Quote:
Originally Posted by VivaLFuego
The siting could have . . . parking to the south along Kimball in the no-mans land south of Addison far from where any poor pedestrian might stray. Access could be both off Kimball and with one or two pass-throughs connecting the parking to Addison.
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Parking in rear sounds fine in theory, but just won't work for big-box retail. Any kind of retail, actually.
First, well over 90 percent of the customers arrive by auto, many of them in a minivan with kids. To keep them happy, you need to minimize the walk from car to entrance and from checkout to car. You can't ask them to walk an extra 200 feet, through a tunnel where a scary guy might be lurking, to get to the front entrance. If you turn the store around, you have the loading docks and blank rear wall lining the sidewalk on Addison.
Second, only a couple of types of retailers (notably fast food, where payment is separated from access) can afford to keep two entrances open. So you end up with signs on the sidewalk entrances saying "enter from parking."
About the best compromise you can hope for is the one used by pre-1970 supermarkets, having the store hug the sidewalk with parking to the side and a corner entrance serving both. But once the store grows beyond 80,000 sq ft, the parking lot becomes a lengthy void to walk past. In fact, that's exactly the site plan of this Kmart, which so infuriated TUP. Other examples include the Jewel on Chicago Avenue in Evanston, or the recently closed Southport store.
Parking on the roof is great, but that extra cost just isn't in Kmart's business model—and certainly wasn't for an in-city store in 1984.
I, too, am sometimes tempted by the idea of a California-style specific plan, that would try to imagine how a neighborhood would build out and set up the urban design guidelines for how it would all fit together. The problem is the one Yogi Berra aptly described: "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." In 1984, the CVS/Home Depot site was still industrial and everyone hoped it would remain so. More to the point, would we be happy today with 1984 thinking about urban design guidelines and how the city should look and function?