For readers with a taste for the archival. Here is the full version of my column abut the Y block in downtown Springfield, an abridged version of which we ran on Nov. 10, The original that follows appeared in my Prejudices series in the IT of Oct. 8, 1981.
Honestly, I didn’t know whether to cheer or to boo. On
September 30 the Illinois Supreme Court ordered that the State of Illinois’
petition to condemn the YWCA building at Fifth and Jackson in downtown
Springfield be dismissed. The state wanted the Y’s land to make room for a
courts complex first proposed back in 1975. But the court ruled that the state,
which has already bought and leveled nearly an entire city block for the
project, had already acquired an “excessive” amount of land. The Y
would stand.
Any victory over the state is sweet. Any ruling which reins
the state’s imperialist impulses is doubly welcome in Springfield, where the
state traditionally has behaved as if it were the lord of the manor and its
capital city were the gamekeeper’s daughter. I was cheered by the ruling, but
only partly because the court had reaffirmed the principle that public money
may not be used by public agencies to condemn land without a proven public need
for it. I was happy mainly because it meant I wouldn’t have to read any more
press releases from the YWCA.
The Y has a slogan which reads, “It’s the ‘W’ that
makes the difference.” They even underline the “W” in their name
in their press releases—only one of the ways the Y’s self-image interfered with
coherence during its five-year campaign. The Y’s court battle with the state
had come to resemble a pulp romance. We were treated to cries of outraged
virtue (a year ago the Y’s executive director said, “We’re not angels, but
we have been sited [sic] as one of the best administered organizations in the
history of voluntarism”). We were warned of the ravening menace of the
state (the Y didn’t actually cry “Rape!” but some of its press releases
came close). We even got hysterics and swooning; when the state filed
condemnation papers in 1980 after negotiations on a selling price failed, the Y
said, “Anyone who has taken advantage of any social service organization
like the Boy Scouts, Salvation Army, Red Cross, anyone who has ever needed the
services of a hospital, or gone to a library…YOU’VE BEEN PUT ON NOTICE THAT
YOU DON’T MATTER ANYMORE!”
There were principles at stake, and the Y did not hesitate
to appropriate several of them in defense of their case, with the result that
the agency came variously to be seen as a champion of women’s rights, historic
preservation, voluntarism, community service and downtown Springfield. But the
issue at stake in the Y’s first skirmish with the state was not voluntarism or
preservation but money. The state had originally offered $650,000 for the Y’s
building. A jury in May, 1980, reckoned it to be worth $1.3 million; the Y,
claiming that it would have cost $2.2 million to replace it ‘way back in 1976,
appealed. As Y director Carolyn Miller Coffman explained last week, “The
main reason we wanted to stay here was because we weren’t offered enough money
to replace the building.” Had they gotten their price, in other words,
they would have hied to the suburbs where their members would not have to cope
with the intricacies of parallel parking. Worse, the Y last year defended
itself against the state’s power of eminent domain by reminding us that the Y
is “not some new radical group”—the implication being that the
unwarranted appropriation of property belonging to such a group would be okay.
Self-interest is one thing; disingenuity another.
But if the Y behaved dishonestly, the state behaved far
worse. It would take a writer of greater skill than I possess to cram into a
few sentences the full measure of stupidity, arrogance and sheer numbskullery
demonstrated by the sponsors of the courts complex. The initial concept sounded
to me like the sort of thing that gets dreamed up by the boys in the locker
room after racquetball: a sort of criminal justice laboratory, in which the
Sangamon County circuit courts would be housed with state appellate courts and
either a new law school or paralegal training center, all equipped with the
latest in data processing gear. The broader purpose of the complex apparently
was to learn ways to make justice quick as well as sure.
The notion made me nervous—I can think of no keener threat
to the republic than an efficient judiciary—but it never mattered because the
project was doomed from the start. Law schools, to pick one, are expensive, and
establishing a new one in the capital was bound to excite institutional
jealousies among the state’s turf-conscious universities. The state was in the
process of approving a master development plan for the Capitol Complex when the
courts complex was first proposed; since the plan made no provision for such a
courts complex, it was put outside the boundaries of the official Capitol
Complex, in effect making a liar of the state, which at least saved journalists
the trouble.
The gravest defect of all, however, was the assumption that
Sangamon County would move its circuit courts into such a complex were one ever
built. The county had built a new county building in 1966, and while the court
facilities therein fail to meet the magisterial standards of the local bench,
they are superior to those in most Illinois counties. Even were they not, no
one had ever bothered to actually study the point: the state could produce
neither a program statement nor a needs study. More amazingly, at no point in
the five years during which the project has been under way did the county
commit itself to do anything more binding than discuss possible financial terms
of a move, even though the county was to occupy roughly 50 percent of the new
complex.
The state, in short, had acted like a bridegroom who made a
downpayment on a honeymoon cottage before proposing to his sweetheart. In April
— for reasons not yet made clear — the county formally “withdrew”
from the project. The Supreme Court, in its YWCA opinion, averred that even
before the county’s withdrawal, “The petition attempting to take the
entire block should have been dismissed as an attempt to take a ‘grossly
excessive’ amount of land.” The county’s April vote merely “reassure[d]
us that no necessity for the condemnation of land for a new circuit court
facility ever did exist.”
The state had spent $3.3 million of the taxpayers’ money
buying land for a courts complex which the county didn’t want and for which
there was never a proven need, and it did so without getting so much as a solid
“maybe” in advance from its principal tenant. In the process it
leveled a movie house, an insurance office, a small factory, a drive-in bank (a
nice irony, that, considering that the bank tore down a church to put up its
drive-in), a rental haberdashery, and a muscle salon. Most painfully of all, it
also destroyed the vacant Abe Lincoln Hotel. The scars from these injuries were
graveled over and the land converted into another of the state’s “temporary”
parking lots — an act which simultaneously eroded Springfield’s tax base and
created an eyesore in the heart of the city. The only consolation for
distressed locals is that the governor, whose mansion sits across the street,
has to look at the damned thing too.
The henchman for this dirty bit of business was the Capital
Development Board. If Tennyson were governor, he might say, “Theirs not to
reason why, theirs but to build and die.” There is a significant body of
local opinion that regards the CDB as the flushest collection of prepaid,
prioritized, prime-rate, four-wheel-drive jerks who ever sat down to sup at a
public trough, and on this point I am inclined to agree.
Confronted with such a blunder, one’s first impulse is to
look for somebody to lynch, or to vote out of office. But the principals are
beyond the reach of legal retribution. Somebody owes us, however. I suggest
that the state donate that land to the city for use as a public park, along
with enough money to landscape and equip it — making it a place of rest for the
strolling tourist, a lunch-hour refuge for the state worker, an oasis for the
city dweller. Should the state fail to make this gesture of atonement to
Springfield, I suggest a public campaign, modeled on the famous tea bag mailing
of 1978. We should all mail a pebble to the governor with the plea that he
convert that rocky feculence into something green and useful. Land for people,
not Pontiacs! Greenery, not gravel! Think of it! We could even name it after
Don Glickman, the director of the CDB, just to show him that there’s profit in
building as well as destroying.Â
This article appears in Nov 17-23, 2016.
