Mike Boer, president of the Illinois Medical
District at Springfield, wants residents to know that when the
master plan for the proposed district receives approval from
commissioners, advisory board, and ultimately, the City Council,
that changes won’t be immediate.
Train tracks won’t move, the direction
traffic flows will not shift suddenly, no buildings will sprout up
overnight, nor will any be demolished, Boer says.
Although all of these ideas are on
the table, any public works, zoning, or building code issues
that arise must still be addressed by the city.
After more than a year’s worth of
planning and gathering input from neighborhood groups, consultants
from the Chicago office of Baltimore-based urban planning firm RTKL
Associates Inc. laid out its vision Monday night for the
square-mile area on Springfield’s near north side.
In a new revelation, the consultants also
said at the meeting that tax increment financing might be available
to cover the entire cost of building the new district, whereas
previously only a partial TIF had been discussed.
The driving concept behind RTKL’s
master plan is “to change the lifestyle of the
district,” making a more user-friendly space where people
will want to work, shop, and live.
“The overall plan is a good plan to
increase the medical district’s purview,” says Marilyn
Piland, executive director of the Enos Park Neighborhood
Improvement Association. “It allows for the development of
medical businesses and that’s a good thing.”
According to the RTKL plan, Memorial Medical
Center, St. John’s Hospital, and Southern Illinois University
School of Medicine would serve as the district’s anchors with
Carpenter Street as the main thoroughfare.
Incorporating different types of housing,
creating a network of neighborhood pocket parks, turning some
one-way streets into two-ways, moving the railroad tracks eastward
and putting in a bike trail, and using ceremonial streetscapes to
showcase First and Eighth streets are some of the plan’s
highlights.
In general, Piland, and most others attending
the meeting at Prairie Heart Institute, think the plan is headed in
the right direction. However, Piland questions the logic behind
some of the proposed ideas.
For instance, Fifth Street or Sixth Street,
she says, would have been more practical than Carpenter as the
area’s primary street. Also, she says, some of the one-way
streets RTKL has suggested to become two-ways are already too
narrow.
RTKL’s consultants expect that most of
the expansion by institutions such as the SIU medical school would
be southward, thus a neighborhood preservation zone was created
along the northern edge of the district.
Still, many residents have concerns about
keeping the historic character of local neighborhoods intact when
new buildings go up, especially near Carpenter Street, the proposed
center of commercial activity.
Several buildings and homes, some of which
have stood for more than 100 years, stand in the corridor where much of the development would
take place. With new construction inevitable, many residents are
worried that historic homes will be replaced with more modern ones.
“There are certain houses that
aren’t worth keeping and some houses that are worth
keeping,” Piland says.
The consultants offered residents a
compromise: designate the buildings they would like to preserve
using a scale of 1 to 3, with “3” being homes they want
to save most.
For example, an 150-year-old home, on Fifth
Street, between Enterprise and Calhoun, is in the path of where
planners have proposed a street or walking trail.
“I’d be really unhappy if they
touched it,” Piland says.
This article appears in Aug 18-24, 2005.
