It’s always very important to ask the community what it wants. Only then and through rapt discernment can officials intuit what the community wants. Because it is always very important to ask the community what it wants.
Take the empty corner of Madison Street and Oak Park Avenue. It’s been empty for decades. Empty so long the last brand of gasoline sold on the corner was ARCO. When’s the last time you saw an ARCO station? I presume the community was asked what it wanted and the near unanimous reply was, “Not some stinkin’ ARCO!”
Since the village-owned site has been empty since before my about-to-vote-in-her-first-presidential-election daughter was born, I must have missed the consensus building exercise where the community declared it wanted that corner used as a parking lot for the SUVs of Fenwick students from Willow Springs. Oh, but wait, in a nice bit of nuance, the community must also have said it wanted Christmas trees, Michigan Christmas trees, sold on the corner from the day after Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve. Isn’t that lovely?!
How on earth the elected mayor of Oak Park ever got the wacky notion that his constituents wanted tax generating retail and high-end housing on that empty lot and stretching further to the east and then neatly jumping to the south side of this woebegone street is beyond me. Simply campaigning directly on that promise and being elected by a wide margin, hosting several wide open public forums and discussing various aspects of likely development repeatedly in public hardly qualifies as “asking the community what it wants.”
How insulting can Anan Abu-Taleb be?
Because of this teeny-tiny backlash from people who are never happy with anything, I’m hoping now that I can plant a small seed that will grow into an actual thing that might soon be seen as “what the community wants.”
Last week, I was coming out of Sears Pharmacy on Madison Street at Home Avenue and my eye was captured, transfixed, laser-focused kitty corner (or is it catty corner?) on the now-vacant and also village-owned former District 97 headquarters and its formerly neighboring and also village-owned HQ of Robinson’s #1 Ribs.
Sure, the autocratic mayor and village board and Oak Park Economic Development Corp. have carefully assembled this wide frontage and relocated the school offices into a new $7 million structure with the completely insider notion of — what else? — creating more tax-producing property. Ho-hum.
Well, last week I saw those twin buildings with fresh eyes. Sure, I’ve said repeatedly that the old school headquarters was on the short list of all things ugly. But because I really like Charlie Robinson and have known him for 40 years, I never said in print that his half-block of storefronts was hideous (though it smelled pretty wonderful).
But maybe, I’d submit, there is a place for the historic preservation of just a little past mid-century horrendous. It’s not just the vertical, formed concrete, fake bricks on the face of the school building or the ghost sign left when Charlie shifted his old sign down the street to his new location.
It’s the friggin’ totality. Taken separately, each of these buildings is just crap. But together they are a statement about the utter futility of Madison Street in Oak Park across the decades. That’s got to be worth something.
Just let this idea of preserving those structures percolate, maybe post a comment about my insights at our OakPark.com website. In a week or two my idea might just ripen into a “community thing, an organic reflection of all that is special about Oak Park.”
Really, I wasn’t going to bring this idea up. It seems sort of stupid. But if we can criticize elected officials for bringing major, legit developers to barren land that Oak Parkers have been paying for in multiple ways for years, then no idea is too stupid.