CedarRound: Kingston Square

One of the cool things about jury duty is I get to walk from the jury parking lot to the courthouse through the historic Kingston Square neighborhood, which is slowly but handsomely being revitalized after the 2008 flood.

I don't know much about the building pictured above, but the pictures below are of the old Peoples Savings Bank Building, which was designed by Chicago architect Louis Sullivan and built in 1911 as part of the short-lived post-Edwardian "Jewel Box" architecture movement. Sullivan designed it with bricks in multiple shades of red to create an almost shimmering Oriental rug effect on its exterior:

The interior is decorated with panels of colored and textured glass and enormous, pastoral murals celebrating the quiet nobility of early rural Iowa painted by Chicago Art Institute professor Allen Philbrick:

The building now houses a high-end restaurant. And the gentrifying neighborhood -- which is being populated with architecturally referential residential construction like the building below -- is filling me with happy civic pride.