Lincoln Square Village to seek historic status

By MIKE MONSON
© 2005 THE NEWS-GAZETTE

URBANA, Ill. – The owner of Lincoln Square Village plans to apply to get the 41-year-old mall listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The downtown Urbana mall "is unique in that it was the first downtown shopping mall in Illinois and one of the first enclosed shopping malls in the country," said Karen Kummer, an architectural historian who is preparing the application for mall owner Jim Webster.

Kummer described the mall, now in the midst of a $10 million update, as "an excellent example of mid-1960s architecture."

"It's a building that turns into itself," she said. "The outside was deliberately planned to be rather plain so that once you walked inside you had this wonderful, sun-filled, climate-controlled space full of plants, benches, public sculpture and very large aquariums filled with fish. It was planned to be a social and community center."

Webster said that despite remodelings over the years, the mall remains close to how it looked four decades ago, when its opening attracted both of the state's U.S. senators and Gov. Otto Kerner.

"You look at photos from the early 1960s and you look at photos now and they are so strikingly similar," Webster said. "I think that's why it's a valid, worthwhile project.

Lincoln Square was designed by Victor Gruen & Associates. Victor Gruen was one of the premier urban planners and architects in the nation, Kummer said.

Nine blocks of residential and commercial property south of Main Street were purchased to make way for the mall, which was the second enclosed mall in Illinois. The first such mall was Randhurst Shopping Center in Mount Prospect, which opened in 1963. That mall was also designed by Gruen, who had offices in Beverly Hills, Calif., Chicago and New York City and was described by some as the father of the modern shopping mall.

The Lincoln Square mall was designed to be an enclosed "pinwheel" that was anchored by the original Carson Pirie Scott Co. department store on the south and the Lincoln Hotel on the north.

The mall was written up in national newspapers and publications and helped revitalize downtown Urbana for many years, Kummer said.

Kummer said the application for National Register status will be made within a few months to the Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council, a 15-member board that meets four times a year.

If approved at the state level, the application will be forwarded to the National Park Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which would make the final determination.

Placement on the National Register of Historic Places contains some tax advantages, as tax credits can be obtained for certified rehabilitation projects.