Reinventing State Street for Chicago’s new economy

A quarter century after the tearing up of the abominable State Street Mall, Chicago’s most iconic thoroughfare might be in line for another big overhaul.

It’s about time.

State Street has bounced back nicely since those ill-conceived mall days of the 1980s, but the street is overdue for a fresh plan for the fast-evolving economy of the next 25 years.

The Chicago Loop Alliance announced last week that it is taking a new look at State Street this year. To be called the State Street Corridor Plan, the document is expected to bring every aspect of the thoroughfare under discussion, including retail and commercial activity, public spaces and infrastructure, traffic lanes for bikes and buses, the CTA’s Red Line station entrances and even those faux-1920s street lamps.

“[E]verything about the Loop is changing rapidly — residential demographics, commercial real estate, mobility, etc.,” Chicago Loop Alliance Director of Planning Kalindi Parikh said in a statement. “Our corridor plan will guide us in keeping the street competitive in a changing economic landscape, and in keeping it a ‘great street’ for all Chicagoans.”

The Loop Alliance has been State Street’s city-approved caretakers and planners since 1929.

Getting it right

State Street hasn’t undergone a comprehensive refreshing since a 1995 plan that thankfully put an end to the pedestrian mall. So many major commercial and cultural changes have transpired in Chicago since then, again calling into question the street’s identity and purpose.

We have seen the growth and dominance of internet shopping. We have seen massive commercial and residential redevelopment in the West Loop, River North and River West. Large corporate employers are moving back into Chicago’s expanded central business area.

And there’s Millennium Park, come to think of it, two short blocks to the east.

How does State Street connect to any of this? How should it?

State Street hasn’t been the Midwest’s dominant shopping district for decades, but that it has managed to recover from a nearly down-and-out retail strip in the 1970s and 1980s to a vital main street again today is a testament to the strength of the 1995 plan.

The challenge is to get the new plan right, knowing how badly the city once got it wrong.

The State Street ‘Maul’

Suburban shopping malls, in their air-conditioned, popcorn-scented, multiplexed movie’d perfection, were taking a big bite out of traditional city retail streets across the country by 1970.

State Street contended with this and the growing might of Michigan Avenue — the Magnificent Mile — and held up pretty well for a time.

The State Street mile from Wacker Drive south to what is now Ida B. Wells Drive boasted seven major flagship department stores, including Carson Pirie Scott, Wieboldt’s, Sears, Marshall Field, Goldblatt’s and Montgomery Ward. Squeezed among those anchor stores were a host of specialty shops. Men shopped for suits behind the curved, glass block window facade of the Benson-Rixon clothing store at State and Quincy Court. You could buy fur coats from Evans, at 36 S. State.

But each year brought greater fear that State Street would be outclassed and out-earned by the suburban malls and Michigan Avenue. Buildings looked tired. Sidewalks were cracked. The street felt ragged and disorderly.

What to do? City Hall’s solution was to turn State Street into an outdoor pedestrian mall, a taste of the burbs that should have stayed in the burbs.

There were 50-foot-wide sidewalks, trees, public art and pushcart vendors. There were Space Age bubble-topped bus shelters. The L station entrance at State and Lake was modernized with a metal and plexiglass re-cladding straight out of a late 1970s sci-fi movie. Cars and bikes were banned.

‘An absolute mistake’

The $24 million mall opened in 1979 to great, brief acclaim, but even greater unintended consequences. The wide sidewalks were uninviting and desolate in the evening. The ban on private automobiles made it a chore to drop off and pick up shoppers.

The mall was a bust.

Goldblatt’s closed in 1981. Montgomery Ward’s flagship store shuttered in 1984. Sears closed in 1986. Wieboldt’s went dark in 1987.

“We walked into it with our eyes wide open, and it was a mistake, an absolute mistake,” the late G. Brent Minor said of the State Street Mall in a 1997 San Francisco Chronicle interview. The Chicago bank executive had advocated for the mall as a member of the Greater State Street Council — which later became the current day Loop Alliance.

“By 1981,” he said, “we knew it had failed.”

State Street: What should happen next?

Philip Enquist, retired urban planning partner at Chicago architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill, was part of the team that re-designed State Street in the 1990s, tasked with ripping out the mall and replacing it with the current streetscape.

“We saw the street at its low point: No activity, no pedestrian volumes, numerous vacant buildings,” he said. “We got excited because Old Navy built a building on the street.”

And now?

“It’s a vital, active, highly pedestrianized street,” he said.

Next month, the Chicago Loop Alliance will officially kick off its work on the State Street Corridor Plan at the group’s annual meeting at the Palmer House Hilton. Architect Ernest C. Wong, founder and principal of Site Design Group, will lead the effort.

Our own view is that State Street’s next-generation upgrade need not require a complete physical change, as was necessary in 1997, but there’s an opportunity for serious creative rethinking.

We’ll have more to say about that on Monday.

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