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In the 1980s, when she served as this paper’s
general manager and ad director, Sharon Whalen and her family lived on Dial
Court, just west of MacArthur Boulevard. She could walk to the Esquire Theater and see a
first-run film, eat at Lichee Garden, and buy groceries at the nearby
National Foods. The newspaper’s offices were on Seventh Street,
not far from the Lincoln Home and downtown, but Whalen says the MacArthur
corridor area felt like “the heart of the city, where things
happened.”
In the early 1990s Whalen left the paper and Illinois
to work for several other newspapers. She was living in sunny Scottsdale,
Ariz., when she decided to take advantage of an opportunity that few people
in this profession of tumbleweeds ever get: an invitation to come back. In 2002, Fletcher Farrar reacquired Illinois Times and asked
Whalen to manage the newspaper’s operations. One of her first
decisions was to move the paper’s offices to State Street, near the
intersection of MacArthur and South Grand Avenue. Our building faces the
now-vacant Esquire Theatre property. On her return, Whalen says, she gravitated back to
the businesses she had patronized in the past and back as well to familiar
neighborhoods, parks, schools, and churches. She bought a charming little
house on Whittier and got busy renovating and landscaping. Because she’d been gone for about a dozen
years, Whalen has a unique perspective that most of us — longtime
residents and newcomers like me — can’t have. You know what I
mean: When you’re watching, changes have a way of unfolding
gradually, almost imperceptibly. If you’ve stopped paying attention
and then all of sudden take notice, change can seem dramatic, even
shocking.
Whalen discovered that little ol’ Springfield
hadn’t been spared the consequences of urban sprawl, and developers
had tugged hard at the commercial heart of the city. “It seemed that all the developers’ eyes
had been focused on eating up farmland on the west and south,” she
recalls. With these problems and a handful of “bad
breaks” — the Venture/Kmart store closed, the theater
shuttered, the grocery gone — it seemed that “MacArthur
Boulevard was on the endangered list,” she says. Nobody was ringing any alarm bells. The excitement of
new big-box stores out west left MacArthur to stagnate and decay. But things started to change in 2006. That year, more than 60 people showed up at a Chamber
of Commerce-sponsored meeting at Charlie Robbins’ real-estate office
to talk about MacArthur-related issues. The goal of the meeting, as Whalen recalls it, was to
start making “some good things happen for the existing business
district” before the completion of the Interstate 72 exchange.
(Whalen was one of the early enthusiastic volunteers, and she’s been
active with the MacArthur Boulevard Business Association ever since.) Business owners and neighbors along MacArthur already
had a pretty good handle on the challenges they were facing. Empty
buildings, where hundreds of people once transacted business, are a pretty
good sign that things are amiss, but we’ll let Whalen list some of
the problems: “Absentee landlords sitting on crumbling properties and
city lots that don’t easily conform to the needs of big-city
developers. Sidewalks and other aspects of the infrastructure are a
mess.”
If the remaining businesses and interested neighbors
could band together, perhaps they could build alliances to reverse the
deterioration. Plenty of stalwarts remain: The Baskin-Robbins at Laurel is
always busy. Luers Family Shoes and Wild Birds Unlimited are solid commercial enterprises.
Town and Country Bank is an important anchor. There are dozens more. Most of the business members of the organization live
nearby, so their interest isn’t necessarily focused just on turning a
buck; they want to also want to keep the neighborhood popular and property
values high. So they’re throwing themselves into events like art
fairs, block parties, and beautification projects to build solidarity while
consulting with developers, urban planners, and city officials to create a
development plan and get government to provide the tools and incentives to
encourage new investment in this vital part of Springfield. Everybody, of course, is not on the same page. As
this week’s cover story makes clear, there are still many
disagreements about the best course for turning MacArthur’s fortunes
around. The city may be looking at a taxing district; some businesses may
not embrace additional costs that could make them less competitive. The
business association supported a variance that will encourage the Mobil
station to invest in a major upgrade; some nearby residents are still angry
that beer will be sold at that location. The challenges are many. Whalen is optimistic but not
Pollyannaish: “The problems in this area of town didn’t
develop overnight — nor will the solutions. But momentum is on our
side.”
Contact Roland Klose at editor@illinoistimes.com
This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 5, 2008.
