“We have seen the first version of Uptown Normal, north of the tracks, we have had spaces that are still vacant and planned for restaurants to come in and they are not here,” Normal Councilmember Stan Nord said during Monday’s Town Council Committee of the Whole meeting on Monday night. The committee was discussing the Uptown South Master Plan.
You’ve got Trail East, Trail West,” Nord stated. “There are several banks that are vacant. The space below the College Ave. Garage still hasn’t been built out. So I don’t see the market driving this push for building more things or more space because they haven’t absorbed the space that we currently have.”
City Manager Pam Reece remains optimistic telling Cities 92.9 that negotiations are ongoing with the developer of Trail East and Trail West.
“As I explained previously, the market changed significantly last year in terms of financing.” “Interest rates went up significantly in 2022 and it affected a lot of projects,” said Reece.
Reece believes that Trail East and Trail West will be completed within five years and points out that the plan for Uptown South is to have it built out over the next 10 years.
Reece also added that, “We have got the Underpass Project that is going to get going this year. There is a lot that is going to be happening in Uptown and would be affecting Uptown South.”
Uptown South is the area south of the railroad tracks near City Hall that consists of about eight acres of land. It is defined as the area bounded by the train tracks on the northwest, S. Linden St. on the east, E. Irving St. on the south and Broadway on the west.
Douglas Farr of Farr Associates, Normal’s consultant, described the project saying, “The plan proposes new streets that interconnect with the existing street grids to the east and to the south. It proposes five mixed used buildings and one mixed use parking deck totaling 400,000 square feet.”
Farr continued, “It proposes streets that have on street parking and bike lanes. It proposes four new public open spaces; the triangular park, the parklet and two sort of courtyard conditions where streets extend on their way to Constitution Trail. And really the kind of cool thing that it does is it enhances the south plaza that is being built as part of the Underpass Project.”
“And it creates this new north-south street which will be mixed use. It’s going to be a great street,” Farr added.
Doug Farr is an architect, urbanist and author. He leads Farr Associates, an architecture and urban design firm.
Farr worked on the original Uptown Normal plan and created the Uptown Normal Master Plan Update, “Uptown 2.0,” in 2015.
