PEORIA -- The Peoria City Council may have violated a 1991 agreement with the state when it voted recently to gut its historic preservation ordinance. The agreement made Peoria eligible to receive grants for historic preservation.
The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, in a Feb. 16 letter to the city, notes that the agreement allowed the city to receive grant funds from the National Historic Preservation Act. The recent changes may have violated the agreement, it says.
The letter states "it would be difficult to identify any cities in Illinois which have sustainable, successful historic preservation programs with owner consent requirements in their ordinances."
It suggests that Peoria study ordinances in the city of Chicago, "a place which has found significant financial and cultural benefits through effective historic preservation."
The letter states that the agency will be watching Peoria for the next year, to see what occurs.
Here's a terrific story from the PJStar on this issue.
Meanwhile fallout from the council's action continues, with the following commentary from preservationist Dan Callahan. It is published here with his permission, and will appear in the March isue of the Moss Bradley Messenger, a neighborhood newsletter.
Callahan writes:
A Tale of Two Cities
The best of times. Our near record snowfall is melting. The days are growing long enough for the sun to effect that. The water is draining clear and sparkling on its way out. There is a promise of a new season, hidden growth seems just about to burst out of the ground.
That joyful expectation, however, is contrasted against a cold and sad reality. The city council has put a gun to the preservation community and fired multiple shots directly at us.
There is blood mixed with the snowmelt.
After decades of serving this city so well, with heritage neighborhoods ringing the city core and serving as a lifeline to it, the Historic Preservation Commission has been effectively neutered. The lopsided February 8 council vote shows how we've become two cities, one urban and one not. It's that clear cut. If you live here, you understand this all too well.
On that Tuesday night, we were ambushed, and the wounds from this are life threatening. Look for more senseless demolitions---from the Near North Side to the Center Bluff to right here on Malvern Lane.
It seems that our experiment in New Urbanism has been abandoned.
The question might be "Why did I think it could have been different here (in Peoria)?" What optimism made a guy like me think that?
My personal journey may give some hints. Four decades ago, I began the study of architecture. I was immediately amazed at how much of what I was learning about its history was represented in my home town. Everything from Italianate mansions to 19 th century iron storefronts to works of modern masters like Frank Lloyd Wright right here.
"Wow," I thought. "I come from some place special."
It got even more exciting for me when I spent a year in Europe. There I saw how really great cities were waking up to the treasure that waited to be discovered and revitalized. Paris' Marais district was coming alive after decades of neglect, becoming one of the most vibrant places in that city and even the world.
Countries that had been torn apart in global depression and world war were binding together committed to healing their societies and making their cities liveable. At work in every one of these---preservation.
The 'Back to the City' movement was making models of US cities from Boston to Portland. Again, the common thread was sensitively preserving the historical best these places had and working with it.
Fast forward to the late seventies: I chose Peoria and one of its historic districts as my home. Effective and flourishing historic preservation was the selling point that brought me home. Of all places, I chose Peoria.
Why was I so filled with optimism? I thought this town offered so much. An incredible inventory of architecture spanning its venerable history. "The first permanent settlement west of the Alleghenies" it was said. And a mechanism, its preservation ordinance that, since the seventies, has kept that inventory alive. Now that is endangered. The worst of times.
Paris came to its senses and stopped planning urban renewal in the Marais. Instead, it embraced preservation. It realized its potential.
Peoria has already lost much of what it had when I came back here in the seventies. Some say as much as half, if not more.
Will we sacrifice even more in the guise of 'property rights'? Let us not forget the forty years of work that has gone on before us.
These could still end up being 'the best of times.' But we've got to get the City Council to understand. We can and we will. Or worse times will soon be on their way. As surely as the spring thaw. -30-
Let's hope Callahan is right about educating city officials before the entire city has become one giant parking lot.
-- Elaine Hopkins
In addition, here is the letter the Historic Preservation Agency sent to the city of Peoria:
Download ILHistPresAgency
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