The Marion Street mall: 1974-2007. May it rest in pieces. Last week they weedwhacked the tulips. This week they chainsawed the trees. Next they level the berms. Then they start backhoeing the cement. Before you know it, Marion Street mall will be Maron Street again. Simple as that, after 34 years. They say it will look lovely. One can only hope.
Thirty-four years is a long time. I graduated from college in 1974, lived in Colorado and Michigan during the entire decade of the ’80s. When I boomeranged back here in 1990, the Marion mall was the first thing that charmed me and made me glad to be back in my hometown.
I can’t vouch for its entire history, but I spent a fair amount of time there the last 17 years. Those desperate for progress who insisted that block needs traffic again have committed gross exaggeration. They’ll tell you this pedestrian haven was always a bust, that “no one ever shops there,” that it’s a veritable ghost town.
Not true.
While it may never have been wildly successful, nothing in Downtown Oak Park has been an unqualified success (except maybe the Lake Theatre) since Marshall Field’s left. But there was plenty of vitality on the mall–the peak period being the late 1990s into the early “aughts” when Daily Grind, a popular cybercafe, anchored the middle of the mall. The reason owners Rafael and Becky Corpuz pulled up stakes and moved the business to Arizona was not because the mall was a bust. It was mostly because the owner of the building didn’t want to renew their lease, saying he had never been comfortable with food-related businesses–even though they were established and successful.
The problem, you see, is not always lack of customers or poorly run businesses or an unfriendly business climate created by village hall or any of the other excuses you hear. Sometimes it’s that landlords have no apparent vision or demonstrable interest in the greater good.
Consider the possibilities if Daily Grind were still here. Cosi cafe and Cozy Corner restaurant at the north end of the mall do steady business. Cold Stone Creamery is certainly a draw. Let’s say an independent book store–like the excellent Book Table on Lake Street–were located in the other storefront at Westgate (the site of Barbara’s Bookstore once upon a time). At the south end, you’ve got Prairie Bread Kitchen along with Minou’s and Luo’s Peking House, which also have steady clientele. And let’s say oddball building owner Lorraine Phillips hadn’t sat on her eyesore Sawyer Business College for decades. At one point a Hemingway-themed restaurant was set to go in there, but the landlady got cold feet. It took years for the village to finally wrest the property away from her and then they made no attempt to develop it (perhaps because they were already committed to restreeting). If a popular restaurant or interesting retail occupied that site, suddenly you’re generating plenty of foot traffic.
The “what ifs” never came together–thanks to a lack of vision and effort and coordination and clueless building owners. But don’t blame the mall. The mall wasn’t the problem.
Even with moving traffic, that stretch of Marion Street won’t work unless the business community coordinates better with village government, unless all the building owners start considering the good of the entire district, and unless both sides develop some vision and make a concerted effort–in other words, everything that’s been missing downtown, with notable exceptions, for about 40 years.
If all those elements converge, Marion Street will be a success. Don’t give the credit to restreeting though. Vehicular traffic isn’t the solution.
For now, I will miss the mall with all its characters and regulars and serenity and commuters running madly to catch their trains and evening strollers and coffee-drinkers deep in conversation at the tables outside Daily Grind, and the way the mall made me feel when I looked at it in 1990 and wondered where the future would take us.
It has taken us here. We have no choice but to make the best of it.