Community members had another chance to learn more about local leaders’ vision for the future of Roosevelt Road.
Oak Park’s village government and the Berwyn Development Corporation hosted a joint open house providing information on the progress that consultants have made on the Roosevelt Road Corridor Plan, the new economic development and streetscaping plan the two bodies are developing together. The plan will look to boost residential development, support local businesses and improve road safety along the thoroughfare, which serves as a defining border for suburban Oak Park, Berwyn and Cicero.
In March, Oak Park’s village board approved a contract worth $100,000 for The Lakota Group, a project management and urban design firm that had helped develop Oak Park’s Pleasant District streetscaping project, to help develop the plan.
Residents gave feedback to a variety of design concepts at a project open house organized at Fitzgerald’s on Wednesday Nov. 19.
“Physical changes that make a street safer are inexorably linked to better economic development, because people want to be there if it’s safer, people want to be around and go the businesses if it’s safer,” said Kevin Clark, the Lakota Group’s Director of Design. “I think there’s a link there and I’ve seen it in other places and in Oak Park I’ve seen it happen. I think Lake Street is a much more desirable place because Marion and Lake Street were redone.”
Engagement efforts since work on the project began have strived to get equal input from Berwyn and Oak Park residents, Clark said.
Ideas the group presented to residents at last week’s project open house included adding crosswalks, building curb bump outs at busy intersections, adding trees and public art to the corridor, utilizing vacant lots for regular events and supporting “Main Street style” mixed use development.
“We wanted to see how people felt about those different things, is that an acceptable type of development that they’d want to see on the street overtime as it redevelops or changes,” Clark said. “This is trying to get a handle on that.”
The Roosevelt Road border between Oak Park and Berwyn has long been a target for development, as this plan comes 20 years after the communities jointly-adopted the “Plan for the Redevelopment of Roosevelt Road” in March 2005. That plan, which took four years to finalize, was “the first-ever comprehensive redevelopment study of this corridor,” according to Oak Park documents.
Clark expects the Lakota group’s report to be finished by the end of January.