James Krohe Jr.

Imagine pedaling happily along a paved path where murals and stand-alone art works distract you from the shabbiness or outright ugliness of Springfield’s backsides, passing frolicking children and couples strolling hand in hand thinking how lucky they are to be living in a city that… well, that part of the daydream is not quite clear […]

We live in dread of the robot brains, haunted as we are by our exchanges with chatbots that are smarter than any actual person we’ve ever known. More perfect AI is likely to make obsolete jobs by the millions. (On the upside, that will include lots of dreary jobs that talented and ambitious people don’t […]

With luck, the $350 million renovation of the Illinois State Capitol north wing will open by the time the snow flies and Springfield will get a glimpse of the new main entrance to the Statehouse. Visitor screening, conference rooms and parking are now bunkered beneath the lawn on the Monroe Street side. Readers old enough to recall when the […]

No one who’s seen it is likely to forget it. I refer to the ending to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind when the aliens’ mothership dropped from the sky to land on an isolated Wyoming butte. Imagine something that unexpected, that wondrous, landing in Sangamon County.  Lots of people thought that wondrous […]

Its downtown might lack a public but Springfield has built lots of public spaces, just in case. Even though few of these spaces are much used, the city looks set to get another one. The state’s Department of Natural Resources is in talks with the city of Springfield to convert the city’s long-vacant Y block […]

The country roads around Springfield are lined with solar energy collectors in the form of cornfields. Here and there are newer and more efficient solar collectors in the form of photovoltaic panels being built alongside of them as rural Illinois transitions from a food-based economy to an energy-based economy. And here and there folks are […]

The most interesting news out of Chicago about this year’s World Cup finals is that there isn’t any. We Old Ones remember that Chicago hosted the official opening match of USA ‘94 (watched on TV by an estimated 750 million people) plus a further five games at a sold-out Soldier Field. But even with those […]

At night, what sounds like the leaves of Springfield’s street trees rustled by the breeze is really those trees whispering to each other. And the word they say most often is “Langfelder.” When Jim Langfelder became Springfield mayor in 2015, one of his first hires was a city arborist. In 2019 he reinvigorated the city’s […]

What follows is a fun story about a city, a court and a cause. I am moved to write about it because it’s important and few Springfieldians younger than 35 will have heard of it. I was tempted to quote Faulkner about how the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past – until I realized […]

Springfield was a grand hotel town in the ’20s. It was the state capital, a tourist mecca and a “good convention town” too, meaning it offered gambling, booze, women and a police force under orders to leave the customers alone as long as they didn’t do it in any of the churches or public parks. […]

Downtown Springfield has been slowly bleeding retailers, office tenants and cobblers-to-kitchen installers since 1951 when Sears, Roebuck & Co. moved its store from Adams Street downtown to South Grand Avenue. Weakened but tenacious, downtown has been “revitalized” more times than the Batman movie franchise thanks to tourists, state workers, apartment dwellers and visiting urbanism experts […]

Anyone versed in the basics of economics knows that there is no such thing as a free lunch – unless you are shopping for a hotel to host your association’s next convention and you are plied with free tastings of dinner menus for your approval. The rest of us have to pay one way or […]