Fenelon Place Elevator
600 Cooper Pl, Dubuque, IA
Dubuque, IA
A little wooden cable car that hauls you up a Mississippi bluff to a rail where three states open out below.
The Fenelon Place Elevator is a funicular, a pair of small cars that ride up and down a steep incline on a cable, balancing each other as one goes up while the other comes down. It climbs a Mississippi River bluff in Dubuque, rising a few hundred feet over a very short track, which makes it one of the shortest and steepest scenic railways anywhere. At the top, a wooden observation rail looks out over the old river city and across the water into two neighboring states.
What makes the little railway beloved is not its size but its story. It was built in the 1880s by a Dubuque banker who lived at the top of the bluff and worked at the bottom, and who was simply tired of the long walk. What began as one man's shortcut home for lunch became a public curiosity, survived fires and hard times, and is now run by a neighborhood association that has kept it climbing for well over a century.
What Guests Love
- The short, steep ride up in a small wooden car on a cable railway
- The three-state view from the top, taking in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin
- Looking straight down over the rooftops and church spires of old Dubuque
- The quirky, homemade charm of a railway a banker built to get home for lunch
Worth Knowing
- It is billed as one of the shortest and steepest scenic railways in the world
- The elevator runs seasonally in the warmer months and closes for the winter, so check before a cold-weather visit
- The top station sits in a residential neighborhood, so be respectful of the homes nearby
- The stairways beside the track are steep; the ride itself is the easy way up
Details
Dubuque, IA
Learn about Fenelon Place Elevator
The banker who was tired of the walk
The elevator was the idea of J.K. Graves, a former Dubuque mayor and banker who lived on top of the bluff and worked downtown. The story goes that the walk around the long way was too far, and the climb straight up too steep, especially for a man who liked to go home for lunch and a nap. In 1882 he had a small cable car built to carry him up and down the face of the bluff, with a gardener sent to work the winch at each end.
Graves eventually began letting neighbors ride, and demand grew. Fire destroyed the works more than once, and after one blaze the neighbors who depended on it banded together to rebuild it as a shared enterprise. That neighborhood ownership is why the elevator still runs today, a rare survivor of the era when many hilly American cities had bluff-climbing funiculars, most of them long since torn out.
How a funicular works
A funicular is a clever, simple machine. Two cars ride the same steep track, joined by a cable that runs over a wheel at the top. As one car descends, its weight helps pull the other one up, so the two counterbalance each other and the motor at the top only has to make up the difference. It is an old and efficient way to move people up a slope too steep for a normal railway.
The Fenelon Place cars are small, wooden, and homey, riding on rails set into the bluff, with the operator sending them up and down between the lower street station and the upper platform. The whole trip takes only a couple of minutes, but it climbs a bluff that would otherwise mean a long, breathless flight of public stairs.
The three-state view
The reward at the top is the view. From the observation rail you look straight down over the church spires, brick warehouses, and tidy rooftops of old Dubuque, then out across the wide brown Mississippi. On a clear day the eye reaches into Illinois on the far bank and up into Wisconsin, so from one small platform you can take in three states at once.
Dubuque grew rich in the 1800s on lead mining, river trade, boatbuilding, and lumber, and the ornate downtown below the bluff still shows it, block after block of Victorian storefronts and steeples. The elevator is the best way to understand the city's shape, a river town wedged between the water and the bluffs, built up and down as much as along.
The river and the bluffs
This corner of Iowa sits in the Driftless Area, a rugged pocket of the Upper Midwest that the last glaciers missed, so instead of the flat farmland most people picture, it is a country of steep wooded bluffs, deep valleys, and cold spring-fed streams. The Mississippi has carved a broad, island-braided valley through it, and Dubuque climbs the eastern edge.
This land is the homeland of the Meskwaki and the Sauk, whose people lived and traded along this stretch of the river long before the mining boom, and whose name marks much of the region. Bald eagles winter along the open water here, drawn to the ice-free stretches below the locks, and the wooded bluffs above the city fill with birdsong in spring.
Closest Boutels
The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.
Things to Do Near Dubuque
National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium
About a mile downhill
A riverfront museum and aquarium on the Dubuque waterfront that tells the story of the Mississippi, its wildlife, and its boats.
Cathedral of St. Raphael
At the foot of the bluff
A soaring 1800s cathedral in the old downtown, one of the church spires you look down on from the top of the elevator.
Mines of Spain Recreation Area
About 4 miles south
A wooded park along the Mississippi with trails, bluff overlooks, and the monument to Julien Dubuque, the trader who gave the city its name.
Galena, Illinois
About 16 miles east
A well-preserved 1800s river town across the state line, its brick main street lined with shops in old lead-boom buildings.