Our View
Now we are moving past surmising about the impact of village board dithering over Downtown Oak Park. Now we are seeing venerable, independent shops closing.
Spauldings, a men’s clothier founded in the Depression, will not survive this year.
Already Alphabet Soup, a 30-year retailer in downtown, is kaput.
More, surely, will follow either in anticipation of the holiday shopping season or following it.
In no way do we blame the closing of these stores entirely on the village government’s colossal and multi-decade failings in downtown. Not entirely. Don Micheli, the classy-and well-dressed-owner of Spauldings, acknowledges that he personally knows of at least six other similar, high-end men’s stores closing around the country this fall. The market for expensive Italian suits has softened in new and more casual workplaces. And Alphabet Soup had grown tired in its merchandising in recent years.
In more typical circumstances, though, Alphabet Soup would have new owners with fresh ideas and we would not have an empty storefront facing Lake Street. And Micheli is plain in saying that if the village had acted more quickly and with greater understanding of the challenge of running an independent retail store, that he would have hung in another couple of years. (And, in fact, after liquidating the stock of its women’s store this fall, the Micheli brothers will re-open a revised version of the women’s store next spring in its current spot.)
Instead, though, the debate over reopening the Marion Street pedestrian mall in front of Spauldings seems endless. A decision to build a new parking garage on North Boulevard is now three or four years past due and still has not been made. Kill the traffic and kill the parking and you’ve killed the retail.
It has only been a matter of time before businesses began to drop. The time seems to have arrived. Mark it down. Fall 2006.
The village’s Business Services Department took advantage of the expensive consultants’ reports generated out of the perpetual studies of the Colt building-even if the village board didn’t take advantage of them. They used the information gathered as a stepping off point to assess Oak Park’s “retail pull factor.” We hardly pretend to know what a retail pull factor is. Suffice it to quote the report which says, “it has been less than one since 2001 and [is] growing at a significantly lower rate than Forest Park and River Forest.”
Most notably to us, the report says that since 1998-eight years ago-Oak Park’s local sales tax has risen by a paltry 8 percent. In that same time, Forest Park is up by 48 percent. River Forest by 41 percent. The credit in Forest Park in this area goes far more to its Wal-Mart and K-mart than to its resurgent Madison Street shops. But River Forest, and its Taxman-developed “Town Square,” has eaten Oak Park’s lunch. Period. Exclamation point.
Multiple village boards have squandered the past decade’s monumental retail and residential development market, the richest on record, with petty fights and assorted nonsense.
This has to stop. It is already too late.