Downtown Galesburg Redevelopment Strategy

We have to think smart about our next steps

(as a warning to email receivers this post had too many pictures for them all to fit in the email, some will be missing. If you want to see them all, which I recommend, please go inlandnobody.substack.com to read this post)

Dream Big, Think Small.

This has come to be my guiding philosophy on how to revitalize Galesburg. The meaning of it being that we should have big goals, lofty ideals, huge dreams of what we want for this town, but then look at what small steps are available to us to get there. That doesn’t mean we can’t do big things, but we need to build to it. Our city has a history of using its resources to try big projects that end up not working out.

So what’s the dream? The dream is a Galesburg that is growing in wealth, people are moving in, there are things happening, and all the people in town are happy and proud to live here. Part of that dream is a vibrant, active downtown that’s a happening place. So that’s the dream, now what would the next step be if I had the full resources to think big?

If I were to “think big” instead of small, I’d choose to do a massive streetscape project along the whole of Mainstreet. Through the downtown strip we’d bring it down to two lanes, have bump outs reducing the space, plant street trees, have raised intersections and plenty of traffic calming so that people only drive about 15 mph and we don’t need all the traffic lights. I’d reconfigure the town square. Outside of downtown it should be two lanes with curbs that have big trees providing a canopy along the street and bike lanes in between the sidewalk and the trees. It would be a grand street that would be the envy of every town, and would have some big effects on the local economic situation.

And why not go with this as the next project? Why not issue a bond to get the money to make this happen? First off, it would cost millions and millions of dollars, money we don’t have readily available. If it turns out I’m wrong then that’s a lot of money spent on a lot of stuff that didn’t do anything, a repeat of our past mistakes. We would also have a lengthy legal battle with the Illinois DOT because a good part of Main Street is US Highway 150. While the state has jurisdiction over the center two lanes and we control everything else, we’d still have to seek approval so who knows how long that would take. We could end up with this project not getting done for 20 years, spending a ton of money, and it’s still a flop. Let’s not do that, let’s start smaller.

Downtown as it stands

I think if we’re going to do the work to try to revitalize downtown, we need to be strategic about it. We can end up spending a lot of money on projects to improve something that ends up not generating any additional growth. Like take a look at this satellite view of Downtown Galesburg:

It’s quite a large area to work with. There is a nearly infinite number of projects we could do in this space. So where are the zones where things are already going well? I’m looking for areas that have a high number of their buildings filled, do a decent amount of business, and have some foot traffic. I believe there are two areas that fill those criteria which I have highlighted below:

With my understanding of downtown, which isn’t perfect and is purely based on my experience, the main clusters of activity are:

1. Cherry St between Main and Simmons, including over to Iron Spike

2. Seminary St stretching from Innkeepers to the North to Sprinkle and Spoon to the South

With the red circle being the train station, these are the areas that I believe are separate walkable zones. Not to say nobody walks anywhere else downtown, but if you are going to either of these areas there is a good chance you are going to walk past some other businesses that you may also go to on your trip. 

And what do these areas have in common? They are a block long, the shops are filled, they are off Mainstreet so the traffic is a little calmer, and the blocks are filled with buildings on both sides. The last part is crucial, this is what makes urban areas places that people want to be. Some call it the “Wall of Buildings”, which creates the feeling of an enclosed space and provides a sense of place. So many other areas in downtown have big empty open lots that ruin the feeling.

Mainstreet does have one block between Cherry and Kellogg that is still filled with buildings, so why isn’t it on the list? I believe one thing that is hampering all of Mainstreet is that the street has too many lanes with drivers driving too fast. Have you ever walked up and down Main Street? It’s loud for starters. It has four 12 foot wide lanes that are not fun to cross on foot either. Since the width of those lanes are highway width, people feel safe to drive fast. When you combine multiple wide lanes with higher speeds, it feels like a casm that is tough to cross and loud as hell. Sometimes it’s so loud that you can’t have a conversation without really having to speak up. It’s not really a place for people.

And this is an important element to remember: cities are human habitats. People living in cities are as natural as bees living in hives, it’s how we live. But we as humans don’t go to places where we don’t feel safe. We subconsciously don’t feel as safe on Mainstreet as we do on those blocks of Cherry and Seminary. On those blocks there are people about and a line of parked cars that provide protection. If you park on one side of the street you feel perfectly fine crossing through the middle to get to the other side. These are better places for humans to do things, and if anything that’s what a downtown is for, is people doing things.

The Idea

So what do we do with this info? I think our first project is to really lean in on making the stretch of Seminary street from the train station to Main Street a really walkable area, an area for people. After we complete this first step we can move on to making the Cherry Street blocks more walkable, and then after try and connect the two areas. 

I’m also not going to propose that we take away the cars. While it would be lovely to have a nice pedestrian plaza, those only work if there is extremely high demand for an area and currently not even the block of Seminary Street has high enough demand. So what we need to do is make the street a place for people where we also allow cars, instead of its current configuration of a place for cars where we also allow people.

The main goal of all these changes I will propose is to decrease vehicle speeds and increase walkability. Decreased vehicle speeds add to a feeling of safety which helps encourage walking. Let’s put it this way, how safe would you feel walking around a car going only 15 mph vs a car going 30 mph? I’d hope the answer is the 15 mph car. In creating a habitat for humans we have to make sure humans feel safe being there.

The Changes

Here is the current zone I’m proposing we change:

The main areas are Seminary St starting at the train station and ending at Main St, ¾ of the block of Mulberry St, and all of the intersections connecting to Seminary St within the section.

Let’s start off from the train station and move North. From the train station we should want to provide the best possible view. While I don’t know exactly how many people come and visit Galesburg by train, it’s something unique we have. In a dream world we would have train loads of people coming down from Chicago every weekend to come and visit our downtown as a nice weekend trip. But if we’re going to do that we need to make sure that they feel like they’re in a real place as soon as they get to the edge of the train station lot. Here’s what that looked like a few days after we got some snow:

As you can see the snow wasn’t shoveled on the sidewalk outside the train station. I don’t have a picture of it but the snow up the block going towards the Enterprise lot wasn’t cleared either. In fact the snow from the Enterprise lot was piled up on the sidewalk making me have to walk onto the street to get around it.

But besides the sidewalk, this is plausibly one of the first places someone could be on their initial trip to Galesburg. And it’s a good start, right across the street is Cornucopia, one of Galesburg’s star local businesses. But we can see there is no crosswalk to get across the 40 ft wide street with three traffic lanes and a parking lane. Nothing about this says this is a spot for you to safely cross the street. Not only that but cars can suddenly appear from the underpass just south of this location, again making it less walkable.

Here’s the satellite view of the interesting in question:

Intro to Traffic Calming

There are three general ideas that can make this intersection, and most of our intersections downtown, more walkable. 

First is getting rid of turn lanes. Turn lanes can be quite convenient in areas with high traffic volumes and high speeds. They give a place for turning vehicles to wait for a break in traffic, which allows the non-turning vehicles to keep moving at speed. On high speed roads and roads with a lot of traffic it helps increase driver safety, keeps speeds up, and allows for a higher volume of vehicles to travel through the area.

That’s a great design feature for roads with high speeds and high traffic volume where the goal is to get the highest number of vehicles through at the highest speed. But that’s the opposite of what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to lower the speed of drivers on this stretch of road, the hope being that we can trade off vehicle speeds so that we can create more demand for the area by making it more welcoming to people outside of cars. We want to make design choices that slow down cars instead of helping them go as fast as possible.

We also don’t have high traffic in the area, here are the daily traffic numbers according to IDOT:

A standard 2-lane road with no turn lanes can handle 10,000 vehicles per day. Above we see the stretch with the highest daily rate only sees an average of 5200 vehicles per day, well below the threshold for “needing” turn lanes. So we don’t need any of the turn lanes in this district, I say get rid of them.

The next step is to narrow the travel lanes. Currently the travel lanes on this stretch of road are around 11.5-12ft. That may not sound like much, but that’s the same width as a highway lane. It’s even actually a little wider than the lanes of US 34 north of town. Wide lanes provide safety when traveling at high speeds, but they also signal to the driver that it’s okay to travel at high speeds. High speeds in an urban context kills people, so we want to send the signal that this isn’t a place for speed. I propose we should have lanes of 9-10ft. Still plenty of room for vehicles; a semi truck is still only 8.5 ft wide and a Ford Fusion is 6.2 feet wide. We can have enough room while also communicating to the driver that it’s a tighter space and they need to drive slower.

Third, we need to shorten the distance to cross the street at crosswalks. This can be achieved with bump outs. They have these on Mainstreet where at the end of the block after the parking stops the curb comes out into the street a bit. This helps create a narrower space for cars like discussed earlier, but also has the added benefit of creating a shorter crossing area for pedestrians. We would only really need the distance between the bump outs to be 18-20ft wide, using the lane widths from earlier. These would end up doing two jobs: slowing traffic and shortening crossing distance.

So what would this look like? I have included a very very very crude drawing of what it could look like:

So on Tompkins Street (the east-west road) we would eliminate the right turn lane, add in a little curb, and could maybe even add a street parking space towards the left edge of the image. But the bump outs are the real star creating narrower spaces causing the cars to slow down while also making it more friendly for pedestrians. This would be an adequate intersection to first encounter Galesburg.

Now let’s look at the next block of Seminary going north from this intersection:

So this block will have all the changes from before and similar changes at the next intersection. If we take out the center turn lane then there will be room for additional on street parking on the east(right) side. It would look something like this:

Again, I said these drawings are crude. But that entire area in brown could be additional on-street parking, maybe 4-5 spots. This also has the benefit of increasing walkability by providing a barrier between driving vehicles and pedestrians on the sidewalk, making the east sidewalk more walkable by just allowing for more parking. 

Next is the Seminary and Mulberry intersection:

Again we’ll get rid of the right turn lane and add bumpouts, but this time with an interesting twist because of the west(left)side bump out being in an intersection. We can’t really put more parking there so I think it should just be one big bump out, as seen here:

That large bump out could serve as a little plaza. Add a couple shade trees, some reinforced bollards to protect against out of control vehicles, add in some benches and maybe some tables, and you have yourself a nice little outdoor plaza. And this space isn’t being used currently, you can’t really drive or walk there, so we’ll be able to reclaim some space. 

We’ll also be able to add in even more on street parking, actually let’s look at the whole block:

All of those brown markings could be turned into parking, potentially providing 7-10 new spots. I’ve also added a crosswalk across from the old Ferris Moving building. This lines up with the path from the train station parking lot so it made sense. Maybe that building could finally be converted into that boutique hotel we heard about years ago. The crosswalk would also calm traffic with bumpouts, and provide a place for people to cross between Discovery Depot and the Railroad Museum next to the train station.

Next we go back to Seminary to explore the block between Mulberry and Simmons:

Again the center turn lane can go and can add parking on the east side. We should also only allow 1 entrance into the city parking lot there. Anyone who’s tried to turn into that northern entrance knows it just feels wrong with the traffic, so we should get rid of it and only have one entrance from Seminary to the parking lot.

Again, removing the center lane, moving the travel lane over, adding parking and adding bump outs does wonders to make the area feel more pedestrian friendly.

And now here’s the intersection of Seminary and Simmons:

Again we’ll remove right turn lanes, use that space for parking, add bumpouts, and can have another mini plaza with trees, bollards, benches and such:

And in the final section of the street project we have Seminary street from Simmons to Main Street. This section doesn’t need much. But we’ll still add in the bump outs and remove right turn lanes to be turned into parking:

This will add maybe 1-2 spots in front of Calico Cat and 3-5 spots in front of Lindstrom’s.

Now I will say, to do this whole project, curbs and all would be a pretty big undertaking just off the bat. I’m pretty confident that this would help provide vitalization energy to the area, provide a nice continuous pedestrian area for people coming from the train station, and create more parking in the area. But I could also still be wrong. So instead of spending all the money to find out it is a dud we could do a trial run. We could do all of these changes just using paint on the road and using some hard rubber lane dividers for the bumpouts. That way we don’t create lasting change without trying it out first. If it ends up not working out then great then we can go back, but I suspect we won’t want to. 

But the street isn’t the only change we can bring to build on the walkability.

The Popup Market

In my previous article, How we Redevelop the OT Johnson Lot, I proposed that we set up a popup market similar to the one in Muskegon MI in the spot of the former local department store. I think that idea still has merit, but I have now thought about it more and think a better location for it would be on this vacant lot on the corner of Seminary and Mulberry:

The city is currently planning to turn it into an extension of the parking lot. But we should try to do something more productive with the land. Do something that creates more demand for the area, and popup shops could contribute a lot. It’s right near where all the Seminary Street shops are, and the farmer’s market is just a block away. This would be THE SPOT in the region to go spend a Saturday morning/afternoon. It will help provide more foot traffic to all the shops nearby, and with the possible new pedestrian infrastructure it could create a really nice area to explore.

Here’s a possible orientation for the popup shops, but it could really be anything as long as some of the shops are up against the street:

Seminary Street - A Place For People

With the changes described above I think Seminary Street could be a top notch zone for pedestrians, all without taking away car traffic and actually increasing parking. We just need to slow the cars down, shorten crossing distances, and get rid of the turn lanes. We can also bring our local entrepreneurs out and create even more demand for the area.

The key to the whole game is building on our successes. This section of Seminary St is probably the most alive block or two we have in town. If we can build on that success then that can radiate outward and help lift up the rest of downtown. This is the logical place to start to get things really going. I would visit that Seminary Street more often, and it would show we are serious about creating places that people want to be.

The Big Dream is a thriving Galesburg, the next small step is improving Seminary Street.