Eugene Sunshine, Northwestern’s vice president for business and finance, said Tuesday that the university doesn’t immediately plan to take action against the city after the Evanston City Council approved the Northeast Evanston Historic District on Monday.
“We want to let the thing settle down for awhile,” Sunshine said. “The proper thing to do right now is nothing at all.”
NU administrators are concerned that the district will restrict the university from expanding west of Sheridan Road or from renovating the 50 university buildings within the boundaries. As a result, administrators and some aldermen have said they believe the district was not created in the name of preservation but as a means to limit the university.
City Council voted 6-3 Monday night to approve a historic district that runs south from the alley between Colfax and Lincoln streets to Emerson Street. The district’s eastern boundary is Sheridan Road, and its western boundary is Sherman or Ridge avenues.
Aldermen voted Monday to move the northern boundary of the district seven blocks south of the one originally proposed by the Northeast Evanston Historic District Association. The district now contains only about half of the 960 structures originally included a figure that has frustrated the NHEDA board and many of the city’s preservation supporters.
The district’s opponents most of whom have been excluded because of the boundary change feel as if they’ve won the battle against preservation. Their homes will no longer be subject to the scrutiny of the city’s Preservation Commission, the governing body that must issue a certificate of appropriateness before structures within the district can be renovated.
But the district’s consequences for NU the other opponent have not changed. All of NU’s properties included in the original proposal remain in the district.
“The original district has been completely changed,” Sunshine said. “What’s left is NU property and not much else. The preservation aspect of the whole thing is highly questionable.”
Sunshine said NU is one of the community’s largest supporters of preservation, when it is applied appropriately. He cited the preservation of Harris and University halls as two examples of historic buildings that the university has maintained. NU further supports preservation in the city by allowing the Evanston Historical Society to use NU’s Dawes House for free, he added.
“Honest-to-goodness historic preservation has never been a controversial issue for us,” Sunshine said. “It’s using it in ways that tie up our land that presents a problem.”
At Monday night’s meeting, Ald. Arthur Newman (1st) mentioned an informal agreement made between NU and the city in the 1960s. Newman said the university agreed not to build west of Sheridan Road in exchange for the council’s approval of the Lakefill project. NU has not kept its part of this bargain, and the historic district was created in part as a means to control development, Newman said.
But Sunshine has said NU has not violated the zoning laws in the area west of Sheridan Road and has no plans for development in that area.
“Some people have this sense that Northwestern has a manifest destiny to expand,” Sunshine said. “But we’re talking about utilization of land we already own and are insistent upon owning.”
Although the historic district could potentially restrict NU’s renovations on buildings such as department offices and the Foster-Walker Complex, it can’t limit the university’s involvement in the Evanston community, Sunshine said.
“We’re going to continue to move forward in our involvement with the city no matter what this historic district does,” he said. “City Council is an important piece, but it is only one piece of what the city of Evanston is.”