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The middle-school kids
who trudge past the immense beige structure on South MacArthur Boulevard
twice a day aren’t old enough to remember when the building housed a
Venture store. Even many of their parents are too young to recall the days
when the Red Grill restaurant, Woolco store, and automotive center stood
there.
Over the years, the expansive swath at the
intersection of MacArthur and Cherry Road has been occupied by shoe
sellers, specialty clothing stores, chain retailers, a temporary auto-sales
lot, and even a house of worship. “When I was a kid, anything you wanted was on
MacArthur,” says Abe Christofilakos, who grew up in Jerome and owns
the Gyros Stop restaurant, near where MacArthur intersects with Wabash
Avenue. That MacArthur — the one that Christofilakos
and many other Springfieldians once knew — is barely recognizable
these days. Today some 20 buildings along MacArthur, between
South Grand and Wabash avenues, are vacant — an amazing statistic,
considering that more than 20,000 vehicles travel the corridor each day.
Residents who live near MacArthur, which once supported two movie theaters
and three grocery stores, must travel at least a mile and a half to
go to the supermarket and three miles to check out a new flick, although a
high-interest payday-advance loan is only steps away. Longtime area residents say that things are getting
worse, and they’re worried. Kathleen Sorensen, president of the Washington
Park-Knolls Neighborhood Association, says the decline has been occurring
steadily for years. “I think it’s obvious just by the way the
businesses are moving out and the kinds of business that are moving in.
Mom-and-pop stores haven’t been able to make it,” Sorensen
says. She notes that even chain operators can’t seem
to hang on MacArthur. When the Schnucks supermarket, previously National
Foods, closed and relocated to Chatham Road, people could still get some
groceries across the street at Kmart, formerly Venture. Christofilakos remembers the area as the epicenter of
Springfield’s retail universe. “Everybody shopped at Venture,” he
recalls. “There’s nothing to offer people on MacArthur now. “This whole side of town is
deteriorating.”
By no means is MacArthur
Boulevard the only prominent street that’s hurting: South Grand
Avenue East and sections of 11th and Ninth streets could use touchups just
as much, if not more, than MacArthur.
But with plans to extend MacArthur southward to
Interstate 72, many people who care about MacArthur believe that now is the
time for a concerted push to turn things around.
Coming up with a plan of action won’t be easy,
though. In recent years competing interests have battled over almost every
proposed change — from plans for a new service station to the
proposed expansion of the long-established Prairie Farms dairy. In explaining the various flare-ups and flameouts,
Springfield historian Edward Russo characterizes MacArthur as a street with
multiple personalities, a peculiar mishmash of homes, businesses, and, in
some cases, home-based businesses.
“It’s always had a two-sided
characteristic,” says Russo, an area resident and retired head of the
Sangamon Valley Collection at Lincoln Library.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Russo says, when the
street was still called West Grand Boulevard (it didn’t become
MacArthur — for Gen. Douglas MacArthur — until 1942), seedy
motels and gambling houses sat alongside hardware stores, service stations,
beauty parlors, markets, haberdasheries, and private residences. The trend continued through the 1950s, when Prairie
Farms erected its industrial mixing facility on MacArthur at what at the
time was Springfield’s westernmost edge and the outskirts of town. Ten years later, Town & Country Shopping Center,
with its 236,000 square feet of retail space, opened as the region’s
first upscale open-air shopping plaza. From that point, Springfield grew more rapidly than
anyone anticipated. Businesses left downtown, flocked to MacArthur, and
flourished. By the late 1970s, however, Americans had begun to change how
they shopped: White Oaks Mall opened in 1977, and when businesses flocked
westward MacArthur languished. Glenn Yanow, owner of the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream
shop on MacArthur at Laurel Street, has operated on the boulevard since 1974. “The
traffic is the same traffic, the neighborhood is the same neighborhood, but
Realtors have moved west, west, and farther west. Now there are too many
empty locations [on MacArthur],” Yanow says. “With the emergence of White Oaks Mall,
development sort of leapfrogged over MacArthur,” says Mike Farmer,
Springfield’s director of planning and economic development.
Farmer explains how the street’s physical
characteristics pose a host of problems — namely, the shallow depth
of the lots on the east side of the street, which put businesses literally
in folks’ back yards. Further complicating commercial development is the
fact that parts of MacArthur fall into multiple jurisdictions —
Jerome, unincorporated Sangamon County, and Springfield — and,
because MacArthur also happens to be a state route, modifications to the
street must be cleared by the Illinois Department of Transportation. It’s simply easier to dig up a cornfield on the
edge of town than to jump through zoning hoops, work around the limitations
of existing infrastructure, and consult with neighborhood associations
— or, as is most often the case on MacArthur, go to war with
residents. Yet another very public battle played out recently
over plans for the Mobil Super Pantry filling station and convenience store
at the corner of MacArthur and Ash Street. Tri Star Marketing Inc., a
Champaign-based company, asked the Springfield City Council for zoning
variances, including one to allow outdoor sales and another granting the
Super Pantry a license to sell wine and beer. Neighbors wasted no time
voicing objections to the proposal, arguing that the store should not be
permitted to sell liquor because of its close proximity to Butler
Elementary School and homes. Supporters of the project argued that Tri
Star’s willingness to make an investment of $1 million, which would
include improving the landscaping, was critical to an ongoing effort to
attract other businesses.
That fight was nothing new. In recent years MacArthur
has often been the scene of victory and defeat and has served as a stage
for drama and comedy alike. Other skirmishes in the past five years alone
have included a dispute in 2004 by neighborhood residents resisting the
transformation of a parking lot once used by patrons of the Esquire Theatre
into a Harper’s Oil filling station, expressing concern then, too,
about liquor sales. The next year, neighbors asked the council to reject
Prairie Farms Dairy’s request to knock down an adjacent building to
install a parking lot and to waive other requirements to landscape and
light the parking spaces. There was cause for optimism in 2005, however, when a
proposal was put forth by the Springfield-based Garrison Group Inc.
Tentatively named the Cherry Groves Shoppes, the development was to
incorporate a mix of local businesses and national chains. Plans for Cherry
Groves were ultimately shelved when the Garrison Group couldn’t reach
an agreement with the sellers, Kerasotes Theatres Inc. [see R.L. Nave,
“Chopped down,” Dec. 22, 2005].
Despite the disappointment, those who hold a stake in
MacArthur’s future also point to several successes, including the
construction of Walgreens and CVS drugstores and the Springfield Priority
Care urgent-care health center. They also laud the group that owns Town
& Country Shopping Center for its remarkable ability to retain tenants
in spite of the great migration of businesses to Veterans Parkway and North
Dirksen Road.
You would have a hard
time arguing that the corner on which the monstrous former Kmart and other
dormant businesses are located isn’t among the worst eyesores in all
of Springfield. Kmart closed the location in 2003, electing instead
to keep its Wabash store open. Several groups — most notably Green
Family Stores, which frequently rolls new Toyotas, Subarus, and Kias into
the cavernous building and onto the parking lot for special sales events
— have rented the space on a short-term basis. The building is controlled by New York City-based
firm Tlm Realty, which, sources say, is seeking about $5 million for the
18-acre plot. A representative of the company did not respond a request for
an interview. The property’s neighbors don’t sense any
urgency on the part of the owners to find a viable use for the vacant
property. “We’re probably a blip on their
radar,” says Michelle Higginbotham, who lives in the neighborhood and
works as a commercial real-estate agent. She is also vice chairwoman of the
MacArthur Boulevard Business Association, formed in 2007. Ward 7 Ald. Debbie Cimarossa says she is concerned
about the safety of the schoolchildren who sometimes walk behind the vacant
Venture/Kmart to get to Franklin Middle School. She wants to work with
Springfield corporation counsel Jenifer Johnson to find a legal way to get
rid of uninhabitable structures that receive multiple code-violation
notices from the city, adding that the city should be able to condemn such
problem buildings with greater ease than it can homes. Cimarossa, who also represented the area when she
served on the Sangamon County Board, does not share the view that MacArthur
is a bad place.
“The only negative aspect is all the vacant
buildings. The vacant buildings make it look like it’s in
decline,” Cimarossa says. The closing of the nearby CVS (a new store opened
just a few blocks south, near the intersection of MacArthur and Stanford)
and the closing of Spillway Lanes in the past year have added to the sense
of desolation. Commerce has continued to move swiftly, but the types
of businesses have changed: Rent-to-own stores and payday lenders —
which tend to operate in areas where rents are cheap — have hung out
their shingles on MacArthur. Such businesses have caught much of the flak
for the current state of MacArthur. Higginbotham speculates that if MacArthur can attract
businesses with better public reputations, the rents will rise and the
easy-loan stores will eventually go away on their own: “We need to
get the idea out of people’s minds that [MacArthur] is just a bunch
of payday-loan stores and vacant buildings.”
Cimarossa plans to help things along. The alderwoman
says she’s considering introducing an ordinance, similar to one
passed for sex offenders living in Springfield, to limit the number of
payday-lending establishments in a given area. Attracting renewed interest in MacArthur is going to
take more than scaring off payday-loan joints. The city will have to
provide economic incentives.
Some of the ideas that have been floated to entice
business back to MacArthur include the expansion of an existing enterprise
zone, the creation of a special taxing district in which businesses could
attach a surcharge to merchandise, and the establishment of the
city’s eighth tax-increment-financing district. Creating a new TIF — an arduous process that
begins with the completion of a series of feasibility studies — takes
at least three years, Farmer notes. He says that the business tax or
enterprise-zone expansion — which requires the cooperation of
landowners and requires the approval of the City Council and Illinois
Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity — might be a more logical
place to start.
Yanow, owner of the Baskin-Robbins, says he opposes a
special taxing district. If such a measure were implemented, he believes,
consumers would just choose to shop in places where they won’t have
to pay the extra tax. Ultimately it’s up to businesses to attract
customers, he says. “If you run a niche business, you’re
going to do very well,” Yanow says. “Out west, children can’t get there
without Mommy and Daddy. People walk here, they ride their bikes here, they
bring their dogs here. You don’t have to get in the car and
drive.”
A sampling of the
various wish lists for MacArthur: Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods Market,
Panera Bread, FedEx Kinko’s, and Starbucks — or, at the very
least, a place where people can buy a gallon of milk without paying through
the nose. “Losing a grocery store was really sad. That
really hurt the convenience. People don’t want to drive across town
to shop for groceries,” Cimarossa says, referring to the departure of
Schnucks in 1996. Also hurting convenience are a number of restrictive
agreements designed to protect certain businesses from competition.
It’s common knowledge, for example, that Kerasotes will not allow the
party that purchases its Esquire property to put a movie theater at that
location. Similarly, Town & Country Shopping Center imposes a long list
of restrictions on the types of businesses that can operate there. “You have to get creative with space
that’s outside the covenants,” says Cory Jobe, chairman of the
MacArthur Boulevard Business Association. “It just makes us work a
little harder.”
The covenants, Russo says, “are legal, so
there’s not thing we can do about it, but it’s discouraging
that it closes off so many options.” Farmer says although the city
can’t prevent such agreements, the city should work more closely with
neighborhood associations to pinpoint where they are and let people know
when the restrictions expire. MacArthur’s boosters hope that their prayers
will be answered in the form of a new plan put together by a Chicago
businessman for the Esquire property. Similar to the Cherry Groves
proposal, Purinton Development Co.’s involves a handful of retail
stores, a café, a small grocery, a drugstore, and a bank. Although parties are reportedly close to reaching a
deal, nobody involved in the negotiations is ready to discuss details,
worried perhaps that a premature announcement will jinx plans for an
important commercial anchor near the intersection of MacArthur and South
Grand.
Most critical to the revitalization of MacArthur is
the long-planned $32 million extension project, now under way, which most
all agree will be a tipping point for MacArthur — even if people are
in disagreement over which way things will tip. Mark Roberts III, executive vice president of
Standard Investment Co. on South Grand, says the project, which will connect MacArthur to
Interstate 72, will be good for all of the businesses on MacArthur. “MacArthur is constantly busy. We’ve had
some major developments,” Roberts says. On the other hand, the Gyros Stop’s
Christofilakos believes that most new construction will follow the new
Legacy Pointe Town Center, just south of Wabash.
Developer Charles Robbins, whose offices are located
on MacArthur, across from Town & Country Shopping Center, says
it’s not a question one or the other. If planning is done properly,
he says, all of MacArthur will benefit once the extension is complete in
2009. “It takes a community,” he says.
“It takes people working together cohesively to get it done. And can
it be done? You’re darn right.”
From a residential perspective, however, Russo says
he’d be delighted if the MacArthur extension had zero effect on the
South Grand-to-Wabash portion of MacArthur. “So far as I’m concerned, when you
increase traffic count that can have no positive impact on
residential,” he says. “People feel strongly about things
related to their neighborhoods. Rights are always bumping up against
others’. Somewhere in the middle is where things should land.”
Contact R.L. Nave at rnave@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 5, 2008.
