Amtrak station should add to Rockford, Ill., renewal
Written by jrood
When people got off Illinois Central trains on South Main Street in Rockford, Ill., during the early 20th century, they were welcomed by a handsome station, a beautiful garden, a quaint cottage atop a limestone bluff and the sound of water cascading over a dam in Kent Creek, according to a column by Chuck Sweeny in the Rockford Register Star.
One traveler who wrote
a postcard to her sister in Davis in 1909 said of the surroundings, "When I
first discovered this place last August I thought not since I had left Golden
Gate Park had I seen its equal."
A century later, the site
looks like Berlin after the Allied bombing. But in two years, passenger trains
will again call there, and people will get off and look at where they’ve come.
In 1909, a polite young
woman getting off a train might have said, "Land sakes alive!" at seeing such a
mess. (My American grandmother, who was in her 80s when I was a child in the
1950s, said that a lot. My English grandmother said, "Lord love a duck," but
that‘s a different story.)
Today I probably can’t print what passengers would
say as they stepped off the train to observe the desolation of the old railroad
yards and the forlorn streetscape of South Main.
But step off they will,
and the city is taking steps to alter their sensory perception. To wit: At the
low price of $1, the city has acquired 5.5 acres at the station site from the
Canadian National Railway, which bought the Illinois Central in 1999. A
dilapidated warehouse on South Main must be torn down, as must the station,
which is not the one seen in the postcard from 1909. Today’s station was built
in the early 1950s. It’s ugly, it’s decrepit, and it’s got to go.
What to build in its
place? They could put up an "Amshack," essentially a bus shelter for rail
passengers. Or they could do something that restores some of the beauty and,
yes, grandeur of the early 1900s version of South Main.
Happily, they’ve
chosen to do the latter.
"Our desire is to build
something that would inspire future development around the train station," said
Steve Ernst, director of the Rockford Metropolitan Agency for Planning, which
takes up a lot of space.
Remember, although Amtrak
service initially is to be once a day, the long-term plan is for the new
station to be the terminus of commuter service to Chicago. When that happens,
things will be a lot busier there.
The city wants to build a
station development that will cost from $3.5 million to $5 million. The money
is likely to come from federal sources, perhaps an earmark if U.S. Sen. Dick
Durbin, D-Ill., and U.S. Rep. Don Manzullo, R-Egan, would be so inclined.
The station site and
parking lot must be secure, with some kind of fence – hopefully an attractive
one – and sufficient lighting for passengers to leave their cars there in
confidence.
The station doesn’t need
to be an exact replica of the one that stood there before the 1950s abomination
was constructed, but it should be something that evokes the Great Railroad Era
of the early 20th Century.
Examples of new stations that succeed at doing
this abound in Chicago’s suburbs on many of Metra’s commuter lines.
Ernst says he’d like "members
of the community" to provide suggestions of what the station development should
look like, and what it should try to accomplish.
Here’s what this member
of the community wants the new station development to accomplish:
"I had not
since I left Golden Gate Park seen its equal."
