Uptown Ankeny: the old commercial core that burned, rebuilt, and found a second life

If Ankeny has an older civic heart, it is Uptown. The city’s history page says that between 1932 and 1940, Ankeny suffered four major fires that nearly destroyed the uptown business area. Most of the businesses were rebuilt, which is one of those plain historical facts that reveals an enormous amount about a town’s character. The center did not vanish. It rebuilt itself.  That same era also marked a wider transformation in Ankeny’s economic identity. The city says that by 1942 the federal government had established an ordnance plant for ammunition on the site now occupied by John Deere Des Moines Works and the surrounding area. Then, after John Deere purchased the plant in 1947, production of corn pickers began in 1948 with 570 employees, and the city’s population entered a period of rapid growth. Uptown’s survival and the town’s industrial expansion were happening in the same broad historical moment.  That gives Uptown a different kind of significance than a polished new district. It is not simply the “cute old part” of Ankeny. It is the commercial center that survived fire, witnessed industrial transformation, and kept enough of its identity to remain legible in a much larger city. That is an inference, but it is strongly supported by the city’s official history of the fires, rebuilding, and postwar growth.  The twenty-first-century revival of Uptown is now visible enough that the city talks about it directly. In its economic-development news feed, the city says property values in Uptown had more than doubled since 2010, and it characterizes the district’s earlier condition as “a tired commercial district with scant hustle or bustle” before transformation began during the following decade. That is a stark official contrast: from tired to valuable, from thin activity to revived district.  Part of that newer identity is public gathering. The Uptown Ankeny Farmers Market page says the market runs every Saturday morning from mid-May through September at AMP Park at 715 W. First Street, and Chamber event coverage notes that its 33rd season wrapped in 2025. That tells you Uptown’s comeback is not only about property values or redevelopment language. It is also about rebuilding habit. People have to have reasons to come back regularly.  So Uptown Ankeny is one of the best “old Ankeny” stories because it lets you feel continuity under change. Fires nearly erased it, postwar industry altered the whole city around it, and later decades left it tired enough to need reinvention. But the old commercial core did not disappear. It kept enough shape to matter again once people decided it should.