Stucco repair costs in Davenport

McClellan Heights, on Davenport's east edge, is a good place to see the city's early stucco. The neighborhood has more than 400 houses, most built between about 1905 and 1940, according to its National Register nomination. Builders there used frame, face brick, stucco, concrete and half-timbering, and several of the small "period cottages" of the late 1920s and 1930s took on the stuccoed look of the Cotswold style. In the Vander Veer Park district, the boxy foursquare is often a frame house covered in stucco, face brick or clapboard. The Census Bureau's latest survey counts roughly 11,700 Davenport homes built before 1940, about a quarter of the city's housing.

The river is the other half of the story. In spring 2019, the Mississippi at the Rock Island lock and dam broke the all-time record crest set in 1993, with a preliminary crest of 22.70 feet, the Quad Cities weather office reports. On April 30 that year, temporary flood protection on River Drive at Pershing Avenue failed, and the blocks around Pershing, Iowa Street and East 2nd Street filled with water within minutes.

For a stucco house near the riverfront, the worst day may come from the river, not the sky.