How to Redevelop the OT Johnson Lot
By thinking small we can do something big
The OT Johnson lot downtown has been a fascination of mine since it became an empty lot. This interest may seem quite evident since I’ve now used it as the thumbnail photo for my newsletter 3 times in the relatively short time that I’ve been publishing. It’s really something, a big empty 127 foot long hole in our downtown with seemingly nothing to fill it. It’s sat empty for nearly 16 years since the building burned down in 2006, leaving a considerable gap in our downtown. That building had quite the character and it’s still hard to see it gone. We have a hole in our town, so how do we go about filling it?
What was OT Johnson’s?
OT Johnsons was a department store that was homegrown in the Galesburg area. The store first opened under the Johnson name in 1864. It quickly grew in popularity and the original storefronts were torn down with a giant grand building replacing it.
Before:
After:
The store carried just about everything you could want to buy. There are loads of pictures showing how big of a space it once was with the large selection it carried. If you wanted something nice you went to OT Johnson’s.
It was truly a gem of Galesburg, both as a local success story but as a fixture on Main Street. When I see pictures of the building I can’t help but think that it was the pinnacle of architecture in Downtown Galesburg, at least for buildings that have existed in my lifetime. It closed in the early 90s, and caught fire in 2006. That store was such a fixture in town for so much of our town’s history, and now it’s an empty field with seemingly nothing to come replace it.
What do we do?
So what DO we do? I’ve talked about the need for downtown renewal, creating an environment for small businesses, and the need for small bets in this newsletter already and I think it’s time to bring them all together into one idea.
But I guess first would be a good explanation of how the OT Johnson building was built in the first place. Downtown Galesburg was a bustling place, as I have shown before in this clip from 1912. Downtown was hopping, it’s where people came to shop, do businesses, have a good time, and be seen.Â
OT Johnsons did not start out as a big corporation. It did not come into town fully formed as a massive retailer like Walmart or Target does. No, it started small. OT originally bought the store from his old boss, ran it for some years, and then eventually expanded, building one of the best buildings in town.
We should use the method of how that patch of dirt was originally developed as an insight into how we develop it again. The fact of the matter is that there isn’t anyone out there who is going to come in to build a new OT Johnson-style building out of the blue. There just isn’t enough demand for that plot of land to put a big building on it. We have to work on increasing the demand for downtown, that’s the whole project in a nutshell.
Just like OT Johnson we have to start small, extremely small, and build our way back up. One town that has figured out the next smallest possible step in correcting this problem is Muskegon Michigan. Muskegon is a town just a little bigger than us, around 37,000 people. Like many towns in the US they built a mall in the 70s which ended up taking a toll on downtown. But while the mall we built on the edge of town here in Galesburg severely hurt our downtown, Muskegon really amped up the damage by tearing down their downtown to build the mall. So once a new developer came to build a mall on the outskirts of town, the downtown mall died and eventually had to be torn down.Â
In order to fill some of those gaps in their downtown real estate they started a little market built with sheds along one of the properties along their main drag. They call it the Western Market.
The idea of the project was simple: fill the empty space with something that creates demand for the area at the lowest development level. So they got builder to build some sheds, maybe 100-200 square feet in size, and lined them up along the street. They rented those shops out to small local start up businesses looking for a place to do business but would normally be too small for most other retail locations. The rent ranges between $1200-2000 for the season(May to December), with the stipulation that every store has to be open during some set hours. These hours normally being Thursday and Friday nights along with Saturday all day. Other areas call these popup shops.
We can use this same idea to restart the development on the OT Johnson lot and all of downtown. We can start out by lining Main Street with some little shops on the OT lot. It won’t be in true character with the rest of the buildings but we need to get the area going again. It doesn’t have to be a massive expenditure, Muskegon started their project with a grant for about $50,000(I believe that’s the number but I couldn’t find it again, they funded it with grants from local organizations).Â
We can start off with just enough sheds to line the sidewalk which would be around 10 or so. The risk is so low on this project. The spaces are small so there’s almost a guarantee that they will all be filled, Muskegon has had a waiting list of 25+ for their little shops. There are lots of budding entrepreneurs in town who need a decent location at an affordable price to sell their wares, so we should provide some.
Also if someone comes along and wants to develop the land, then the sheds could be moved to another plot of land or even just sold off. We have plenty of other spaces that need a boost and this could potentially work at. And again if this doesn’t work out we could just sell the sheds. There isn’t a ton of downside.
More than just some sheds
In Muskegon they have experienced great success with the shops. It gives a platform for the first baby steps of a business, increases foot traffic to the surrounding area, and sometimes businesses graduate out of the chalets and become full time full fledged businesses. While the developer hasn’t come to develop the property yet, I think there can be another step that we can take.
Let’s say that we start up the downtown market, and it’s a big success. Year by year we add more sheds. Instead of just along the sidewalk we line them along the sidewalk and an aisle down the middle of the lot. If we were able to fill that all up it would be quite promising, but probably not enough to attract a big developer. We could then choose to enable small development. We could sell off little parcels along the sidewalk and along the center aisle. Enable very small developers wanting to build whatever small business they want in the area, as long as they build. This way we can continue to enable super small businesses, redevelop the lot, and also create a unique pedestrian only street without having to shut down an existing street.
This project could be a huge boon for Downtown Galesburg and fill in an empty spot we’ve had for so long. It could also flop, but if it does we didn’t sink too much money into it and it could be recovered for the most part. The next step to redeveloping our downtown is enabling the next smallest possible steps that create demand for the area, because no big developer is coming to save us without big demand for the area. We can rebuild our downtown, and if we start small enough we can do something pretty big.