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 here to prescribe a cure. We cannot say these investments failed to “save” downtown – one shudders to imagine how desolate the city center would be like without them. But the city center still is not the thriving place it was even 10 years ago although it remains Sangamon County’s government, tourism and medical center.
State Sen. Doris Turner has sponsored three bills intended to invigorate the downtown economy. The details are complex and subject to legislative tinkering but two would result in creation of a new tourism authority that would build a cavernous addition to Springfield’s convention center and a new 200-300-room hotel next door. (We discussed the convention center/hotel scheme in “Something for nothin,’” April 16.)
The third of Dr. Turner’s magical elixirs is an expanded and buffed Mid-Illinois Medical District, which, if approved, will be called the Capital City Downtown Medical District. In its new form this special purpose district would encompass not only the north end territories occupied by the two big hospitals and SIU School of Medicine but those of Springfield Clinic, the barony whose lands in the old Aristocracy Hill neighborhood stretch to South Grand Avenue. The new version of the district would be allowed to acquire land and build its own housing, educational buildings and research facilities to support its existing facilities devoted to care, all in accordance with its own binding land use plan based on accepted urbanist principles.
How fitting that the healthcare industry should be the cure for what ails downtown. As far as I can figure it, the hope is that, by spurring investment in these wellness factories on the northern and southern fringes of downtown, the new district will stimulate service and residential investment within downtown itself. Certainly the district’s coordinated planning can act as a brake on speculative land dealing, which is good. (If you’re not sure it is, drive around the Illinois Department of Revenue complex to see what happens to a neighborhood without such constraints.)
Has the old medical district made a difference in development since its master plan was adopted in 2004? The SIU Center for Family Medicine building at Fourth and Carpenter stands proudly on the street as does the new YMCA across the street and (a little less so) St. John’s Prairie Diagnostic Center. This is good. Buildings so sited are easily seen from the street and tell you where you are. In contrast, the nearby Memorial Wellness Center sits on its parking lot like a cake-on-a-plate and a landmark that can’t be seen from the car tells you nothing. And Carpenter Street in this stretch so far remains an address, not a city street as the plan envisions; nowhere are the coffeeshops and lunch places and dry cleaners that make for a lively city neighborhood.
While the Turner-fied Capital City Downtown Medical District may well make Springfield safe for the local branch of the U.S. medical-industrial complex, it is less clear whether it will much help the capital city or downtown. As introduced, the scheme intended to revitalize downtown would carve out the heart of old downtown from the new downtown medical district boundaries. (Those squeals that were heard during the drafting was the sound of toes being stepped on.) The big property owners in that center of the old city center don’t need some expert’s plan; they have their own plan – wait until they find a sucker, sell and move to Florida.
Worse, the redevelopment of property within the district that is in private hands remains subject to Springfield’s own zoning and building codes. The result can be seen at Second and Carpenter. The County Market supermarket chain had built a more urban version of its supermarket in Champaign that would have fit perfectly in the neighborhood envisioned by the medical district planners, no doubt at some extra cost. But the city allowed the firm to build another cookie-cutter version of its stores that deadens two sides of a crucial intersection with empty asphalt “screened” by knee-high shrubs, a presence that is not green or urban or anything except bare and bland. (I complained of this in 2012 in “A double shot of urban-type feel.”)
In the end a plan is only a plan. Making a city real takes vision plus money, patience and time. I interviewed the president of the commission that oversaw the original Illinois Medical District, who told me that some local officials expected the district to be the economic salvation not only of that part of town but of the entire city, indeed of central Illinois. “Expectations,” he said, “are unrealistically high.”
That interview was done 20 years ago – 20 years during which decision-makers should have learned to temper their enthusiasm for miracle cures. We will see.
Mr. Krohe is a graduate of Springfield High School (Class of ’66) and is gratified to learn that recent boundary changes now mean SHS is a downtown institution.
This article appears in April 30-May 6, 2026.
