Greetings from Brooklyn, Iowa.
Brooklyn is known as the community of flags.
People come from all over to go to a class together.
The Brooklyn Service Center is 1920s.
John Wayne's father was a pharmacist and he lived here for a couple of years.
We know he went to kindergarten here and he lived up the block on East Des Moines Street, and we've got a marker there to commemorate that.
One of the first routes across Iowa goes right through Brooklyn.
It was called the river to River Road that went from Council Bluffs to Davenport, Stagecoach Road.
Eventually, Highway six followed it.
The railroad followed it.
Interstate 80 followed it.
So it must have been a pretty good way to get across to Iowa because it's still prevalent today.
This is the Brooklyn Opera House, originally built in 1911.
In the 1920s was the introduction of silent movies, and so all the windows on the outside kind of got covered over so that movies could could begin in here.
It was ran off and on throughout the years, up until the late nineties.
In 1998, the floor collapsed in the building right before one of the shows.
Its last show here.
And so at that time, it just kind of got boarded up and and nobody touched it again until we came in here in 2014, we started working with contractors, engineers, architects.
So we really actively in 2018 started construction on the building.
It took us about 14 months to complete the building.
I came here when I was young, you know, sat in the balcony when I could with a girl.
If I could, you know, they didn't always open the balcony, but most of us wanted to sit in the balcony.
In Brooklyn, Iowa, there's just a lot going on for a small town.