The Corn Latitudes

As I write this in 2026 the fate of Springfield’s much debated “Y” block downtown seems decided. Grown over with something that approximates grassy turf, the space is now home to popular warm-weather music concerts. That is probably the least of the several uses proposed for that land but it’s being used for something, I guess.

For years, “green space” in downtown Springfield meant a weedy parking lot. These days greenery of a handsomer sort abounds, in curbside flower beds, in planter boxes and urns, in hanging baskets and window boxes and sidewalk planting wells. By the most accommodating definition, green space is merely any public space that has green things in it. Certain downtown stretches of Sixth Street and Capitol Avenue could thus be considered green spaces. So is the planted nook that brightens North Fifth between Washington and Jefferson streets. So is the statehouse lawn.

Ask people what they think of as green space, however, and most will say “a park.” The decision to redevelop the YWCA block downtown with a mixed-use complex that incorporates green space has excited extravagant hopes among observers of this mind. They foresee space to play with children or walk dogs (or, more commonly, walk the children and play with dogs). I’m not convinced that even a small park of the conventional sort is feasible for a downtown the size of Springfield’s. Unless they are very diligently managed, public parks are problematic places in settings where the public does not agree on how to use them. That’s why sensible private developers put their parks behind locked gates, as was done in the case of the landscaped courtyard at Near North Village.

Happily, green spaces provide other public goods besides recreation. Some are ornamental, as are the few landscaped grounds of corporate and public buildings and the Lincoln home area and the Old State Capitol. (Being pleasant to look at enhances a human’s prospects on the open market; it enhances a property’s prospects too.) Many studies confirm the healing effects of greenery on the ill, which is why the cut flowers in hospital patient rooms have evolved into lush gardens such as the $1 million rooftop garden for families of kids in critical care at Children’s Hospital of Illinois in Peoria. Green spaces act as balm to soothe nerves rubbed raw by the jangle of the city, although what downtown Springfield needs is stimulation, which green spaces can provide too.

Green spaces do not merely offer relief from the sight of concrete and steel structures, they can replace them as means to control stormwater runoff. If nature does not have a soul, it seems at times to possess a sense of humor, given the many opportunities it gives humans to make fools of themselves. One such was the summer downpour of August 28, which left every Springfield Fire Department crew on duty for one shift rescuing motorists stranded after trying to drive through flooded underpasses and intersections. A reformer would have better chances of getting a bill through the General Assembly.

We have waded into Springfield’s stormwater problem in previous columns, such as my “Going against the flow,” from August 11, 2011. That piece described non-concrete or “soft” measures to cope with flooding rains to augment the existing sewer pipes and pumps. Divert stormwater runoff onto water-collecting swales, for example, and the tangle of plants slows the movement of water into overloaded sewer pipes.

The Y block would seem to be a particularly promising site for such an approach. A study of the potential of the proposed Jackson Street Trail that was prepared for the Greater Springfield Chamber of Commerce by the Springfield landscape architects and land planning firm Massie Massie & Associates suggested converting that block of Jackson to a greenway. The existing brick surface would be replaced with permeable pavement atop subsurface retention cisterns to detain excess storm water, which is prudent and doable.

Happily for those of us who are columnists, and whose ideas thus are not expected to actually have any effect whatsoever in the real world, we can dare to go beyond the merely doable. The block is above the course of the old Town Branch of Spring Creek, which wound its way through that part of the future downtown. (I described the Town Branch in “Touring Springfield 150 years Ago.”) The stream was piped up and converted to a sewer decades ago but the sloping valley walls it carved into the landscape remain substantially intact.

Water that falls on the upland bits of that part of downtown thus tries to join that ghost stream to this day. That’s why Sixth and Edwards floods after a heavy rain, providing temporary pools in which local drivers can splash and play. That also may explain a curious thing about the Y block. The State of Illinois planted lines of trees and shrubs atop the berm that surrounded its new parking lot there. On three sides of the block, what was meant as a landscape screen is straggly and gap-toothed, where the plants survive at all. On the southwest corner of the block the plants are lush, in spite of the landlord’s neglect; I suspect it’s because plants there drink in great draughts of rainwater that pour there from the rest of the block.  

A little astute engineering could turn the tendency of water to flood in that part of downtown into a virtue. The stretch of Jackson Street between Fifth and Fourth is a block of minimal importance in terms of traffic or parking. Why not tear out the bricks, smash up the curbs, dig up the verges, and replace it all with a marsh that would collect and hold stormwater diverted from the Y block? The flow would never be regular enough to create even a simulacrum of a creek, but it would irrigate plantings adapted to such a setting. The gardens of the Executive Mansion that abut it to the south must remain fenced, but the new wetland could be knitted visually with the plantings on the mansion ground to create a green interlude extending the better part of a city block.

Building wetlands of this sort is an evolved art. It was a new idea twenty years ago—I know, because I wrote about it then—which means it is ripe enough for Springfield to swallow by now. Add a winding walking path down the middle of the old right of way, and you have a real estate amenity and infrastructure enhancement that also improves the looks of the joint. Can’t be bad. ●