By Greg HafkinThe Daily Northwestern
With the Evanston city government actively looking for a new site for city hall, officials and commentators have floated various places from the West Side to the farmer’s market lot downtown. Now I wish to join the debate by suggesting an unlikely but highly promising site: the Northwestern Lakefill.
An obvious advantage is that this would not remove any additional property from the tax roll since all of NU is tax-exempt anyway. Valuable land in downtown would be preserved for high-rise condo development.
One of the biggest obstacles to putting a municipal government center downtown is the lack of space for parking. The Lakefill has plenty of room for a parking lot and should the city need more office space, it won’t be too difficult to expand. All they’ll have to do is build another landfill further out into the lake. There won’t be anyone to complain, unless the fish or their supporters decide to found a Not in My Back Yard committee.
A lakefront civic center would offer tremendous advantages to both students and city employees. For aldermen, what better way to loosen up before a long council meeting than by having a quick volleyball match on nearby North Beach? In the summer, a lunch-break dip in the lake can provide much needed stress relief to city workers with tedious desk jobs.
A public works project on this scale does not come around too often, so I would suggest an international design competition for Evanston’s newest landmark. A scenic location and immense flexibility in shaping both the ground and the water of the site should appeal to the world’s foremost starchitects, such as Santiago Calatrava of Spain, who designed the stunning lakefront Milwaukee Art Museum just north of here. Along with Lake Michigan, a marvelous city hall would provide a beautiful backdrop for Dillo Day festivities and perhaps help NU attract top acts for the concert.
Construction of the city hall could be part of a bigger project to get rid of the lakefront’s rocks and restore it to dunes, as was suggested at a public workshop last week. We could thus kill two birds with one stone, metaphorically speaking, though no birds will need to die. And I certainly hope this plan would get full backing from the Bird Conservation Network, which supports the dune-restoration efforts.
Student participation in City Council meetings has been sorely lacking, with the notable exception of the bar-night hearings a year ago. Placing city hall directly on campus might not increase involvement, but it will at least give the city government greater ability to appeal to students, such as through easily accessible volunteering and work-study opportunities. Increased interaction between Evanston residents and NU students could work to deflate tensions and improve town-gown relations.
One drawback I see is the lack of direct public transit access to the lakefront, but this is a must if we wish to have an accurate representation of the Evanston populace at city meetings. One solution is to have CTA bus No. 201 do a quick detour to the lakefront, a change that won’t generate too much protest since very few people ride 201. (If you’ve ever seen one passing by on Sheridan Road, you know what I mean.)
It’s time for Evanston to take a leap into the future, realize the full potential of the lakefront and improve ties with NU. The current civic center was designed as a school and is inadequate for such a great city as ours. With the redevelopment of downtown and growth in other parts of the city, the last decade has clearly shown that Evanston has arrived, not merely as a suburb of Chicago but as a vital city on its own. Here’s an excellent way to proclaim this to the world.
Assistant city editor Greg Hafkin is a Medill senior. He can be reached at [email protected].
