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Marion is so small that I'm not sure you can really characterize it as having neighborhoods. Maybe there are "areas of newer development" vs. "older homes with a lot of character and high heating bills," but that's about it. Marion generally "pulls together" as a town. It has a great small town feel but you, effectively, live in Cedar Rapids and so have amenities that would otherwise only be available to residents of a much larger town.
Hiawatha is similarly small. However, Hiawatha did not come into existence until sometime in the 1950s, while Marion is one of the oldest towns in the state, older than Cedar Rapids. I probably should avoid saying anything about Hiawatha because I pick on them a lot, but you asked, so here goes. What kind of town is named after a TRAVEL TRAILER? Yep, Hiawatha is. Not the Longfellow poem, no, nothing elegant or memorable -- named after a particular camper model. So, Hiawatha is newer. It has no real identity in terms of a downtown or even "uptown"... Center Point Rd. runs through the town and there are a couple of restaurants, a couple of bars, and several very diverse retail shops scattered the length of the 3-4 mile stretch, not much density. There is a Fareway grocery store on the very northwest corner of town, which has an incredible meat department but little in the way of fresh baked goods or produce. But, again, Hiawatha is so small that the HyVee at the northeast corner of Cedar Rapids is practically in Hiawatha. The town has pulled together to get RAGBRAI, the cross-Iowa bike ride, to stop overnight there, and they did a SUPER job of it -- that was FUN! But the town just seems to have this split personality. An example... they spent a lot of money on "streetscaping" that main drag that is Center Point Road. They put in a lot of brickwork, an elegant display wall with a swirling iron "H," set into it, backlighted, and these old-fashioned streetlights. However, the streetlights are politically correct and only shine DOWN, no light pollution. The result is that you need a streetlight ever few feet, not one or two a block, and it just looks odd. Then you have to have the modern mercury-vapor ones at corners, anyway, in order to actually see anything! Also, alongside all the olde-fashioned streetlights and scrollwork, we have the city... what... signature?... which is the word "Hiawatha" with the "Hi" done in a sort of graffiti-paint style in turquoise. Get it? HIawatha? This is ALSO on the water tower. So, are we olde-fashioned? Or are we HIawatha, all friendly like an untrained puppy? Pick one! IMHO, the town can't decide what it wants to be when it grows up, assuming it is allowed to, as it spends a lot of time negotiating where it will be allowed to annex future land and then dealing with lawsuits by landholders who will do ANYTHING to be annexed by Cedar Rapids rather than Hiawatha because the services are so much better and less expensive (economy of scale, really, nothing personal about Hiawatha). Well, some of it is personal, I guess... the elected officials have done some pretty goofy stuff. My in-laws live in Hiawatha. They live across from a beautiful park, get a great small-town newspaper, and generally have no complaints. So don't let my griping about the lack of town identity scare you -- it's a fine place to live, as long as you don't think about it too much! <g>
Robbins is kind of between Marion and Hiawatha -- don't rule them out! They recently got their first commercial resident, a convenience store. It was pretty exciting!
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Marion Neighborhoods
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