Drive down First Avenue in Coralville this month and you will pass a red brick building with plywood over its windows and orange construction fencing blocking the parking lot. That is 501 First Ave, the old Iowa River Power building, and it has looked roughly the same way since a Gazette reporter photographed it back in May. Keep driving another few blocks into Iowa River Landing proper and the picture flips. There is a bakery with a line out the door most mornings and a fast-casual bowl shop that has already settled into the lunch rotation. Same district, same year, two completely different paces.
That gap is not an accident, and it tells you something useful about how this part of Coralville actually fills in. The easy stuff, a coffee counter, a healthy lunch spot, moves fast. The one building everyone actually wants back moves on its own schedule, because it is not really a restaurant project. It is a historic preservation project that happens to end in a restaurant.
The Meals That Already Showed Up
The Eat Shop hit its May 1 opening date this spring at 104 E 7th St, and it is the biggest location owner Cheryl Maloney has built yet, with expanded seating and daily hours from 6:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., seven days a week. Maloney started the bakery as a pandemic hobby, opened her first storefront in Solon in 2021, added a Marion location in February 2025, and told the Daily Iowan that Iowa River Landing was a spot she had been eyeing for a long time because her own family already ate there regularly. Coralville City Administrator Kelly Hayworth said he expects the bakery to fit naturally into the corridor, where foot traffic from the nearby trails, hotels, and retail keeps building.
A few blocks over, Crisp & Green filled the lunch gap at 805 East 2nd Avenue, opening earlier this year with the kind of fast-casual bowl and smoothie menu that fits the crowd walking over from the Hyatt Regency Coralville Hotel and Conference Center or cutting through on a lunch break from the nearby medical clinic. Between the two, the district now covers a full morning-to-afternoon stretch of eating that did not exist in this form a year ago.
Neither opening required much patience. A storefront build-out for a bakery or a bowl chain runs on a normal commercial lease timeline: sign, permit, build, open, usually inside a year. That is exactly what happened here.
Why the Building Everyone Wants Back Is Taking Longer
The Iowa River Power building is a different kind of project entirely. It opened as a restaurant in 1977 inside a power plant building that dates back to the early 1900s, and it ran for 46 years before an abrupt eviction notice in November 2023 ended the run. University of Iowa alum Mark Kaufman bought the property for roughly $3 million through his company, Old Gold & Black LLC, and rather than gut it for a fast reopening, he is pursuing a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.
That decision changes everything about the timeline. The project has already pulled in $1.3 million from the Iowa Economic Development Authority's redevelopment tax credits, money reserved for grayfield sites, meaning long-vacant properties that need real infrastructure work before they can be reused. Kaufman brought on Dubuque-based Stickley Morton Architects, Gronen, and Heritage Works to handle the design and preservation work, and put a former college roommate, Tom Beardsley, in charge of overseeing construction. None of that is the kind of team you assemble for a quick tenant fit-out. It is the kind of team you assemble when a building has to satisfy state preservation offices before it can satisfy a health inspector.
As of the most recent reporting on the site this spring, the restaurant partner still had not been finalized, and Kaufman said it will be up to that incoming group whether the Iowa River Power name survives at all. Hayworth called the building "one of Coralville's most iconic and visible structures" and said he is looking forward to enjoying dinners there again. Nancy Bird, president of Greater Iowa City Inc., described it as a building with enough nostalgia attached that it works as what she called a calling card, something that pulls people back into thinking about this part of Coralville even if they had not been by in years. Both comments point at the same thing: this building carries more weight in the district's identity than any single storefront that has opened this year, which is exactly why it is being handled with more care and less speed.
The target has been fall 2026 since the project's team last discussed a timeline. Given how visibly unfinished the site still looked as of this spring, whether that holds through the rest of the season is worth watching rather than assuming.
The Weekend That Showed What This Is Building Toward
FRYfest returned to Iowa River Landing on September 4, its 17th year running, timed the day before Iowa opened its home football schedule against Northern Illinois. The event's High Porch Block Party brought back live music with headliner The Spazmatics playing a set of 1980s covers, Mount Vernon-based Rattlebox opening, and free admission covered by SCHEELS sponsorship. All of it happened in and around the Hyatt Regency Coralville Hotel and Conference Center, the same building anchoring the district where the Eat Shop and Crisp & Green now serve their regular customers.
That timing matters more than it looks at first. A single big annual event does not make a neighborhood a place people actually live their week in. What does is having somewhere to grab a coffee on a Tuesday morning, a bowl on a Wednesday lunch break, and then, eventually, a river view dinner on a Friday night, with the annual festival as the loud exception rather than the only reason to show up. Iowa River Landing has two of those three pieces locked in now. The third is still behind plywood.
What This Actually Looks Like Right Now
If you live near the district and have been wondering what's changed since spring, here is the honest state of it. Breakfast and lunch are handled, and handled well, by two operators who each had the track record and the capital to move on a normal commercial timeline. Dinner, at least the marquee version everyone remembers, is still tied up in a slower, more deliberate rebuild that has as much to do with historic tax credits and state preservation review as it does with menus. That is not a complaint about the pace. A building that is 120-plus years old and headed for the National Register does not get rushed without losing the thing that made people want it back in the first place.
In the meantime, the district is not actually short on places to eat dinner or grab a drink. 30hop, with its rooftop patio and rotating beer list, has been carrying that role for years already. Backpocket Brewing had been doing the same until its taproom closed for good in December 2025, when the brand shifted production to Waterloo. That closure is worth sitting with for a second, because it is the mirror image of what is happening at the old power plant: an ordinary tenant can wind down a lease and move out inside a few months, while a building tied to historic tax credits and a National Register application takes years to come back. Both speeds are normal for this district. They are just normal for different reasons.
What changes when the Iowa River Power building finally reopens is not whether you can get dinner in Iowa River Landing. It is whether you can get that specific dinner, in that specific building, with the river view that made it a fixture for two generations of Coralville residents before anyone reading this ever moved to town.
Keep an eye on First Avenue this fall. The fencing coming down will be the actual signal, not another press release.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own plans in Coralville, whether that's timing a move, sizing up a rental, or just trying to figure out how a neighborhood is actually changing versus how it looks on paper, Case Group Realty pays attention to this kind of detail for a living. Work With Us.
