Roosevelt Road is a tough stretch. Has been for as long as anyone can remember. It’s ugly, overlooked and has either no identity beyond being home to FitzGerald’s or it’s seen as a rainy-day alternative to the Ike.
But now our very own Roosevelt Road is the recipient of a $7 million gift from the cash-strapped State of Illinois. This money has federal roots, though I can’t keep straight how, even when it’s explained to me. The essential point Oak Park Village President David Pope would like made is that the state came up with these funds because officials are finally starting to see the value in spending money “where people actually live” instead of “building roads to connect the ducks to the geese,” his word picture of building more roads in exurbia.
Here’s another Pope image: Link up Oak Park, Berwyn and Cicero, the three towns butting up to the stretch of Roosevelt from Austin to Harlem, and you have the second largest city in Illinois.
These happen to be the three towns that have worked cooperatively, with Cicero a bit of a late addition, for several years to reclaim Roosevelt. They paid for a consultant’s study that wrapped up four years ago and painted a realistically grim visage of Roosevelt. Aging retail in obsolete storefronts. Lots of driveways leading to bland strip malls, fast fooders and gas stations that make walking this 1.5-mile stretch impossible and uninviting. Then there’s the two-block-long bread factory that straddles both sides of the street like a yeasty, windowless behemoth.
There might be the option of just ignoring Roosevelt for another 20 years to see if it disappears, except that the street has slid from being a nothing to being a negative. Pope talks about the Berwyn bar, Club Inclusive, saying that before it finally closed, it had “started to drag down the whole neighborhood” with its gangbangers and many public nuisances.
So Pope sees the coming $9 million investment ($2 million will have to come from overstretched local funds) in streetscaping and repaving (yes, it was just kind of resurfaced) as a way to “create an environment the bad guys don’t want to be.”
Now I don’t think gangbangers will much mind a few benches and some curlicue street lamps. The key to driving out the cretins is to bring back the locals, and I have my doubts that brick pavers will be enough to do it. Neighborhood people will come to Roosevelt because there’s something to do, places to shop. Where Roosevelt works now, and there are pockets, is where there are street-level attractions: FitzGerald’s/Wishbone, Gina’s Italian Ice, Dan’s Bike Shop, Salerno’s. Where there are two blocks of Italian bread baking, blocks of odd storefronts with no discernible identity, and worse, actual knucklehead magnets like bars and liquor stores, things have to happen to actually change things up. That means new stores, tough policing, community organizing and some good luck.
You can’t read the consultant’s straightforward report and not realize this is a sincere effort. You have to be impressed when, to build it out, three towns with no history whatever of cooperation fund a study, create a planning body, mutually change their zoning, and lobby a bankrupt state successfully for a big bucket of cash.
But curb bump-outs and antique bike racks aren’t going to do this. Roosevelt Road needs purpose: New stores and restaurants. An answer to Turano’s spread. For those who have worked so hard to get to this point, enjoy the holidays. Because, remarkably, the easy part is behind you.
