An obituary of sort of Carolyn Bartholf Oxtoby, who died on January 12, 2024. It appeared in the 2024 edition of  IT’s interesting end-of-the-year special issue, “Remembering: The Lives They Lived.”

 

That abbreviated remembrance left some things unsaid. She was widely praised even before her death as a philanthropist and do-gooder, but Oxtoby was in fact a businessperson, albeit not a typical one. (Few Springfield developers studied at the Sorbonne.) 

 

Indeed, some in Springfield remember her for the building she tore down. The private school she founded was housed for a time in the  nobly proportioned house at South Grand Avenue that prominent local attorney Logan Hay had built for himself between Lincoln and Dial Court in 1905. It was far from ideal as a school and was too much like a school to appeal as a house. Edward Pree, a noted local lawyer and former high official in the Stratton Administration, argued that the house should be appropriated by the State of Illinois for official guests, as the Blair House in Washington is used by presidents. Alas, the state, which probably was the only possible buyer for a house of that size, did not want it.

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Oxtoby found that the property was not zoned for office use and knew that its neighbors would never let a city council change that. So she reluctantly sold it to high-end condo developers to free up capital for her other projects. The Logan Hay house was razed in 1979, an outcome Pree called “another irreparable loss to the city of Springfield.”

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Ron Sakolsky, a local left-wing professor, argued in print at the time that, because of Oxtoby's wealth, "Springfield is her toy and we are . . . her playthings." That was mostly the sort of nonsense, of course, of the sort that can be said of any person of property. Still, it is true that Oxtoby was cheered mainly by people with a taste for fine dining and she added at most a couple of dozen people to downtown Springfield’s resident population (most of them lobbyists or legislators). That was not nearly enough to mount an effective counteroffensive against downtown’s decline.

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A failure then? I don’t think so. I knew her a bit, as she was one of the partners who bought and partially restored the old building that once housed offices of Abraham Lincoln and who thus became my employers when they hired me as a tour guide. She was no Joan of Arc and never pretended to be. What she was was the ideal Shipley girl. It was her old prep school, after all, that aimed to prepare its girls to become “a useful, interesting, happy, and increasingly mature person.”

 

“When we took all the crap off it”—the crap being ill-considered “modernizations” that had turned a handsome19th century commercial building into an ugly 20th century one—"we had a building that was simply stunning.”

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That was Carolyn Oxtoby, recalling the Eureka moment when she became alive to the wisdom and (the potential profit) of adapting and reusing older downtown buildings. In the latter 1960s she had joined four other partners who bought and partially restored the Tinsley Building at 6th and Adams where Lincoln once had an office. Inspired, she decided not just to repair the  interiors of two family properties at 6th and Monroe she had recently inherited but to convert them into office space and apartments while keeping their handsome 19th-century exteriors largely intact.

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Over the years she did the same to several other 19th century commercial buildings up and down 6th Street. In 2001 the moribund Masonic Temple on 6th south of Monroe (which she did not own) was transformed into the Hoogland Center for the Arts thanks to a $350,000 donation from Oxtoby and her brother Stephen Bartholf. Not for nothing did this newspaper in 1977 dub her “The patron saint of sixth Street.”

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For 40 years Oxtoby gave the speeches and wrote the letters and made the phone calls and sat through the meetings and set up the organizations and occasionally donated the money and advice (she had both) to get other owners to do the same on the reasonable assumption that you can’t have a downtown without having buildings.

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She did a great deal, in short, for a woman raised to do nothing in particular in just the right way. Carolyn Bartholf grew up in the 1930s the grandchild of a what everyone said was the richest man in town in a house whose front yard later was converted into a 14-house subdivision. She would recall her childhood in Springfield as dull her adolescence was not, busy as it was with debutante balls, holiday dinners at the Stevenson governor’s mansion, summers in the Upper Peninsula, pool parties at the country club. She was sent away to the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and Mount Holyoke. She spent the customary junior year in France, dropping by London on the way to watch Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, and reigned herself over the 1953 Beaux Arts Ball.

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“Exclusive but not snobbish” was the motto for that affair, and Oxtoby would remain not quite what people expected in a debutante, being personable, unpretentious, and articulate. Both Shipley and Holyoke were strongly service-oriented women's schools. “They were saying to women then what women's liberation is saying now,” Oxtoby would recall. “1 guess it was there that I got the idea of independence, of being able to do something myself.”

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Back home, Oxtoby made herself into a 1950s version of the Helpful Lady, those politely progressive reformers of the late 1800s. She was a busy member and officer of the League of Women Voters. (About a much overdue state judicial reform in 1958 she lamented, “[Progress] must come slowly but I ask you, isn’t one century long enough?”) In 1967 she cochaired two referenda campaigns to finance new public school buildings. Both failed. District 186 schools having proved unimprovable, she decided to start one of her own, City Day School, the private college prep school she helped found and which died of debt in 1986.

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To education and government reform she would add urbanism to her causes, becoming She an eloquent defender of downtown against the mallifiers. “Owners of downtown buildings losing their retail tenants to White Oaks” she railed in these pages in 2009, “quickly put two and two together to equal four—or as it turned out, to equal zero—and soon began to raze adjacent buildings in an effort to provide mall-type parking.”

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Alas, she was no King Canute. As urbanist Mark Heyman wrote in this paper in 1977, "there just aren't enough Carolyn Oxtobys to actually reverse the tide [of suburbanization]." She did keep several valuable properties from being washed away, however, and what was good for Springfield was good for her too. “Everything I've done and will do downtown and elsewhere reflects what I like to see in a city.” She moved into one of her apartments after the death of her husband. Anyone who ran into her during those years—and just about everyone did, in the shops or at a sidewalk table—saw a woman very much at home. She told IT, “If I ever feel lonely, I just walk downstairs and find people I know up and down the street. It’s a great way to live.”

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For all this she was much praised, becoming the State Journal-Register First Citizen in 1998 and Illinois Times’ “Best Springfieldian” in 2004. Landmarks Illinois awarded Oxtoby its Lifetime Achievement Award  in 2010. That part of the public that prefers the un-city parts of Springfield did not think so highly of her, and others resented her wealth, as if she had a choice of parents and forgetting perhaps that the test of character is not how a person acquires wealth but how she uses it. ●