A seven-member team of urban paramedics known as a Sustainable Design Assessment Team recently spent three days touring Springfield’s city center, greater downtown Springfield. They were charged to recommend steps to enliven that district that will not require the city to make drastic changes. Of course, drastic changes are exactly what the city’s development practices […]
Illinois – James Krohe Jr
Posted inOpinion
White elephant
A planned new “patioscape” on the parking lot side of the former White Oaks Cinema will provide outdoor seating for customers of the shops and eateries expected to move into the converted theater. The enclosed mall will be slightly less so, each of the new tenants being likely to have its own entrance to the […]
Posted inOpinion
New Beijings
I have often lamented here the continuing decline in the population of Illinois’ rural parts. (See “Devoid of life,” July 14, 2011.) Like a great many readers, I have roots in central Illinois that go deep. My interest in the central question – if the present population cannot support itself on the countryside, how might […]
Posted inOpinion
Accidental sagacity
I was looking up something else on the web a couple of months ago when I ran across a reminiscence by the veteran Tribune writer Ron Grossman. “Like Columbus, I’d start with a destination in mind but wind up someplace else,” he recalled about his boyhood explorations of the family encyclopedia. “‘Pericles,’ the Athenian statesman, […]
Posted inOpinion
Nickeled and dimed
A few years ago, the executive director of the National School Boards Association said, “In a democracy, school boards are the closest thing to the ground.” “Like dandelions in a lawn,” I muttered to myself. In my too-many years as a public scold, I have learned to accept the many absurdities occasioned by government of […]
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Fountain of death
How did that song go again? I had it right on the tip of – oh yeah. “I hope I die before I get old.” Apparently you have a good chance to doing just that if you live in Sangamon County. A health research center at the University of Washington in Seattle recently published the […]
Posted inOpinion
A double shot of urban-type feel
“Everyone wanted it to have an ‘urban’ type feel,” said one focus group participant to the State Journal-Register about the new supermarket that Niemann Foods Inc. plans to build at Second and Carpenter, “although it’s in a neighborhood.” The County Market’s potential shoppers were talking about Starbucks and a deli counter. A surer way to […]
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Topping off the tank
As I understand it, the Republican position on gasoline prices is to save drivers money by refusing to raise the excise tax on gasoline that pays the federal share of building roads and bridges. As this will cause the road network to crumble, people will have to stop driving, thus saving them hundreds a year […]
Posted inOpinion
Springfield visited
No doubt some members of the of the Springfield Diocesan Council of Catholic Women settled into their seats at the Centennial Auditorium in March 1949 looking forward to being instructed by their invited guest on the writers and converted Catholics G.K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox and Graham Greene. I suspect more of them came to learn […]
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Sputnik moments
In the fall of 1957, the then-Soviet Union put into Earth orbit the world’s first artificial satellite. The news excited me – I was a geeky 9-year-old who looked forward to the next issue of Popular Science magazine the way the young Jim Edgar must have looked forward to the next issue of the Illinois […]
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Made in the shade
I think that I shall never see a car park lovely as a tree. Not in Springfield anyway. You’d have to travel to the Gobi to see expanses of treeless terrain to match the city’s larger parking lots. At White Oaks Mall, for instance, the mall’s southwest lot boasts 13 smallish trees on the perimeter of a space that […]
Posted inOpinion
Faith, hope and statuary
The vandalism being perpetrated in Washington, D.C., it turns out, is not confined to the nation’s finances. Perhaps you read of the House subcommittee that met in March to hear arguments against the design of a proposed Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial near the National Mall. The design is the work of architect Frank Gehry, who […]
