Downtown parking was in the news for about five minutes the
other day, as it usually is this time of year when the annual Central Area
Parking Survey is released by the Springfield-Sangamon County Regional Planning
Commission.
As has been the case for the past several years, the survey
found that greater downtown boasts 27,489 parking spaces of all kinds, of which
much less than half — 40 percent of off-street parking and 44 percent of
on-street parking – was actually being used on typical weekdays. And has also
been the case for the past several years, the findings always accompany
complaints from some downtown business owner or landlord or church complaining
that the lack of parking downtown will force them to leave. This year is was
Norb Andy’s, who lost access to shared parking next door. Apparently walking a
block to the car was beyond them after they’d enjoyed the tavern’s offerigs, or
maybe they were too dumb to find the bar if they parked out of eyeshot.
Springfieldians have struggled with such challenges for a
long time. I’ve written at least seven columns over the years that took
downtown or statehouse parking as their topic. This year I thought, maybe my
faithful readers might enjoy the chance to read the old rants again. Maybe I
should reprint one every year to coincide with the survey, kinda like people
watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” at Christmas?
So I am. Here’s the first one, “Bombed-out
Springfield,” which appeared in our old Forum section in the paper of November
12-18, 1976.
A few weeks ago I was sitting in the office of a lawyer
friend, waiting while he talked to a client on the phone. On his bookshelf he
had a 9 by 13 inch aerial photo of downtown Springfield, which he was using as
evidence in a bit of gentlemanly haggling over the value of some condemned
property. I absentmindedly studied the photo for quite a while — it was a long
phone call — and tried, as a game, to identify as many business and buildings
as I could off the top of my head.The view was from the southeast. You could clearly see the
municipal and county buildings, St. John’s, the broad gray ribbon on Ninth
Street. The Lincoln Home area was recognizable, as was Forum Thirty (still
unfinished), the new Horace Mann headquarters, the Old Capitol, the square.It wasn’t very hard — I’ve lived in Springfield since 1 was
less than two months old — but something about the picture bothered me. There
was an echo of something in that shot and I -couldn’t figure out exactly what.
As my friend hung up the phone and we resumed our conversation, I forgot about
the photo for the moment. It took several days before I realized what it had
reminded me of. That picture looked like the news shots I’d seen of bombed-out
European cities after World War II.True, we’ve used bulldozers instead of bombs, but the effect
was the same. There was scarcely a block downtown intact. The cityscape was
pockmarked with scars where buildings had once stood before they’d been
replaced by asphalt parking lots. The blocks east of Seventh, for example — the
area which includes the city and county buildings and the Lincoln Home area —
were roughly 50 percent parking lots. It wasn’t a city built for people I was
looking at, but a city built for cars.Many bright people, like Mark Heyman of Sangamon State
University, have addressed the problem of the future of downtown in these
pages. They have argued convincingly that new uses must be found for downtown
if it is to survive suburbanization and a changing economy. Instead of its
historical role as a residential and shopping center, they argue, the downtown
of tomorrow will be a cultural and entertainment center, with an economic base
firmly rooted in two functions unique to the Illinois capital — tourism and
state government.Lately, as a result of these forecasts, when I am foolish
enough to lament the fate of another old building falling to the wrecker’s
ball. I am often chastised as if 1 were a schoolboy who still believes in Santa
Claus. “But downtown is changing.
You can’t keep things the way they were. Downtown’s got to change to keep
up.”No argument there. But the destruction of its physical
environment is manifestly not the kind of change championed by critics like
Heyman. As an accommodation to changing times, in fact, the current
smash-and-pave policy of the city’s downtown property owners is a disaster.Preserving nineteenth century buildings does not require
preserving nineteenth century functions. Carolyn Oxtoby’s recently unveiled
plans for the resurrection of the Pasfield and Maldaner properties in the 200
block of South Sixth are a good example of how to preserve the best of
downtown’s physical environment while adapting it to changed economic
conditions. But it’s fruitless to talk about preservation unless there is
something left to preserve.For example, if tourism is indeed a key to the future
economic health of downtown, then it is in the interests of the city — and
especially the part of it that makes its living catering to the tourist — to
preserve the fast-disappearing nineteenth centurycharacter of the downtown
environment. To do so would provide a period backdrop to the Old State Capitol,
the Lincoln-Herndon law offices and other attractions.Take another example. For twenty years now, downtown
property owners, especially retailers, in responding to the erosion of their
economic position by the shopping centers, have tried to make downtown look
like another shopping center. They’ve replaced irreplaceable wood, ironwork and
decorative stone with exceedingly replaceable plastic, plate glass and aluminum
instead of tapping the resources of the area — its building, its scale, its
intimacy— to create a unique shopping environment beyond the ability of any
shopping center to duplicate. You can’t beat a first-rate shopping center by
building a second-rate one, but that’s just what Springfield’s downtown
retailers have tried to do.Trying to match the shopping centers architecturally is
foolish enough, but trying to match their convenience is what is killing
downtown. If acres of asphalt is what the customers want, the retailers seem to
be saying, then acres of asphalt is what they’ll get. Consider Lewis Herndon’s
new project on South Fifth. When the
Herndon’s store moved into its present store in 1965, the old store on South
Fifth was leased to the state of Illinois for office space. Its most recent
tenant was the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, now the
Illinois Office of Education.But the state built a new office building for IOE at Second
and Washington. The Herndon Building was left vacant while the dust and taxes
piled up. The owner therefore decided to convert the structure to professional
office space, with maybe a first-floor mall and a top-floor restaurant thrown
in for good measure.But at the rents they win probably be paying the tenants may
be expected to demand on-site parking space. So Herndon bought the old Lincoln
Theater building one door to the south of the Herndon Building. Built in 1884,
the structure originally housed the YMCA and Lincoln Library, among others; its
latest tenants were the theater and the Fifth Street Florists. The building has
been torn down — even though there is a four-level municipal parking ramp one
block west at Fourth and Capitol, a private lot one block south at Fifth and
Jackson and underground parking two blocks north.Downtown, you must remember, must change to fit the times.
Grade-level parking is the most land-inefficient way there
is to store cars. The trade of buildings for asphalt is a bad bargain
financially and a worse one aesthetically. In the last five years or so dozens
of buildings—apartment houses, single-family homes, shops and theaters — have
been destroyed to make room for cars. Although the area immediately north of
the statehouse complex has been hardest hit, whole chunks of other blocks have
been chewed away.During the war in Vietnam, an American field officer, after
troops had reduced a suspected Vietcong stronghold to a dirty smudge on the
ground, explained that they had had to “destroy the village in order to
save it.” In Springfield, SCADA and others argue that in order to preserve
the city’s center you have to bring people downtown to work and to shop. But
people won’t come downtown unless they can drive and in order for people to be
able to drive they must have some place to put their cars. And, since land
downtown is in short supply and since people apparently will not walk more than
a block or two from their car to a store or office, it is necessary to tear
down buildings to make room for the cars.It is necessary, in other words, to destroy
downtown in order to save it.
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2015.
