Story of Its Construction

Cathedral

The cathedral

The cathedral, by J. K. Huysman ; translated from the French by Clara Bell, and edited with a prefatory note by C. Kegan Paul

The Cathedral