The Corn Latitudes

“I think it’s Italian.’’ The speaker is a bearded young man, his audience two women. They are examining the dark marble, now cracked with age and weather, that hangs on the front of Maldaner’s Restaurant on Sixth Street in downtown Springfield, or, more accurately, what used to be Maldaner’s. The popular eating spot has been torn apart and rearranged, its kitchen modernized and a new upstairs terrace room added as part of a two-building renovation project that will also transform the rest of the 83-year-old Maldaner building and the 89-year-old Pasfield building—Thrifty’s—next door into offices and apartments. It’s all part of a plan to equip the buildings’ interiors for 20th-century functions while keeping their 19th-century exterior forms largely intact.

 

The trio ignores the looks of curious passersby. They are talking about whether the marble can be saved and re-used somewhere in Maldaner’s new (and still unnamed) second-floor dining room. The man is Dick Morse, an architect with John Lampros Associates, Inc., who is doing the design work for the project. One of the women is Judy Escobar who, with her husband Al, owns and runs Maldaner’s.

 

The other woman is a little shorter than average, slightly built, with a cap of restless dark brown hair. In dress and comportment she is indistinguishable from a thousand other suburban housewives. But typical she is not. She is Carolyn Oxtoby, downtown property owner, historic preservationist, school president, the person upon whom a great many people are depending to pull off the hoped-for resurrection of downtown. The re-opening of Maldaner’s, which begins this week, has been awaited by Springfieldians with more than a little curiosity, and has already done a great deal to encourage those who feel the downtown can be saved.

 

There’s no way anyone can tell what's going on in here from the street,” Oxtoby explains as she takes a visitor on a tour of the Maldaner building. The second and third floor interiors of both it and the Pasfield building next door have been completely gutted. New ornamental brickwork (using weathered brick salvaged from the old Lincoln Theater) has been added. A two-story glass wall is being mounted on the west side of Maldaner’s new room. A 120-square-foot stained glass panel found in the alley side of the building is being restored. A second floor office and spacious third-floor apartments are being built, while next door loft apartments and more office space are being finished off. A new elevator has been installed, along with a new kitchen in Maldaner’s. The Pasfield building will get a new first-floor facade. The project is an ambitious one. Privately, some have called it crazy.

 

Oxtoby is sitting on a three-rung stepladder in the large second-floor-front room that will, if everything goes well, be an office in a couple of months. The room is the headquarters for the rehabilitation project. A chest-high table fills half the room. It is piled high with tools, architect’s plans, empty coffee cups, a telephone. It is impossible to touch anything or walk anywhere without leaving marks of passage etched in dust. Carpenters and painters crawl antlike through the building and it is very noisy. Oxtoby is obviously at home here. She kicks off her shoes and talks.

 

"I’d always wanted to do something with these buildings ever since I got them. Maldaner’s, I acquired in . . . 1966, I think it was. The Pasfield building has always been in my family. But it wasn’t until I got involved in the Lincoln-Herndon building with the Myers’ that I really got interested in doing something downtown. I initially got involved in that project because of the Lincoln connection, but it ended up that my interests in it were more aesthetic than historical. When we took all the crap off it, we had a building that was simply stunning.”

 

Oxtoby gazes out the window as she talks. The window—maybe twelve feet tall, fitted with custom-made double-pane glass—overlooks Sixth Street. It’s a few minutes after noon and the street is awash with crowds of lunch-hour shoppers and strollers swirling back and forth like currents in a stream. ‘‘You know, SCADA looked into this and found out that there was something like 40,000 people who work downtown every day. And they’re the backbone of the downtown trade—them and tourists. But the tourists are seasonal, and the people who work downtown do all their shopping on their noon hour. They call it ‘‘the golden hour,” between 11:30 and 2. But if we’re going to make downtown really viable again we’ll have to have people down here all the time, not just at noon.”

 

Next door a half-dozen workmen are trying to squeeze a ten-foot refrigerator unit upstairs through what looks like a nine-foot stairway. It is a noisy passage, but Oxtoby ignores the racket. “I have a theory. If you want to build downtown as a shopping area you won’t do it by just going out and trying to find new stores to replace the Bootery or Edwards Jewelers or LaBontes—though you keep trying. What you also need to do is get people back downtown to live. They’ll provide the demand for the grocery stores and dry cleaners and what not. You get the people first. The merchants will follow them.

 

‘‘I’ve been told that a lot of people are watching me to see if we can make this thing work. If we can, it will be an example to all the other downtown property owners. We’ll show them it can be done, that you can get a return on these old buildings, and maybe we can show them how to do it. And,” Oxtoby emphasizes, ‘‘it’s going to work. I have absolutely no qualms at all about being able to attract people to live here. ’’

 

Oxtoby tours the building’s cluttered interiors, ducking under wires and stepping over pipe stacked on the floors, listening to complaints, answering questions, relaying messages. There is a hassle over who should pay for some weekend electrical work. A shipment of glass from PPG will be late; construction schedules will have to be shuffled a bit to work around the delay. The silver paint used on the wall art downstairs is too watery and runs when the painters use it; can that detail be dropped? The problems are constant. And expensive. It’s too early to tell exactly, but Oxtoby guesses that by the time all the bills are added up the tab for the project might go as high as $500,000.

 

She is one of two children of Herbert B. and Susan Bartholf. She and her brother Stephen, a Springfield insurance man, are the great-grandchildren of George Pasfield III, builder of the Pasfield building, a doctor who eschewed medicine in favor of banking and real estate, which made him, by one account, “the wealthiest man in the city.” He in turn was the son of George Pasfield II, one of the town’s pioneer merchants, an Englishman by birth and an American by adoption who came to Springfield in 1831 and was one of the men who signed at $50,000 note with which Springfield covered its part of the cost of building the capital and thus bought its future as state capital.

 

Like those of Pascal Enos, Elijah Iles and other of their generation, the Pasfield clan prospered. leaving behind them a Pasfield Park, a Pasfield Street, a Pasfield building, and a sizeable fortune. Carolyn Bartholf grew up in the imposing Pasfield house on—where else?—Pasfield Street just off Edwards. The old estate embraced four city blocks and was described somewhat inadequately in 1881 as “a cozy rural retreat.” The house is still standing, now split up into apartments, at the entrance to Jackson Parkway near the Springfield High School athletic field. “Jackson Parkway used to be our yard,” Oxtoby points out matter-of-factly. Her childhood years were “dull,” even if, living in a house with a yard big enough to hold a dozen houses, it was far from typical.

 

They left the big white house in 1939 or thereabouts, moving to a new house on Sunset Lane. Oxtoby was only a parttime Springfieldian by then, having gone off to boarding school (Shipley, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania) and, later, college at Mount Holyoke. Both institutions were strongly service-oriented women's schools. Oxtoby remembers that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were Shipley’s idea of good citizens. ‘ ‘They were saying to women then what women's liberation is saying now,” Oxtoby recalls. “1 guess it was there that I got the idea of independence, of being able to do something myself.”

In many ways Oxtoby has brought a decidedly big-city style to her small hometown. It is no accident. In addition to a junior year spent in Paris.

 

Oxtoby spent time in Boston, Philadelphia, other cities, places as different from Springfield—especially the Springfield of the 1950s—as a trout is from a catfish. Upon her return Springfield looked “rather drab” to her. “What I’m doing. I suppose, is trying to create my own environment. Everything I've done and will do downtown and elsewhere reflects what I like to see in a city. 1 really do like downtowns and I can see myself moving down here as soon as the kids are grown. 1 practice what I preach.”

 

An example of Oxtobian preachment-practicing is City Day School, the private college prep school she helped found in 1969. Back in 1967, she served as cochairperson with soon-to-be school board member Della Allen on two successive building bond issue referenda. The high schools in District 186 were then running on a split-shift schedule because of overcrowding. Both times the voters said "No.” 

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The results disappointed Oxtoby. Her unhappiness was shared by friend and neighbor Joan Gillespie, and together they hit upon a solution that was typical of Oxtoby: If the public schools aren’t good enough, start a school of your own that is. City Day opened its doors in the fall of 1969 in rented space in the education building of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral at Second and Lawrence. The school survived some first-year growing pains and now is housed in the seventy-five-year-old Logan-Hay mansion on South Grand.

She brings to the job of City Day president the same energy that she brings to the job of landlord. She is sitting in the City Day office, in a room that opens onto the terrace. “We were mainly concerned with starting a school that would have academic excellence in an atmosphere in which students and teachers . . .” She jumps up and runs into the foyer/reception area, where an interested parent is waiting for a tour of the school. Oxtoby gets her on her way, then returns. “Sorry about that. As I was saying, where students and teachers could establish a good rapport. I think we've done that."

 

Whatever weight there may be in the Pasfield tradition Oxtoby carries lightly. She is not sure which Pasfield built the building that bears his name, is not sure even how many George Pasfields there were. Her concerns are more of the present. In addition to her family. City Day School and the Pasfield/Maldaner renovation. Oxtoby is a member of the Public Information and Education Committee of the monitoring commission appointed by U.S. District Court Judge J. Waldo Ackerman ("Wally,” to Oxtoby, an old friend) to oversee the court-ordered integration of District 186 elementary schools this fall. In February Oxtoby was named to a three-year term on the board of directors of the Greater Springfield Chamber of Commerce, and she also occupies a seat on the Springfield-Sangamon County Regional Planning Commission as the representative of Leland Grove Mayor Pat Riley.

 

Her days thus are crammed with enough meetings to wear out a congressman. "She's usually about fifteen minutes late," says Al Escobar of Maldaner's with a smile, “but she always shows up eventually.” Still her talk is full of plans for more projects, such as some day converting the three pieces of property she owns with her husband on the south side of the Old Capitol mall into a new kind of space for shops and apartments.

 

She is, in short, a compulsive doer, the kind of person for whom the question, “Why?” is less seductive by far than the question, “How?” Oxtoby was invited by the editor of Preservation Illinois, a manual on historic preservation being prepared by the Illinois Department of Conservation, to put down in writing why she had taken on the Pasfield/Maldaner job. Her reply is typical: "Goaded by the stark realization that it is ultimately the property owners, as opposed to government agencies or do-gooder groups, who must do this work, I set out to try to reverse the stampede to suburbs and shopping centers . . . I am the guinea pig.”

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Whatever else that passage may reveal, it does not reveal any lack of confidence. Many people share Carolyn Oxtoby's concerns about Springfield, of course, but she belongs to the tiny minority who have the means to do something about it: What's more, she has the will to do something about it, and that puts her in what may be the tiniest minority of all. ●