Imagine Waukegan’s grand 1920s Art Deco movie palace, the Genessee Theater, unshuttered and restored to its past glory, the center of a burgeoning new theater district.
Imagine a giant platform, four blocks long, stretching out over the Amstutz Expressway, allowing traffic to pass underneath while pedestrians stroll unhindered from downtown Waukegan to the lakefront.
Imagine a hotel and convention center built atop that platform, attracting new visitors to Lake County’s largest city.
These are among the details of an ambitious, three-year plan unveiled recently by community leaders, who hope to breathe new life into Waukegan’s tired downtown.
The Waukegan Sunrise organization announced its plan at an informational breakfast meeting at the Glen Flora Country Club in Waukegan.
Organizers said they hope to attract as much as $200 million in public and private investments to make the plan a reality.
“We need to bring downtown back in order to show everybody that there’s a positive spin on Waukegan and that great things are happening here,” said state Sen. Terry Link (D-Vernon Hills), who serves with other community leaders on a management team for the Waukegan Sunrise project.
If organizers succeed in attracting investors–and that remains uncertain–they hope to transform downtown Waukegan, where many of the storefronts and buildings are empty.
Waukegan Sunrise, a subsidiary of the Waukegan Downtown Association, plans to spend about $200,000 per year over the next three years to attract investors.
Organizers said they would seek investments through a combination of grass-roots organizing, professional planning and old-fashioned civic boosterism.
The Illinois General Assembly already has committed $200,000 to the project, according to Link, who made the revitalization of downtown Waukegan a plank in his campaign platform.
The plan calls for the city, county and major corporations each to contribute $50,000 annually for the next three years, said Jack Potter, Waukegan Sunrise chairman.
Contributions from individuals and smaller businesses are expected to bring in another $50,000 per year, Potter said.
Probably the grandest part of the plan is the proposed hotel and conference center.
The center would be built on an enormous deck over the Amstutz, providing not only hotel and meeting facilities for travelers and area businesses, but also a pedestrian link between the lakefront and the downtown.
At present, people who want to get from downtown to the lake either need a car or prodigious athletic ability to dodge traffic whizzing along the Amstutz.
“I’d like to see people from the city side be able to get to the lake more easily, because the two should be inseparable,” said Mary Walker, president of the downtown association and Waukegan’s harbor master.
The hotel and conference center is among five projects organizers said they hope will get the plan up and running.
The other four are a downtown system of bus-like trolleys, downtown residential construction, an expansion of downtown educational institutions and the theater rehabilitation.
“Some of these things, like the Genessee Theater rehab, are slam-dunks,” Potter said. “It’s there, it needs to be done, everybody knows it needs to be done, so there’s really no reason to put it off while we work on the comprehensive plan.”
The theater, a 1920s movie palace and vaudeville stage shuttered since 1982 because of asbestos problems, will benefit from a $100,000 federal grant recently received to complete a pilot facade facelift at Genessee and Clayton Streets.
It will include Victorian-style streetlights, landscaping and other amenities. Potter said the pilot project should be done by Dec. 1.
Downtown activists said they hope to use the project as an example of what can be done on a larger scale.
Upscale residential housing, probably in the form of townhouses, could spring up on the southern edge of downtown, Potter said.
