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Don’t Look Now

Springfield is blind to the scenic

Illinois Times

February 4, 1988

Nature endowed Springfield with very little in the way of scenic charm, which made it all the more regrettable that city officials and developers have ruined so much of what the city had.

 

I returned to this issue many years later here.

Life, being indifferent to one’s convenience, took me down Monroe Street the other day. I was afoot as usual, heading west. I had just crested the shoulder of the presettlement creek valley on which the Third Street railroad track sits today, and was beginning the descent toward Second Street. Most of downtown Springfield sits on what was level prairie, but the terrain falls away at this spot toward the long-vanished course of the Town Branch of Spring Creek. Dump-trucks were trundling up and down the street carrying debris from the recent demolition of office buildings which recently occupied the block southeast of Second and Monroe. A new state library will be built on the site, but for the moment the vista looking west from Third toward 1 the statehouse was unimpeded by overpriced real estate. The entire capitol complex—reading from the left, I saw the Supreme Court, Centennial, Archives, statehouse, and Armory buildings—was arrayed before me. Distance and elevation gave me a new perspective. From the customary vantage point of Second Street at Capitol, for example, the statehouse (including its memorial statuary and fountains) always looked to me the way a room full of partying adults looks to a child of four. From my new and unexpected vantage point, however, I could see the complex as a grownup, and for the first time look the buildings in the eye.

 

Back when it sprouted trees instead of limestone, this place was known as Mather’s Grove. Later construction obscured the view which was then so pleasing; it was not until the day of my walk, when demolition temporarily restored the sightlines of a century ago, that I sensed the shape and sweep of the spot.

 

My pleasure was quickly soured by reflection. The view will not last long once construction begins in earnest on the new library. Less selfishly, I realized that I was one of the few people who would see it while it does exist; Monroe Street is one-way going east at this point, so that motorists driving through downtown Springfield have the view at their backs. I thought too about how that vista might have been preserved, with a little bit of thought. The block would have been the perfect spot for the visitors center now nearing completion on the other side of the capitol complex. The low-rise shelters being built for the center would not materially mar the vista from Third Street, which itself would have made an enticing focal point for a much long-dreamed-of pedestrian corridor linking the complex with downtown and Lincoln’s home; that corridor is usually sketched in by planners along Capitol Avenue, which has become a blight of parking lots.

 

Springfield’s terrain offers few opportunities for scenic vistas. No doubt the engineering rationale was persuasive, but building the city’s power plants in the 1930s smack at the "entrance" to Lake Springfield always seemed like putting a trash barrel on the main staircase in an opera house. Greed, however, has ruined more vistas than necessity. When you drive west from Springfield on Route 125—as every Springfieldian should at least once a year, to visit the Arenzville Burgoo—you will cross another creek valley. The road curves downward from the flat toward the Spring Creek bottom. As you emerge from that curve the valley wall is revealed on the other side, visible through a frame of trees which lines the creek itself. Whenever I make that trip, I envision that little hillside in bloom.

 

Sometimes I plant it mentally with trees, sometimes with flowering shrubs, some- times in prairie grasses and wild-flowers. I would not have planted what is, unfortunately, actually there. A sprawling traffic intersection occupies the middle distance. The hillside itself is littered with tract houses arranged with their backs to the road; a person who so arrogantly showed his bare backside in such a way would be arrested for public indecency. On the south side of the road, smack in the foreground of what drivers bound for the city would otherwise enjoy as a view of the creek bottom itself, is a commercial nursery selling ornamental landscape plants—as tidy a symbol as you could want of the culture’s priority which places private beauty over public.

 

The scenic gets short shrift, in fact, unless it is so spectacular as to support a tourist industry. Psychologists argue that visually pleasing vistas have a restorative effect, that much of the neurosis which we associate with city life i may be traced to the fact that we are daily assaulted by scenes which are unbalanced, incoherent, and disordered.

 

I introduce such notions at some risk of misunderstanding. In the butch world of mortgage financing and big-deal development, concern for the wider aesthetic aspects of the landscape is considered effete. "Highway beautification" for example is almost a term of derogation among our hairy-chested money men, who do not appreciate that the miles of bluebonnets planted along Texas highways as a result of the badgering of Lady Bird Johnson is an act of civilization, while the grand schemes of her husband for a Great Society were merely acts of government. In Chicago, many a lip curls into a sneer at the name of Walter Netsch, who as chairman of that city’s park district proposed to humanize the brutal landscape along Lake Shore Drive with a plan derided repeatedly by the press as "planting posies."

 

I have a certain contempt for beautification programs too, not because they aren’t worth doing, but because they are almost never done well. The J. David Jones Memorial Parkway which connects Capital Airport with North Grand Avenue is the classic example: Landscaping a median strip (in one spot with Astroturf or its kin) and installing decorative light standards on a road which rolls past landfills and open storage yards is like an undertaker painting a smile on the face of a corpse.

 

What cannot now be done along that stretch of Route 29 could have been done along Springfield’s newest major trafficway. Along part of Veteran’s Parkway, an earthern berm screens motorists from the butt- ends of the houses behind it. (That berm was built, of course, to shield the houses from the noise of the highway; even when designers do something right it is for the wrong reason.) Everywhere else, alas, is desolation—parking lots, billboards, garish lighted signs. The city’s westward expansion gave city and state builders a blank canvas, and they painted us up another Wabash Avenue. It would have been simple to acquire and dedicate a strip of the new right-of-way on each side of the road for plantings intended to screen offending views being built behind them, converting the road into a green corridor. That such plantings would also provide protection against both winds and bank erosion may make it easier for those among us who need to justify the good in terms of the narrowly practical.

 

In some states existing vistas are being protected by law. Such laws typically apply to quasi- rural suburban areas, because that is where rich people live, but even rich people come up with an idea worth emulating once in a while. Connecticut has a Scenic Roads Act which allows the protection of the visual character of roads against the effects of widening and straightening, and thus indirectly against the sort of land speculators who years ago began buying up parcels along Koke Mill Lane and similar bucolic byways hereabouts. New York state offers similar protection in the Hudson valley.

 

Laws don’t work very well even if they are passed, of course, and are in any event a remedy of last resort. Ideally, a cultivated sensitivity to landscapes would inform every local zoning, planning, and development decision. (Ha, ha ha ha; sorry—I like a little joke now and then.) It could be done by fiat or through property tax breaks, tax write-offs given in return for scenic easements on private property, and so on. The problem isn’t means; an hour in any public library and any zoning administrator, planner, or city commissioner can learn ways it is being done in other places. What is lacking is political will of the sort which derives from the conviction that a public interest in views is not a frivolous addition to the established public rights to health, safety, and quiet, but one which follows inescapably from them. □

SITES

OF

INTEREST

John Hallwas

Essential for anyone interested in Illinois history and literature. Hallwas deservedly won the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society.

Lee Sandlin Author

One of Illinois’s best, and least-known, writers of his generation. Take note in particular of The Distancers and Road to Nowhere.

Chicago Architecture Center

See Home Page/Learn/

Resources for a marvelous building database, architecture dictionary, even a city planning graphic novel. Handsome, useful—every Illinois culture website should be so good.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago

 

The online version of The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Crammed with thousands of topic entries, biographical sketches, maps and images, it is a reference work unmatched in Illinois.

Illinois Great Places

The Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2018 selected 200 Great Places in Illinois that illustrate our  shared architectural culture across the entire period of human settlement in Illinois.

McLean County Museum

of History

A nationally accredited, award-winning project of the McLean County Historical Society whose holdings include more than 20,000 objects, more than 15,000 books on local history and genealogy, and boxes and boxes of historical papers and images.

Mr. Lincoln, Route 66, and Other Highlights of Lincoln, Illinois

 

Every Illinois town ought to have a chronicler like D. Leigh Henson, Ph.D. Not only Lincoln and the Mother road—the author’s curiosity ranges from cattle baron John Dean Gillett to novelist William Maxwell. An Illinois State Historical Society "Best Web Site of the Year."

Illinois Digital Archives

 

Created in 2000, the IDA is a repository for the digital collections of the Illinois State Library and other Illinois libraries and cultural institutions. The holdings include photographs, slides, and glass negatives, oral histories, newspapers, maps, and documents from manuscripts and letters to postcards,  posters, and videos.

The Illinois State Museum

 

The people's museum is a treasure house of science and the arts. A research institution of national reputation, the museum maintains four facilities across the state. Their collections in anthropology, fine and decorative arts, botany, zoology, geology, and  history are described here. A few museum publications can be obtained here.

Chronicling Illinois

“Chronicling Illinois” showcases some of the collections—mostly some 6,000 photographs—from the Illinois history holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.

Chicagology

I will leave it to the authors of this interesting site to describe it. "Chicagology is a study of Chicago history with a focus on the period prior to the Second World War. The purpose of the site is to document common and not so common stories about the City of Chicago as they are discovered." 

Illinois Labor History Society

The Illinois Labor History Society seeks to encourage the preservation and study of labor history materials of the Illinois region, and to arouse public interest in the profound significance of the past to the present. Offers books reviews, podcasts, research guides, and the like. 

Illinois Migration History 1850-2017

The University of Washington’s America’s Great Migrations Project has compiled migration histories  (mostly from the published and unpublished work by UW Professor of History James Gregory) for several states, including Illinois. The site also includes maps and charts and essays about the Great Migration of African Americans to the north, in which Illinois figured importantly. 

History on the Fox

An interesting resource about the history of one of Illinois’s more interesting places, the Fox Valley of Kendall County. History on the Fox is the work of Roger Matile, an amateur historian of the best sort. Matile’s site is a couple of cuts above the typical buff’s blog. (An entry on the French attempt to cash in on the trade in bison pelts runs more than

2,000 words.)

BOOKS

 OF INTEREST

SIUPromoCoverPic.jpg

Southern Illinois University Press 2017

A work of solid history, entertainingly told.

Michael Burlingame,

author of Abraham 

Lincoln: A Life 

One of the ten best books on Illinois history I have read in a decade.

Superior Achievement Award citation, ISHS Awards, 2018

A lively and engaging study . . .  an enthralling narrative.

James Edstrom

The Annals of Iowa

A book that merits the attention of all Illinois historians

as well as local historians generally.

John Hoffman

Journal of Illinois HIstory

A model for the kind of detailed and honest history other states and regions could use.

Harold Henderson 

Midwestern Microhistory

A fine example of a resurgence of Midwest historical scholarship.

Greg Hall

Journal of the Illinois

State Historical Society

Click  here 

to read about

the book 

Click  here 

to buy the book 

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Southern Illinois University Press

SIU Press is one of the four major university publishing houses in Illinois. Its catalog offers much of local interest, including biographies of Illinois political figures, the history (human and natural) and folklore of southern Illinois, the Civil War and Lincoln, and quality reprints in the Shawnee Classics series.

University of

Illinois Press

The U of I Press was founded in 1918. A search of the online catalog  (Books/Browse by subject/Illinois) will reveal more than 150 Illinois titles, books on history mostly but also butteflies, nature , painting, poetry and fiction, and more.  Of particular note are its Prairie State Books,  quality new paperback editions of worthy titles about all parts of Illinois, augmented with scholarly introductions.

University of

Chicago Press

The U of C publishing operation is the oldest (1891) and largest university press in Illinois. Its reach is international, but it has not neglected its own neighborhood. Any good Illinois library will include dozens of titles about Chicago and Illinois from Fort Dearborn to

Vivian Maier.

Northern Illinois University Press

The newest (1965) and the smallest of the university presses with an interest in Illinois, Northern Illinois University Press gave us important titles such as the standard one-volume history of the state (Biles' Illinois:
A History of the Land and Its People) and contributions to the history of Chicago, Illinois transportation, and the Civil War. Now an imprint of Cornell University Press.

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Reviews and significant mentions by James Krohe Jr. of more than 50 Illinois books, arranged in alphabetical order

by book title. 

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Illinois Center for the Book

Run by the Illinois State Library, The Center promotes reading, writing and author programs meant to honor the state's rich literary heritage. An affiliate of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, the site offers award competitions, a directory of Illinois authors, literary landmarks, and reading programs.

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