Woman slowly restoring historic Davenport house
DAVENPORT, Iowa (AP) — From the front, Donna’ Winfield’s house in Davenport’s historic Gold Coast neighborhood looks great.
It’s painted in a two-tone, light-green/dark-green color scheme, accented with black trim, and is embellished with numerous architectural details.
Look closely and you’ll see fish scale shingles filling out the attic peak, a “swooped” roofline sitting atop a window with 36 panes of beveled glass and a bump-out on the second floor with rounded boards.
Walk to the sides and back, though, and it’s an all together different story.
The Quad-City Times reports that not only are these areas unpainted, but glass is missing from windows and trim is rotting. Inside is worse. There are holes in the floors, almost no plaster, missing walls, no working mechanical systems and lots of evidence of racoon habitation.
This once-grand house built in 1898 had already been turned into apartments by 1924, and it has been vacant for more than the past 30 years. It’s rough.
But, it is on its way to being rebuilt by Winfield, a Davenport native who lived most of her adult life in Texas where she was an attorney, including a district attorney for the county in which she lived and a juvenile court judge.
About 10 years ago Winfield came back to the Quad-Cities to care for her parents, and fell in love with the Gold Coast, the area of Davenport described as “Five to Nine, Ripley to Vine.”
But why? Why pour so much money into this wreck of a house?
Asked that question, Winfield gazes up, blinks, quivers a bit, and thinks, searching for the right words to express what she feels about this property.
“Because it’s worth it!” she finally exclaims. “It’s part of our neighborhood, our history, our community. (Think of) the effort it took to build...