Ralph Coglianese, village administrator for south suburban Matteson, has a view out his Village Hall office window that encompasses Lincoln Mall, Interstate Highway 57 and acres and acres of cornfields.
But a few steps away from his desk is a plastic-enclosed table encasing a model of Matteson’s 6-month-old Village Hall on Cicero Avenue just north of Lincoln Highway surrounded by the shops, office buildings, condominiums and single-family homes planners say soon will comprise the suburb’s new downtown.
The model isn’t big enough to show the old town center, a quaint blend of homes and specialty shops hemmed in by the same Illinois Central railroad tracks that helped give birth to Matteson more than 140 years ago.
Now poised to receive the masses of people and commercial business development chugging toward the south suburbs, towns such as Matteson, Olympia Fields and Park Forest are either rehabilitating their downtown areas or creating new ones.
Capitalizing on current shopping trends–which planners say favor short, convenience shopping over long strolls through regional malls–the new downtowns reflect new growth and new ideas about economic development.
“We had to search for a niche,” said Park Forest Village Manager Janet Muchnik, whose town recently rehabbed the mall at its town center into an actual downtown, complete with a Main Street, side streets, village green and specialty shops.
“I think that there’s a push toward convenience shopping that these downtowns represent,” she said.
“We’re seeing a rapid increase in growth, and what we’ve been doing over the years is try to take advantage of it,” said Coglianese, who anticipates more than 200 houses a year will be built near Matteson’s planned downtown over the next few years.
And with population and buying trends what they are, he said, the village stands to benefit from creating an area dedicated to specialty shopping as an alternative to the chains at the mall.
Lincoln Mall aside, Will County and Cook County suburbs along its border are about to hit it big, development- and population-wise, said John Paige, director of planning services for Northeast Illinois Planning Commission.
Since 1990, Matteson’s population has grown by almost 10 percent to 12,490, with most of it landing in subdivisions west of I-57. Communities are connected to the new village center via a dedicated bridge over the interstate that was integral to the design of the new Village Hall.
Matteson’s population is expected to at least double in the next two decades, said Paige, who added the suburb’s proximity to I-57 could contribute to an even larger spike in employment, from the nearly 8,000 jobs found there in 1990 to about 25,000 expected by 2020. Similar growth is anticipated for other area suburbs.
On the other side of Cicero Avenue from the new Matteson village center, housing development is booming. The village’s skyline, once the rolling hills of the Illinois prairie, is now broken by the banks and office buildings that continue to sprout up along Lincoln Highway.
Matteson’s new downtown will grow over the next few years to feature a tree-lined main street, an outdoor gathering place and a variety of specialty shops. In other words, said Coglianese, just because the new downtown is near the mall, doesn’t mean it’s going to look like a mall.
In neighboring Olympia Fields, which has never had a village center of any kind, Village President Linzey Jones said officials hope a few open acres surrounding the Metra station on the Illinois Central/Metra line can be converted to the purpose.
The 52 vacant acres are the last parcels of open land in Olympia Fields, and the village is working with the owners of the land to develop the site into a downtown area complete with a new Village Hall, mixed residential and retail use, and plenty of parking.
Olympia Fields is a suburb built inward from its margins. Three distinct business districts line its edges, behind which lurk the bedroom communities that have long made up the character of the 70-year-old suburb.
As much to create a steady sales tax base as to centralize the community, the village is fishing for architects to design the area.
Because there is no other remaining land, added Jones, “this will be the last opportunity we as a village have to do something like this.”
Still another transition has taken place in Park Forest, built to accommodate soldiers returning to civilian life after World War II.
After more than $7 million was spent in federal, state and village funds, Park Forest has torn apart the Philip M. Klutznick-designed shopping mall that used to be its center, replaced it with a downtown area and is building new housing developments around it.
“It was hot stuff for about 20 years,” Muchnik said of the old shopping mall. “Then in the ’70s, people decided that the regional mall was a fabulous idea, but where they ought to be located was at a highway intersection.”
From that, she mused, Matteson’s Lincoln Mall was born.
“It was new, it was convenient and it eclipsed Park Forest,” said Muchnik.
To reclaim a sales tax base in Park Forest, the village bought vacant shopping center property in 1995. It has since demolished almost 300,000 square feet of retail space, ripped up swatches of parking lot, laid out the village’s new Main and side streets and planted trees.
“We knew we had to create a grid street system there. It’s not just for pedestrians anymore, it’s for bikes and vehicles,” said Muchnik.
The adoption of convenience shopping also marked a movement toward a 24-hour focus for the town’s center.
Now, presiding like a shopping mall anchor store over the village’s new downtown, the Park Forest Village Hall looks out at coffee shops, restaurants, a flower shop, a movie theater and the offices of the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra.
“You’ve got to respond to the changes that are happening,” said Muchnik. “There’s nothing permanent about the way people choose to shop or choose to live.”
