The now-stalled beautification project to transform Capitol Avenue into a
ceremonial gateway to the Statehouse and Lincoln sites confirms what longtime
residents already know, which is that Springfield is not especially good at
gateways. Several disgraced governors ago, the gateway to the city from the
airport, Walnut Street north of North Grand, was dressed up as the J. David
Jones Parkway. The result owed more to the parking lot than the park. (For a
while, the medians were covered with Astro-Turf.)
The terrain in that part of Springfield’s north side offered the possibility of a genuinely handsome green gateway.
Unfortunately, achieving it would have required land use and building controls
to prevent such scenic corridors from being littered with trailer-like metal
sheds which are to Springfield what red-tiled roofs and stucco are to Spain.
When it comes to a choice between growing green and folding green, the latter
will always be preferred.
The only thing monumental about Monument Avenue, the gateway to Oak Ridge
Cemetery and Lincoln’s tomb from North Grand, is its name. It is distinguished from a thousand
identical streets by a few planters and a sign on Ninth Street bearing a phrase
from Lincoln’s House Divided speech. It says, “It willbecome all one thing…” which for a long time I assumed referred to the city’s tendency to permit commercial land uses anywhere in town. It is at least a
symbolically Springfieldian gateway, what with Lincoln at one end and a strip
mall on the other.
Clear Lake Avenue is the gateway into the city from the busy eastside interstate
exits. The Presidential museum’s Web site sensibly instructs visitors to come via the westbound lanes of the
Clear Lake/Madison-Jefferson one-way couple. That allows drivers eager to be
amazed to move directly from I-55 to the parking garage on Sixth Street between
Madison and Mason streets.
Unhappily for proud Springfieldians, inviting visitors to the city to come in
via Clear Lake is like asking your dinner guests to come in through the garage.
That’s why Mayor Tim Davlin targeted it in 2004 as a “Springfield Green” project. He should have targeted it with smart munitions, since making
Springfield look green by planting flowers along Clear Lake is like trying to
making the Blagojevich administration look competent by straightening the
magazines in his office waiting room.
People come to Springfield by rail too. Springfield’s first official city plan, drawn up by Myron West of Chicago’s American Park Builders at the request of a reformist Zoning and Plan
Commission in 1924, proposed construction of a new passenger rail station at
18th Street and Capitol. The new facility would replace the two or three rail
stations through which many visitors then entered and left the capital city.
West’s version of Capitol Avenue thus would have functioned as a real gateway to the
Statehouse complex, rather than a merely symbolic or ceremonial one.
West’s train station was never built, of course, since it was soon rendered moot by
the automobile. Springfield has a new opportunity to build a rail gateway to
downtown, in the form of the proposed new transit hub on 10th Street. Present
plans call for putting it between Washington and Adams streets. Either street
makes a better gateway to the heart of Springfield than Capitol, yet it is
Capitol that is being is groomed as (quoting Mr. Blagojevich again) “a red carpet to the Statehouse and other famed downtown sites.” Presumably the new station will include a gateway to the gateway.
Better perhaps to simply abandon the Capitol Avenue rehab. Springfield already
has the central reference point for walking tourists, one that is better than
the prettified Capitol — South Sixth Street between Washington and Capitol That street needs no
multimillion-dollar investment to render it comely to visitors. It includes one
of the few architecturally viable blocks left in all of downtown,
humanly-scaled and lined with small shops that attract people and divert the
eye, and walking along it takes strollers from the Presidential funhouse past
Lincoln’s law offices and Old State Capitol toward his house.
Besides, there is a long list of things the tourists’ Springfield needs more than it needs $17 million worth of faux brick. The
statue of Lincoln at Capitol’s Second Street terminus stands in front of a building he never even saw. Why
not transplant it up the street to Eighth, where it would announce the presence
of the Lincoln home park? The hole that would leave in front of the Statehouse
could be left as is, as a monument to State of Illinois financing practices.
Imagine the CPAs who would line up to have their photos taken in front of it.
“Beautification” is what cities usually give people after they’ve stripped a street of every other reason to linger on it. Downtown Springfield
has suffered through more beautification plans than Joan Rivers, yet tourism
numbers continue to slide. There is a lesson there. It would be nice if
official Springfield would learn it.
Contact James Krohe Jr. at peptobiz@mindspring.com.
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2009.
