The merchants and property owners who make up the Greater State Street Council have a plan to make State great again. For $60 million, they want to demall State Street, restreet it, repave, replant, and relight it, recar, rethink, and revive it as the heart of a new Loop.
In 1979 the government was not underwriting shopping malls. It was, however, paying for “transit malls.” The U.S. Department of Transportation ponied up $10 million (out of a total project cost of $17 million) to convert the street between Wacker and Congress into a transit mall a la the Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. Motorcars were banned and traffic lanes reduced from four to two as CTA buses were rerouted onto State, transforming it into a transfer center for more than a dozen routes. The official purpose of the project was to boost mass-transit use; the unofficial purpose was to boost retail sales. Thus the principal supporters of the 1979 redesign were at cross-purposes from the start.
The $60 million Chevy version of a redesigned State Street offers little new in the way of actual facilities. There would be some new lighting to highlight historic structures. Intersections would be less cluttered, the trees artfully clumped, the signage thoughtfully coordinated. There are no bus benches on Chicago’s current mall, lest the homeless sleep on them. So the redesign offers a cunning alternative in the form of leaning rails, against which bus passengers may rest but which offer no surface for sitting or reclining. One way or another, the new State Street will be a place filled with upright citizens.
Certainly buses don’t have the same appeal. Focus groups convened by the council confirmed that many State Street regulars felt that the street belonged to buses. And buses are not the signal State Street merchants wish to send. To some, the noise and smells and sense of unease caused by the buses lining up along State like camels at a caravansary are yet more inconveniences they must endure for the sake of the very young, the very old, and the poor who dwell in those trackless wastes beyond the el lines.
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Sales did rise very modestly in Oak Park in the first months of 1990, just after Lake Street was reopened to cars as part of a $2.7 million “restreeting” of the 1974 downtown mall. But since then retail vacancy rates have improved only slightly, and a major retailer (Baskin’s) has closed. The increase in sales may be explained by the recent conversion of vacant retail space to office use, which increased Lake Street’s population of daytime shoppers.
Streetscape design is a nebulous art that borrows equally from architecture and psychology, and no design feature makes this clearer than that most essential of amenities, the sidewalk.
