Three years ago Ron Kysiak dreamed of turning Evanston into a “wired city” where residents could chat, shop and meet neighbors on the Internet. But Kysiak’s vision has faded against the backdrop of a sputtering economy.

Kysiak co-founded e-Tropolis Evanston, a non-profit endeavor that worked with Northwestern and other institutions to provide affordable broadband Internet access to Evanston offices, businesses and residences. E-Tropolis was a joint venture with The Performance Group — a for-profit division of a Chicago architectural firm — which was responsible for finding investors and promoting the project.

“(E-Tropolis Evanston) promises to be a city of the future,” Kysiak said in a 1999 press release.

But tumbling telecommunications stocks and a lack of funding forced Kysiak to shut down the venture in September 2002.

“Right now, it is sort of in stasis because there isn’t any funding out there for this type of project,” said Kysiak, who is also the executive director of Evanston Inventure, a non-profit Evanston economic development corporation that initiated the e-Tropolis project. “We put the thing under wraps until the economy comes around a little bit.”

To provide affordable Internet connections, e-Tropolis sought cheap Internet packages from providers and sold the discounted connections to Evanston residents and businesses. Many of these providers backed out of their contracts with e-Tropolis because of financial problems.

“The implosion of the telecom industry just made it impossible to go forward,” said Patricia Widmayer, a former NU employee who worked with Kysiak to design e-Tropolis. “It seemed like every time we got to the ‘Let’s make a deal’ phase, they filed for bankruptcy.”

Widmayer’s position, special assistant to the vice president for information technology, has since been eliminated.

Other collaborators on the project included Northwestern/Evanston Research Park, the Evanston Public Library and the Evanston Chamber of Commerce.

Kysiak had hoped to build community development without using public funding. He planned to use revenue to maintain a community resource center, create an Evanston Web page and provide computers to underprivileged students. But e-Tropolis never took in any profits and was forced to shut down when it could not pay its lone employee.

While it failed to wire the whole city, e-Tropolis did promote community involvement in technological development, said Jonathan Perman, executive director of the Evanston Chamber of Commerce.

“I think it was a laudable effort,” Perman said. “At the time, I think it was a great idea to pull together people in the community.”

Perman said that the future for Evanston business may be in wireless connections, not digital wiring.

“The world is quickly emerging into a wireless world,” Perman said. “Businesses have moved on, and businesses evolve their own ways of getting into broadband communications.”

Still, some Evanston business owners said e-Tropolis may have set its sights too high. Tom Erd, co-owner of The Spice House, 1941 Central St., subscribed to the e-Tropolis service. He was bothered by the changes in service providers under e-Tropolis and at one point tried to sell spices online using a dial-up connection instead of the e-Tropolis connection.

“It was this grand plan that just totally failed,” Erd said. “I was disgusted.”

Although the project did not turn out the way he had hoped, Kysiak remains positive about e-Tropolis’ future.

“It’s a good idea whose time, unfortunately, has not come,” Kysiak said. “We don’t have any brilliant ideas. So we’re waiting for the world to catch up to us.”