May's Island (or Mays Island) is a small island on the Cedar River, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Functioning as a civic center much like the Île de la Cité, it is the site of the Memorial Building (the city hall), the Linn County Courthouse, and the county jail. The island plus an adjacent block was listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
The island and all of its buildings were devastated by the 2008 flood of the Cedar River, with water reaching above the first floors.
Until the 2008 flood, the concentration of local and county government on the island served to unify the city on both sides. The Memorial Building was designed by Hunter & Hatton, architects of Cedar Rapids. The Beaux Arts-style Linn County Courthouse was designed by Joseph Royer, of Urbana, as was the county jail. The building masses are long and narrow, like the island itself. The buildings face each other, creating an "insular quality".
The concentration of government services extends to the east bank, where the Federal government is located, to the east of the Memorial Building, in the Beaux Arts-style Federal Building, whose design is credited to the Office of the Supervising Architect under James A. Wetmore. Its block, from 1st Avenue north to 2nd Avenue, from 1st Street west to the river, is also included in the historic district. This makes a total of four contributing buildings in the district.
History
Before Cedar Rapids was incorporated, May's Island was a low, marshy piece of land in the Cedar River (then called the Red Cedar), prone to flooding and covered with scrubby brush and trees. Because of the undergrowth and its inaccessibility, it was reputedly used by local horse thieves as a spot to temporarily hide their loot. In the 1850s, an entrepreneur/dreamer by the name of "Major" John May managed to acquire the island. (May had been granted the title for some service to the governor of New York and he always used it thereafter; interestingly, though, when called up to actually fight during the Civil War, he paid another man to serve in his stead). May was also into real estate speculation, and when he learned that the island had not been included in official government surveys of the city, he managed to get the government to recognize its existence and then sell it to him.
His original dream was to start a town called May Island (about the same time he started another town, called Mayfield, south of Cedar Rapids), but that plan quickly proved unworkable due to the island's tendency to flood and due to its inaccessibility—there were still no bridges across the Cedar. Undaunted, May came up with a new vision for his island: it would become the heart of an enlarged Cedar Rapids that straddled the river (at that time Cedar Rapids was confined to the east bank of the Cedar; there was a separate town called Kingston on the west). To this end, he persuaded the Iowa State Legislature to rename Kingston "West Cedar Rapids," thereby planting the idea that the two towns were really just two halves of a greater whole. May then left Cedar Rapids to pursue ventures elsewhere, but returned to check on his investment periodically. He returned to Cedar Rapids for good in 1871 to find fortune had smiled on his island: Cedar Rapids had annexed West Cedar Rapids/Kingston and had constructed an iron bridge to unite the two halves of the newly enlarged city—this bridge, along the line of the current third avenue bridge, cut directly through the middle of May's Island, and remained the only operable bridge for the next 14 years. May's vision had been realized, and businesses began popping up along the new thoroughfare.