On the precipice of the millennium, urban planners are heading back down cobblestone streets to revisit the architectural trends of the early 20th Century. Pedestrian-friendly and neighborly, with an emphasis on traditional architecture, this New Urbanism movement may have its highest profile a half-hour from Orlando’s Walt Disney World, where the Disney Co. is building Celebration, a brand-new version of small-town Americana, a Main Street that’s more than a facade.
Luckily for those who live in the southwest suburbs, local city planners are way ahead of that curve. Historical preservationists are hard at work restoring the downtowns in Beecher, Crete, Frankfort, Lockport, Plainfield and Morris to periods ranging primarily from around 1870 to 1920. They’re finding that with some minor reconstruction they can literally uncover treasures that Disney Co. can only dream about replicating.
So why are so many towns, old and new, looking so far back for inspiration?
One answer, at least locally, is authenticity. Historical preservationists say they are looking to restore the true character of a building, the integrity of a downtown block. And it just so happens that in the Midwest, most small-town downtowns sprang up around the turn of the century.
In addition, one architect says, discontent with today’s homogenized society, where corporate chains drape each town in similar plastic fashion, is leading to a hunger for something unique. Disappointment in suburbs in which neighborhoods can be antisocial, impersonal and even criminal is leading to a hankering for the good old days.
“People are just finding suburban America is unlivable,” said Michael Lambert, architect with Arris Architects & Planners, of Plainfield. “Our cities back then worked.”
Many of the quaint features of turn-of-the-century American architecture look like a Disney creation. Think of a line of one- and two-story brick or stone storefronts rubbing shoulders, each faced with broad windows, crowned with decorative cornices. Then add the old-fashioned mock gaslights, fancy benches and brick walkways that towns are so fond of installing in their downtowns nowadays.
“They’re trying to portray Main Street at Disney World. Well, we have Main Street right here,” said Rosemary Winters, owner of Canal House Antiques in Lockport. Not only are the buildings genuine but so is the friendly, small-town attitude.
Winters and her husband, Ray, have bought and renovated three downtown Lockport buildings, including the one that houses their antique shop. As buildings are restored, so is community spirit as neighbors pull together.
In fact, renovation can be catching. Tom Alves, a Lockport restaurant owner and developer, has been at it for 17 years and said that when he is fixing up a building, people notice.
“They stop, they talk, they watch the progress that’s going on,” he said. “It has been my experience that when they see someone else doing it, they start doing it.”
Generally, buildings are restored to their date of origin. “Each building has its own personality,” Winters said.
For example, she and her husband worked on a Pure Oil gasoline station building that dates back to the early 1900s. They based their extensive restoration on old photos, replacing and rebuilding worn-out parts, preserving its steep rain-splitter roof.
“It looks like a little cottage,” Winters said. “It looks very charming. People like being in it.”
Perhaps fittingly, the station serves as an office for Main Street Lockport, a program that takes its cue from the National Main Street Center, a private entity that promotes downtown revitalization through historic renovation. Since the program started in Lockport in 1991, the city has reaped more than $3 million in investment in its downtown, according to Winters, past president of the local Main Street program. Preservation is the key to progress in downtown business districts because it attracts customers.
“People today want to go to something different than a mall. Strip malls all look the same,” said Nick Kalogeresis, suburban coordinator of Illinois Main Street, a state government program.
But the value of restoration is more than economic. When a downtown maintains its historical authenticity, the buildings provide a sort of time line for residents old and new.
“When you walk through a downtown, you’re really walking through an open-air museum,” Kalogeresis said.
His program acts as a middleman, contracting with the National Main Street Center so communities don’t have to. Illinois Main Street started in May 1993 for rural towns and in February 1996 for suburbs. Glenwood officials have been to Illinois Main Street seminars and are preparing to apply to the program, said Eda Schrimple, Glenwood economic development director. Frankfort and Plainfield number among the first nine suburbs selected for the program.
As part of a second crop of four towns, Lockport, which already has been working directly with National Main Street Center, also has been chosen to join the Illinois program. The three southwest suburbs are part of an outer ring of communities that were self-sustaining small towns at one time, developing between 1850 and the turn of the century, Kalogeresis said. Blue Island, a south suburb also in the program, falls into a second category of younger towns closer in to Chicago that developed between 1890 and 1940 as suburbs.
Frankfort has long recognized the value of preservation. According to the village’s centennial book published in 1979, the Chamber of Commerce in 1966 “realized it would be futile for Frankfort to attempt modernization in competition with nearby sophisticated shopping centers. They recognized the value of the historical buildings in the old business area and began a campaign to restore and return these buildings, through modern means, to the atmosphere of the 1890s.”
Some of the buildings have front porches, others have gabled roofs. “As one of our downtown merchants described it, it’s like coming home,” said Ray Bodnar, village director of economic development and coordinator of Frankfort’s Main Street Preservation Alliance of business owners and residents.
Plainfield’s historic downtown buildings are of the Italianate Victorian variety, with long, curved second-floor windows and detailed cornices. They are generally more decorative than the later, streamlined art deco style that cropped up from the 1920s to the 1940s.
Plainfield faces two challenges. One is an empty lot at Lockport and Des Plaines Streets that had been the site of a glass shop before it was destroyed in a fire. For a long time before that, the lot had housed an auto dealership. The second is proposed expansion of the downtown west of the river. In both cases the goal is to make new construction compatible with its historical neighbors without copying what’s already there.
Plainfield has approved a developer’s plans to construct on the empty lot a two-story brick building with traditional architectural features, such as first-floor storefront windows, window ornamentation and a receding entryway, said Jeff Durbin, Plainfield village planner.
The village plans to move its offices into half of the second floor space. The other half could be used as office space and the first floor as retail space, he said.
On its downtown expansion, the village got some creative help through a competition to design the 300-acre site. The old downtown and a new one will sit side by side.
“We don’t want to put up a mirror,” said Durbin.
It wouldn’t work anyway. “Today you have to respect the fact that people are using cars, communication has changed,” he said.
To complement the old urbanism, the winning design entry will employ New Urbanism precepts. In fact, Richard Schaupp who teamed up with Washington, D.C., architect Michael Franck to win the contest, works with Cooper Robertson, the New York firm that designed Celebration for Disney.
The aim is to bring people into the core shopping area by making it pedestrian friendly and respecting traditional architecture, Durbin said. But rest assured it won’t look like a second Celebration.
“That’s Florida. This is the Chicagoland region. You have to respect local culture, local tradition,” Durbin said. Differences will arise, for example, in materials and street layout.
Crete is refashioning its downtown based on the period between 1880 and 1920. Phyllis Monks, chairwoman of Crete’s Heritage and Architecture Commission, said building characteristics from that period fit in with the older homes and historic nature of the village.
“We liked the design elements, especially up at the roof line, a parapet design that gives Crete a certain charm,” Monks said.
Not part of the Main Street program, Crete is receiving help from architect Lambert. He has rendered streetscapes and offered suggestions that include putting period features such as porches and center-peaked cornices on new construction.
“That truly is a strong period for them in Crete,” Lambert said. “The town started to thrive in 1880.”
As in other communities, Crete’s heyday lasted until the Depression. It was a time of great industrialism and prosperity, particularly in the Midwest. As the 20th Century approached, many towns experienced fires that devastated their wooden buildings, so they built bigger and better, more memorable buildings of stone and brick, Lambert said.
Manufactured building items became available: metal ceilings, light fixtures and decorative metal cornices, he explained. With railroads came imports of stained glass and art glass, wallpapers and woodworking. Transportation acted as a connector.
“Just as we’re being connected globally, that’s how I imagine it was becoming connected nationally,” Lambert said.
Crete’s Heritage and Architecture Commission members plan to go door-to-door to encourage business owners to take advantage of the village’s low-interest loan program offered through First United Bank in Crete for historical renovation of their building facades.
“A few architectural changes not costing very much can make a world of difference in the design of the facade,” Monks said.
Lambert said designs from the past allow people to escape from the harried present.
“If we can absorb ourselves in historical architecture, we feel ourselves being taken back to a simpler, quieter time.”
He said he thinks part of preservation’s popularity is nostalgia as another millennium approaches.
“There’s a lot of turning back,” he said. “People want to glamorize the good old days.”
CAPITAL ADVICE FOR TOWNS
National Main Street Center, based in Washington, D.C., has provided advice and technical help to nearly 1,300 towns since it started in 1980 as an offshoot of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The center claims 39,700 new businesses have sprouted, reaping $30.72 in investment for each dollar spent on revitalization and generating 143,000 new jobs.
The center advises aiming for historical accuracy and good design from whichever era an individual building originates.
“We encourage people not to adopt a historic theme,” said Kennedy Smith, National Main Street Center director. “It’s confusing the issue to create fake history.”
An authentic building from the 1890s, of course, should be preserved, she said. But so should a building of good design from the 1940s, equally a part of history.
Smith said problems come from incompatible or bad design, such as the use of overpowering, interior-lit plastic signs, developed during the shopping-mall era of bigger scale and cheaper materials.
Similarly, an older building with a solid fake front hiding its formerly windowed upper stories looks out of place on the traditional Main Street; duplicating features of an authentic turn-of-the-century building and applying them to a modern-day building cheapens the downtown’s historical integrity.
National Main Street Center offers a formula for ensuring compatibility with the traditional Main Street storefront, a 10-point checklist of crucial design elements such as proportion, composition, materials, color, roof and cornice style and the like.
