Protecting pedestrian-oriented retail districts

Consultants have identified 12 miles of pedestrian-oriented retail streets in Chicago’s neighborhoods as worth safeguarding. These are shopping areas at least a quarter-mile long with buildings lining the sidewalks on both sides of the street, uninterrupted by parking lots, driveways, and empty lots. If zoning regulations currently under consideration are adopted, no one will be allowed to insert a driveway, a parking lot, or a strip shopping center into those retail sections. “This is a bigger chunk of urbanism conserved than anything else I’ve heard of,” says Doug Farr of Farr Associates, which has worked on the proposal for the Zoning Reform Commission. The longest designated pedestrian retail strip, over three-quarters of a mile long, is on Broadway in Lakeview. The conservation initiative is needed, Farr says, because otherwise, pedestrian shopping districts can be demolished by developers who want to replace them with strip shopping centers. Hundreds of strip centers have cropped up in the city in the past 30 years. The city is also aiming to preserve eight distinctive intersections where diagonal streets cross Chicago’s ubiquitous grid. Drive-thru lanes, gas stations, and strip shopping centers will be banned from those six-cornered intersections. The thinking is that those areas, with their flatiron-shaped buildings, have a character especially worth saving.