Green Street. For most students, it has never looked much different. Green Street Towers, Chipotle, Za’s. Three lanes of traffic, wide sidewalks, trees, banners and benches. Campustown today is a pedestrian-friendly place active throughout the day and night.
Flash back 10 years and students saw the Co-Ed movie theater, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and Babbitt’s Books. Four lanes of traffic, no diagonal crosswalks and a general sense of decay.
Administrators were noticing it, too. Former Chancellor Michael Aiken assembled a group called the Campustown 2000 task force in the mid-1990s to look at ways to improve the streetscape, safety and traffic issues of the area.
“We started to get comments from students and people recognizing that conditions in Campustown and the area around it was negatively influencing decisions of whether to go to U of I or not,” said Bruce Knight, planning director for the city of Champaign.
Committees of the task force analyzed aspects including economics, safety, drainage and traffic, and made suggestions about how to improve them on Green Street from Wright Street west to Neil Street.
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“Campustown should be something you go to, not drive through,” said Kevin Hinders, chair of the Campustown 2000 design team and associate professor of architecture.
Timing was right to start making improvements, said T.J. Blakeman, planner for the city of Champaign.
The city diverted its newly established food and beverage tax to the Campustown 2000 project in 2001 and established a 10-year tax on Campustown businesses in 2002 based on their property values and Green Street frontage.
Those taxes raised enough to cover the approximately $8 million cost of narrowing Green Street from Wright to Fourth, widening the sidewalks and adding benches, garbage cans, fencing, trees and banners.
“The very first time I came back and saw it, it was huge,” said Jerry Heintze, former owner of Zorba’s Restaurant, who moved to Arizona before the streetscape project was complete. “It was very much what we imagined.”