What makes a great street great? Maybe it’s historic theaters and music houses like those on iconic thoroughfares like Broadway, Bourbon, or Beale. Maybe it’s the warm nostalgia of the main drag your childhood hometown. Or, maybe, it’s just a few special details that truly define a special sense of place.
Last week, three Illinois communities took their first steps towards making their main streets, great streets, when they met together with East-West Gateway staff and other planning specialists to create detailed improvement plans that would qualify for Federal Great Streets funding. The full week of workshop activities encouraged the towns of Belleville, Lebanon, and even the tiny hamlet of Grantfork (population 341) to think big about their main streets.
Functional and pleasant streetscape design remains the ongoing focus of EWG’s Great Streets Initiative. Since 2006, Great Streets has helped breathe life into roadways around the St. Louis region, making them safer, more efficient, and more beneficial to their communities.
Great Streets has so far helped create detailed and strategic plans for 23 communities in and around St. Louis. There’s no project too big or too small. The initiative has developed plans for the high-traffic bustling arts hub of St. Louis’ Grand Center arts and entertainment district; suburban Maryland Heights’ stretch of Dorsett Road; and the Main Street of the 4,000 person City of Smithton, IL. In each of these communities, Great Streets partnered with city leaders to develop a cohesive streetscape plan that demonstrates seven key characteristics:
- Representative of their places
- Allows people to walk comfortably and safely
- Contributes to the economic vitality of the city
- Functionally complete.
- Provide enhanced mobility
- Facilitates placemaking
- Are green
During last week’s workshops, EWG’s Great Streets team tried something new so that smaller communities with smaller projects can utilize Great Streets funding and principals in an efficient and transformative way. Leaders from Belleville, Grantfork, and Lebanon, IL jointly met for a planning panel at East-West Gateway’s headquarters in downtown St. Louis. They were joined by the Great Streets team; consultants versed in transportation, urban design, and green infrastructure; and representatives from IDOT. These meetings focused on how each city can transform key sections of a vital thoroughfare and hopefully trigger the economic and social benefits that can come with a well-planned, community-centered street. This new Great Streets format is intended to use an interdisciplinary team to tackle smaller projects while avoiding myopic planning and unintended consequences, said Paul Hubbman, EWG’s senior manager of corridor and long-range planning.
The kind of lasting change that Great Streets seeks to spark takes time. While almost all of EWG’s Great Streets projects have seen real progress since the completion of their master plans, the initiative is not a quick fix. The timelines for each plan can be 20-25 years, so seeing them through is a long-term commitment. The Great Streets team only goes where they’re wanted, however, and plenty of communities in St. Louis want to make quality long term investments into the functionality of their infrastructure – and Great Streets makes sure they envision plans with a holistically strong impact. Hubbman said, the plans that will result from last week’s planning panel will likely have shorter time horizons. While some of the projects may take the better part of a decade to complete, progress on others could start as early as this year.
As each of these Illinois communities looks to implement plans for their soon-to-be-great streets, the Great Streets team is set for more work, including developing a detailed plan on the Missouri side of the river. Street by street, the Great Streets initiative is helping to make the St. Louis region a greater place to drive, walk, bike, shop, visit, and live