Rampant and haphazard growth after the Civil War left Springfield dirty, dangerous, unhealthful and inconvenient. The race riots in 1908 left the city’s worthy citizens with what we might call a reputational problem, so progressive-minded locals undertook a municipal housecleaning. The 1911 commission reform promised to fix politics. The election that same year of Willis J. Spaulding began a campaign that led in the 1930s to a water supply lake and municipal power plant. The 1914 Springfield Survey promised to fix schools, housing and public health.
Another of the sputtering candles lit against the darkness was the “City Plan of the City of Springfield Illinois,” adopted in 1924 as the city’s first attempt to rationalize the process of urban growth through land use zoning. More familiarly known by the name of its principal author, Chicago parks consultant Myron Howard West, the West plan was offered to an incredulous public in a handsome book published in 1925.
Like every plan for the future, West’s ended up being a bit behind the times. Springfield was then a classic 19th century streetcar city; within 13 years the Springfield streetcar system was dead and autos had completely taken over city streets. Pollution controls and structural changes in the local economy would soon obliterate distinctions between land uses that were the premise of West’s new zoning scheme.
West’s plan to turn the whole city into a monument to Lincoln was grandiose and impractical and (maybe more disqualifying) impolitic, although even more modest versions of them would have been rendered moot by the Depression. Nonetheless, much of what he recommended was bult – sort of, eventually. Springfield does have a municipal water reservoir of the kind he proposed even if it was not built where he thought it ought to be and its shores were not set aside for public recreation as he urged. Fifty years later the blocks around Lincoln house would be acquired as part of a larger park. And while consolidating rail lines as West urged will have taken more than a century it is happening.
Contained in its 90-plus pages are two separate plans. The zoning scheme set up a bureaucratic process to control property development to make growth rational, efficient and cost-effective. The zoning map only tells city officials what may be built. West argued that the most diligent observance of even a good land use plan will not build a great city, only avoid building a really bad one. He thus presumed to tell them what ought to be built. This “City Beautiful” plan prescribed for the public realm, a grand scheme to secure a new water supply, untangle the city from its rail tracks and make the public realm not just greener and cleaner but inspiring. “The right thing should be done at the right time,” he explained, “and the greater perspective afforded by the plan will make this possible.”
Since 1925 Springfield has made project plans but no wholesale reimagining of the city. The city’s urban planning philosophy these days is expressible in only two words – “new” and “more.” The city makes certain that every new strip mall has the correct number of parking spaces, but seldom asks whether Springfield needs another new strip mall. Shiny it might be for the moment, but the resulting new Springfield west of Chatham Road is as failed an urban environment as the old Springfield that West knew – massively wasteful of land and the time and energy it takes to move around within it, a drive-through city, a placeless place that has no form, no aesthetic, no idea of itself.
This sort of plan-less development on the fringes of Springfield also was being done 100 years ago as city hall relinquished decision-makings about development to individual property owners. “The lack of perspective, the inability of city authorities to control the development of the city as a whole, and the leaving of this development to individuals with a myriad of ideas,” West wrote, “have led to a complexity of structure which is hampering more and more the functioning of [Springfield.]”
Certainly there are Westian things that remain undone. The Sugar Creek valley northwest of the city might still be purchased and maintained as a municipal nature and recreation preserve, as West proposed. His system of landscaped boulevards connecting parks and monuments was probably not buildable, while today’s Veterans Parkway isn’t actually a parkway but it could still be turned into a passable imitation of one. Too bad then that the notion that planning has a public purpose beyond providing minimally for public health and safety, and that a city was a place of citizens, not just property owners, died out with the progressive era.
Mr. Krohe has grown old writing for Illinois Times. He also is the author of Corn Kings & One-horse Thieves, A Plain-Spoken History of Mid-Illinois, which many people have found to be worth reading.
This article appears in November 20-26, 2025.
That’s the Spring Creek Valley NW of Springfield. But ironically, a portion of this ethic was put to use in the planning of Lake Springfield (on the actual Sugar Creek Valley) ten years later. And notably, much of that ethic remained intact, save for the McMansions that overtook the shoreline in the 80s and 90s. But Lincoln Gardens, the Wildlife Preserve, and the numerous public parks & lake access reflect the same good thinking.