Editorial

Of plans and the people

By Richard Parmater, Managing Editor
August 7, 2003

One of the happiest aspects of Daniel Burnham’s great Plan for Chicago – his 1909 urban-design manifesto for the city (“Make no little plans”) – is the fact that so much of his

passionate dream never got off the ground.

Chicagoans rightly honor Burnham for pressing his goal of the lakefront being made open and free; for Lake Shore Drive and for the continuous boulevard system weaving through the older city (would that later planners had continued the same pattern throughout the city’s outer ring!); and for the series of large and small neighborhood parks and field houses laced along those tree-lined drives, many of them created by some of the nation’s outstanding landscape designers and architects.

But thank goodness Burnham’s full vision never took form. After having given the city its World’s Fair in 1893 – a dazzling Beaux Arts confection of an imagined old Europe made fresh and fictional for the tourist trade, Burnham never gave up on his dream of designing the new Chicago as a Paris on the Prairie, a city much in the 19th-century French style with strong retrospective emphasis on ancient arches, domes, colonnades, dizzying traffic circles and huge, palace-like government buildings dominating grand vistas that made human beings look very small, indeed – Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” meets the Arc de Triomphe. As Frank Lloyd Wright snorted early on, an unfettered Burnham plan might have killed the nascent Chicago School of Architecture and never given the early Prairie Style a chance to flower in the wide and flat city by the lake.

All of this is to say that urban planners dream big dreams (the way they should dream) and that time’s shifting sands carve their dreams into a breathing human form – a suitable metaphor for healthy change in a democracy.

Right now, on a much smaller matter than Burnham’s fantasy but no less important to those on the scene, some people in Palos Heights are talking about, and some are worrying about, the vision for Harlem Avenue that has been cooking in the mind of urban planner Steven Yas for the past year-and-a-half at the invitation of members of the local government, the commercial community and the hybrid Business and Economic Development Committee.

Some of the true believers who attend each of Yas’ occasional presentations gush over his words and drawings that set forth a redesigned Harlem Avenue business district as if he were Burnham reborn, give a second chance to go all the way. Other people, after examining concept drawings that appeared in these pages last month, fear that Yas would eventually butcher his way into the leafy residential streets of cottages and ranch houses with heavy-walled, three- and four-storey commercial buildings, a shopping structure/parking ramp and a huge community center – as if he were Burnham reborn, give a second chance to go all the way.

Neither case will apply in Palos Heights.

At a special committee-of-the-whole meeting of the City Council on July 31, Mayor Bob Straz sounded the right and realistic note when he emphasized that Yas’ vision, both in the short term (over the next few years) and the long (some 30 years hence) for a redesigned Harlem Avenue business district corridor can be nothing more than a broad guideline against which to measure the course of inevitable change, whatever its nature, on the avenue. Should Yas’ initial plan of action be adopted by the City Council, he said, it would serve as a necessary gauge measuring the progress of Palos Heights’ economic and social health. Nothing about it would be coercive, inflexible. Indeed, he said, most development decisions based or not based on the plan over time would be made by members not yet on the City Council who would be elected by voters not yet living in the city. What is needed now, Straz suggested, is an articulated guide to thinking about how to shape a part of the city’s future – the condition of its commercial, financial and social well-being, its property values and its human values.

In the short term, the Yas plan is premised on the idea that the Harlem Avenue central business district lacks continuity, in appearance, in accessibility – lacks that almost inexpressible “lure” that makes people pull off a road, shop in a store, eat at a restaurant, walk from shop window to shop window and return again and again. Yas calls for continuous sidewalks eventually running from the Calumet-Sag Channel to 131st Street, for a Harlem Avenue that feels more like a stately boulevard than a state highway, for convenient parallel parking along the road, for attractive lighting, for public plazas. In the longer term, he envisions offices and living units above stores, including fourth-storey “penthouses” for some downtown dwellers, and he calls for those proposed huge structures eventually to indeed push at least a block into the residential neighborhood.

Now, with the City Council’s unanimous approval of the designer’s Harlem Avenue Master Plan at Monday night’s meeting this week, Yas’ role in influencing Palos Heights’ future gains enormous significance, but it does not bear the weight of inevitability. As Mayor Straz suggested, the people will over time shape the city’s future, guided by the vision but not dominated by it.

Of key importance for residents to keep in mind in all of this is the fact that the Harlem Avenue Master Plan is not about Harlem Avenue alone. With a tax increment financing (TIF) deal likely to pay for much of the project, Harlem’s development will almost certainly be the model for future expansion elsewhere in town: commercialization of Route 83 between 71st Avenue and Ridgeland Avenue; renewed business expansion along the Southwest Highway strip that runs from the channel to Route 83; enhancement of an eventually widened 127th Street. These and other changes (presuming that the city will jettison its long-standing mania for encouraging “professional and personal service offices” over sales-tax producing businesses) would support property values and public services to a degree unimagined in recent years.