More Thoughts on Sims Bowl

 This letter appeared earlier this month in the Journal. What do you think?



Sims Demolition Could Be Another Mistake

In 1985, an ambitious development called River Woods Park was proposed for the same block of Ellinwood Sims occupies. It would have featured a four-winged, nine-story, 436-unit apartment building with an underground parking lot, a health club, small office building, and green space. Ellinwood Street would have been eliminated. Then checks started bouncing in 1986. The proposal languished for another year because the developer had options or owned the parcels on the block. The city considered taking over these properties, but decided they could not afford the risk.

Then The Prime Group bought the old Riverwoods Lumber property at the corner in 1988; four other developers had been looking at the block. They proposed an 11-story senior citizens home and a 22-story apartment building on the site of Sims and other businesses, with 20% set aside for low-income subsidized apartments and the rest luxury apartments. Ultimately the 22-story building was dropped, and the senior proposal became the Heritage, finally opening in 1993.

You might remember yet another high-rise proposal from 2005 that would have covered the entire block. The same year, there were vague rumblings of an "entertainment" proposal. Neither came to pass.

This isn't the first time the city has taken the "demolish first, ask questions later" approach. The block between Pearson and Miner actually was cleared in 1986-1987 in hopes of attracting new development. Officials believed this would "serve as a catalyst to redevelop the area and bring back the intense interest despite more than 10 years of redevelopment talk." Three or four plans came and went until 1999, when Library Plaza was finally developed - building single-story strip malls on the sites of stores that had apartments above. A net loss, with 12 years of lost property and sales taxes, plus the cost of demolition and construction, plus the loss of attractive historic buildings. The ten years of vacant lots between Lee and Pearson didn't attract developers and only further disconnected downtown, since nobody likes walking through a vacant lot. Chicago did the same thing with Block 37 across from Marshall Field's, cleared in 1989 and finally opening as a lackluster shopping center this year. 

Let's look at some other examples of this strategy. Two doors down from Sims is a small, barely-used or visible pocket park; the building there was demolished all the way back in 1954 as part of the large city parking lot that was once behind it. (The city must think the citizens miss that parking lot more than we'll miss a bowling alley!) The park that was between the Sugar Bowl and Brown's was cleared for a walkway between two parking garages that were never built; this vacant land created an opportunity to stick a driveway to Metropolitan Square right in the middle of our most important business street. Old Maine Township High School/Thacker Junior High, replaced with the lackluster Central Park that could have occupied the footprints of any of the surrounding condominium buildings. The 1874 North School, torn down to make way for a parking lot. And so forth. I'm hard-pressed to think of an instance of Des Plaines-led demolition without a redevelopment plan that has produced anything better than a small park or parking lot.

Unless they are a threat to public safety, vacant buildings are better than vacant lots, because vacant buildings have reuse options and vacant lots - especially city-owned ones - are tax drains.

City officials would be well-advised to learn from these past mistakes. They say they're talking to three developers now. How many of them are serious? How many will stick around for two years? What will the climate be like in two years? The plan is for retail and condos, but we have plenty of those to go around. There are many retail vacancies in Metropolitan Square, and there are storefronts in Library Plaza that have still never been occupied. What would draw shoppers to that side of downtown, without an entertainment anchor like a bowling alley? There are condo buildings that aren't complete. There are plenty of office vacancies, too. So why are we so confident a big development is around the corner? "If you tear it down, they will come?" Demand for quality new development will not come until we have fully utilized the resources we already have, by establishing downtown Des Plaines as a worthwhile destination for distinctive shopping, dining, entertainment, and living.

This assumption of redevelopment has been a big factor in depressing downtown revitalization. Why invest in maintaining a building or running a quality business when redevelopment might be imminent? Sims had been expecting a buyout for years.


TIF money is designated to remove blighted conditions from downtown. But now we propose to use it to send a functional building to a landfill and create a vacant lot. In the meantime, it will be a mid-block parking lot - something specifically discouraged in the 2007 parking study, in a block that same study showed had no demand for parking. We will be creating blight and taking properties off the tax rolls.

Let's not make the same mistakes yet again. Instead of buying and demolishing the block, secure options, or let the developer do it. There is no good reason to demolish anything until new development is financed and shovel-ready. In the meantime, if the proposals fall through, existing businesses can continue to be productive. Let the park district run the bowling alley, or let someone else run it on short-term leases, so it is productive. Would it cost more to fix the roof than to demolish the building? Rosemont and Melrose Park are building new bowling alleys - and you can't build the retro character Sims has.

It's time to stop the unsuccessful "strategy" for downtown that we've pursued for the last 40 years. We have aggressively removed much of our history and character. Before losing the things that can give our city a unique identity, before we go past that tipping point towards Anytown, USA, we need to step back and create a real plan for downtown - to use our resources efficiently to achieve a reasonable goal. We need to identify and protect many of the dwindling historic places that are left so that they can help us have a more productive future.  Most of all, we need a vision of what we want downtown as a whole to be, instead of continuing its death by a thousand cuts. Creating a strong downtown isn't as easy as making a parking lot and crossing your fingers. Before we do something else we might come to regret, step back and think about how it factors into a comprehensive master plan in revitalizing downtown Des Plaines. It's too important to leave to chance or developers.

Brian Wolf