Oak Park’s forgotten commercial corridor on Roosevelt Road is getting some attention. We suppose that’s a good thing. But working again with Berwyn, and interestingly not with Cicero, Oak Park is sinking $100K into a streetscape planning process.
If this seems familiar, it’s because the three suburbs undertook a similar streetscaping project just 20 years ago. That resulted in perhaps the most underwhelming upgrade we’ve ever observed. And the bumpouts-and-benches approach has not aged well.
Roosevelt Road continues as a mishmash of uses and misuses starting at Austin and stretching to Harlem. The bright spots, and there are a few, are mainly on the Berwyn side of the road. All hail FitzGerald’s, the iconic music club that has only blossomed under its new owners and their serious investment in outdoor spaces. There are also the Berwyn Shops, a retail incubator concept now being copied in Riverside and Brookfield. There are a handful of worthy restaurants, including Autre Monde and Bodhi Thai. And in an easy-to-miss small storefront there is The Pile Bookstore, a little treasure waiting for you to discover.
It’s on the Oak Park side of the equation that opportunity knocks as there are some desperate holes to fill. Brick sidewalks and curlicue lampposts are not going to cut it.
Are we happy that Taco Bell got turned away at Austin and the best we could come up with is a maybe-to-be-built car wash? How long will the failed Ino’s fast food sit vacant near Harlem? It cries out for townhouses. The largely vacant and troublesome block-long parcel that was once Associated Tire has some positive activity but needs more help. We’ll be glad to see Community Builders add a handsome affordable housing building on one of the street’s ugliest parcels. Then there is a range of obsolete and underused mixed-use, two-story buildings that deserve to be better than smoke shops. We count three such vaping-centric uses on the street. That’s not a record we want to chase.
Oak Park’s economic development apparatus at village hall imploded over the past few years. Now it has been rebuilt with another hire just coming on board. Before another bond is issued to undertake a fancy streetscape of Roosevelt Road, we’d urge the village board to direct some focus of the new development team to Oak Park’s quite sad southern border.