By Bob Seidenberg
Frustration boiled over at times as members of the Evanston Preservation Commission met Feb. 11 for a second review of proposed city zoning code changes encapsulated in Envision Evanston 2045, raising concerns the recommended changes for greater height and bulk may be placing development over maintaining the city’s special character.
“I think the real danger here is it unleashes the forces of developer profit and capitalism on our neighborhoods in a new and more destructive way,” said commissioner John Jacobs, in a nearly six-minute summary at the end of discussion that received approval from fellow members.
“Nearly every desirable town in America is struggling with gentrification and the inevitable displacement of lower-income people. I don’t think we are in danger of becoming Winnetka. We are in danger of becoming Bucktown or Wicker Park.”
Part of Envision Evanston
City staff, working with former consultant HDR and its subconsultants, had drawn up the changes as part of the Envision Evanston 2045 process, where both the zoning code and city’s comprehensive plan are undergoing their first major revisions in more than a quarter of a century.
Facing strong criticism, City Council members have pushed back the timetable for adopting a new zoning code to later this year.
The draft comprehensive plan, a document charting the city’s goals across a wide range of areas, meanwhile, could go before the council as soon as its next meeting on Feb. 24. Mayor Daniel Biss and some council members have said they wanted to be able to vote on the plan before the April 1 municipal election.
The Preservation Commission, an appointed citizen group and the sole group within the city which acts as the voice of preservation, had reviewed the city-proposed zoning changes for the Chicago Avenue Corridor and portions of the Main Street and Davis Street businesses districts at their Jan. 21 meeting. They called out officials about proposed maximum increases along Chicago Avenue, which backs up to the Lakeshore Historic District.
‘I don’t usually get upset, but I’m upset‘
Commission members voiced more of the same concerns at their Feb. 11 meeting. At a virtual tour of areas proposed for change, city staff liaison and commission member Cade Sterling stopped at a spot on the map showing a strip of Chicago Avenue just east of the main public library, an area includes one of Evanston’s best-known historic buildings, the Frances E. Willard House at 1730 Chicago Avenue.
The existing zoning for that area — which includes the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s museum as well as its Rest Cottage, a vacant parking lot and the Woman’s Club of Evanston — is R6, Sterling said.
Other restrictions include a limit on building lot coverage to 50% and maximum allowable impervious surface of 65%, Sterling said.
While the WCTU properties would still be controlled by the city’s preservation ordinance, the proposed zoning changes could significantly open the door to potentially “taking challenges or desires to relocate the property, as well as the potential for incompatible built forms and scales surrounding it that could be detrimental to its integrity,” Sterling said.
That was enough, as far as Sarah M. Dreller, the group’s former chair and an architectural historian, was concerned.
“Think about how few … buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places,” she said to commissioners, “and then out of that, a fraction of them are national historic landmarks. Literally, the White House is a national historic landmark.
“This is a national historic landmark,” she said of the Willard House. “Under no circumstances should this be rezoned.
“I don’t usually get upset, but I’m upset,” she added.
Carl Klein, the commission’s current chair, noted that out of the limited number of national landmarks in the country, “there are a very, very, very small number that are for women or for women’s history. And this is exactly — this is that, it’s women’s history.”
Before that, the meeting’s virtual tour stopped along Sherman Avenue and a portion of Clark Street, where the former Varsity Theater and Marshall Field’s buildings, now converted to residential uses, stand as landmarks.
The area is currently zoned for a height limit of 42 feet with a floor-area ratio (FAR) of 1.75, Sterling told commissioners. The proposed zoning would allow buildings to be built by right — that is, with no required public hearing process — to 135 feet with a floor area ratio of 7.0, he said.
“I would like to state that generally lower height and the bulk nature of that area should be kept intact,” Jacobs said. “I can see there may be some properties that would be ripe for planned development that would support a taller structure with more FAR, etc. But a wholesale change to the entire district that would allow any of these properties to be torn down and something that you built to the descriptions that you just described,” he said, would be bizarre “from a preservation point of view.”
Evanston Labs building
Klein pointed out that Sherman Avenue is probably one of the widest streets in the downtown area, and therefore could probably accommodate an improvement of the streetscape, place-making and more activities catering to families.
Commissioner Amanda Ziehm asked about the height of the recently opened Evanston Labs building in the Clark Street part of that zoning district.
“I was actually just at Starbucks on Sherman today and looking out the window and that building was so high over these lower buildings,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, I would hate to see the rest of that area go the way that this did.’”
Dreller observed, “For me this area of downtown Evanston has the feeling of a kind of small town Main Street because of the low-scale buildings, and I do not think that there is a way to insert tall buildings here and maintain the character of it.”
Regarding the Evanston Labs building, she noted, “I’ve gone back and forth about that. It’s on the edge of downtown, so that kind of minimizes it, but I would have loved to see something go in, something a little bit more contextualized.”
‘Copy Cat’ building and Sherman Garden
Commissioner Joshua Bowes-Carlson sought the rationale behind the wholesale changes, noting that “people come to the city all the time and ask for variances to put up giant buildings, and they almost always get turned down over and over again.”
Here, he said officials are “proactively changing the code to allow for this when the current protections are in place are still allowing this discourse to happen. So I don’t know what we’re doing here,” he said, noting the commission serves as one of the “backstops,” protecting against such moves.
Sterling highlighted changes slightly north and west, at 1830 Sherman Ave., constructed in 1889, and for many years a Northwestern University dormitory (also sometimes referred to as the “Copy Cat’’ building, for the business which operated there), and the Sherman Garden Apartments, at 1866 Sherman Ave., which was determined a few years ago to be landmark-eligible.
“It’s a really excellent example of mid-century architecture,” Sterling said.
Klein raised another concern should the greater height and density open the area to greater development.
Sherman Garden is “a co-op that you can still purchase a unit at a relatively affordable rate, and so you know if that’s threatened, then we’re going to potentially lose a whole bunch of affordable housing.”
Central Street too?
The proposed increased height and density recommendations would apply to Central Street, where residents worked successfully some 15 years ago to establish an overlay — limiting height to a maximum of three stories or 35 feet in most of the district.
The proposed zoning changes call for a height of up to 65 feet and a floor-area ratio of 5.0 on Central Street.
Klein said, “I’m just going to go out there and say I don’t think this needs to be touched, because this is a successful business district, and I think that this could be applied to other small business districts, or small-scale business districts, because I think if you look at the vacancy rate on Central Street … It is an attractive, human-scale street, and I think it’s successful.”
Dreller said “as a message to the city, I think it would be a good idea for us to like point out that there’s already things that are working here. So let’s use that as a kind of inspiration or touch point, or whatever we want to call it, for the evolution of the zoning code.
“I’m there every day,” she said, “and there’s a lot here that we can learn from and say, ‘OK, if we want to have low vacancy, if we want to have livability, if we want to have all the things that we want, this is something that that we could say to them that is as a good example.’”
The group’s last stop on the meeting’s virtual tour was the Florence Avenue/Greenleaf Street neighborhood, the West Village Arts District. The neighborhood is currently zoned B1 with allowable heights on of 40 feet and a floor-area ratio of 2.0, Sterling said.
The proposed change calls for a height of 50 feet and a floor area ratio of 3.0.
The neighborhood is home to a lot of artists and craftspeople, noted Klein, who are attracted to the area because of the comparatively low rent. “And I think that should be encouraged. Going up to that height will prevent that from being preserved.”
“I think it [the proposed zoning change] would come as a real shock to a lot people in that neighborhood,” Bowes-Carlson said. “I mean, not everyone is aware, amazingly, of Envision Evanston 2045, so I think people who live in that neighborhood — and I have friends who live in that neighborhood — don’t think of it as a business district that someone could build, you know, a 50-[foot] apartment building.”
Dreller said that to her, the framers of the recommendations “picked these nodes in the city and they’re like trying to create a cluster of density, and I don’t think that might be the right approach.
“It doesn’t feel like the people in those neighborhoods were engaged with, and I know engagement is very difficult to do, but it just doesn’t feel reflective of our culture and the culture of these places that we’re changing,” she said.
