Think fountains. Think green. Think arcs of water that seem to chase each other through a garden.
Think brick walkways and benches, winter holiday banners and summer art fairs. Think shops, a grocery, a library, a kids theme park, a carousel, a movie theater, a village hall, a police station and a community center.
Put it all together and you’ll have downtown Elk Grove Village by late 1998.
“We have no true downtown because the village was built with an industrial park for its tax base,” said Village Manager Gary Perrin. “Each neighborhood had its strip shopping center. This is the closest thing we have to what can be considered a downtown.”
Part of the overall plan for downtown Elk Grove already is in place. The municipal buildings, the library and the Park District’s Pavilion already share what Assistant Village Manager Ray Rummel calls “our governmental campus.”
The Pavilion, a $10 million building completed in 1994, includes a full-size, lighted merry-go-round, a shallow, lagoon-type water playground, a regulation swimming pool, a fitness center, basketball and racquetball courts, an indoor track, a banquet hall, bronze sculptures, arts and crafts rooms and tanning beds.
A gazebo on the Pavilion grounds is often used for weddings. And at the far west end of the site is a child-size theme park, Pirate’s Cove, that includes a jungle ride, bumper boats, a spaceship, a rock-climbing wall and, of course, a huge pirate ship suitable for make-believe ocean battles.
In addition to a steady flow of toddlers and children with parents, the center contributes to the downtown image by attracting adults throughout the day and evening hours.
“We have 4,000 members in our fitness center,” said Pavilion manager Carl Vangundy. “People who work around here come to work out or play racquetball and basketball during their lunch hour.”
“We will have high-level colonnades and upscale brick treatments to make it look more like a downtown than a mall,” Rummel said. “We want to make it a gathering place, to bring the community together.”
Recently, the final hurdle to breaking ground for the new complex, called the Town Center Redevelopment Project, was cleared when nearly 200 cubic yards of contaminated dirt that had been under an old dry cleaner was removed and carted to a special landfill in Michigan.
“We could have just paved the dry cleaning site over and it would have been safe, but then we would not have a clear title to the land,” said Elk Grove Village Mayor Craig Johnson. “We went with the more complete method of removing enough soil so there was no longer any sign of contamination.”
The former owner of the dry cleaner paid the nearly $300,000 to have the soil removed.
When completed, the defunct Grove Mall at the corner of Arlington Heights and Biesterfield Roads will have been razed to make way for a new complex anchored by a supermarket. A two-screen movie theater will get a brick facade and will be expanded to six screens. But the theater will keep its second-run status so tickets can be priced under $2.
The theater is due to reopen by October and the supermarket should be completed by spring. The target date to complete the entire project is the fall of 1998.
The village set up a tax-increment financing district to recoup the $6.2 million it paid to buy the property.
“The existing center was blighted. Tenants had moved out and taxes had decreased,” Rummel said. “After the new project is completed and the village is repaid, the other taxing bodies will benefit by receiving considerably higher tax revenues.”
