Why Won't You be My Neighbor?

There have been rumblings in the grapevine that one of the principal reasons why many Aldermen feel the Lexington Club PUD proposal is appropriate for the neighborhood into which it will be inserted is because they feel that it is not actually being inserted into an existing neighborhood.  Instead, they think that the Lexington Club will be its own neighborhood, and thus, the builder should feel free to build whatever he wants.  Because they think it will be its own neighborhood, there has no requirement to "blend" it into the existing neighborhood.  This line of thinking is deeply disrespectful to the feelings of the residents who live adjacent to the site in what they understand to be a neighborhood--and which has historically been known as just that: the St. Pat’s / Belgian Town neighborhood. 

The neighborhood into which the proposed Lexington Club will be inserted is known by those who live here as either Belgian Town (a reference to the men brought here to work at Moline Malleable) or, alternately, as the St. Pat’s neighborhood (due to its proximity to the local parish church).  Traditionally, neighborhoods have been defined by their ethnic makeup or local landmarks, not by the name of the developer who built them, or the subdivision in which they are located.  They are identifiable due to a concentration of a particular ethnicity (e.g. Andersonville in Chicago (Swedes) or Belgian Town in St. Charles) or being located near a certain building or geographic feature (e.g. Lakeview in Chicago or St. Pat’s in St. Charles).  Further, the boundaries that determine the commonly accepted edges of a neighborhood are frequently natural features, major thoroughfares, train tracks, etc.  Thus, the mental map of neighborhoods in peoples’ heads are not updated just because some developer drops a new set of buildings into an established neighborhood.  The site formerly occupied by Applied Composites has been a part of my “neighborhood” since at least the time the original factory was built and the neighborhood around it filled out in the early 1900's. 

The majority of St. Charles residents live in post-WWII housing, frequently in subdivisions that were created by a single builder.  For those types of developments, it is totally acceptable to define a neighborhood simply by who developed it or what subdivision it is.  Very large suburban developments are often even further subdivided by what phase of construction they were, or by the price-point of the homes in a particular section.  Because of this, I have a friend who, when describing her neighborhood, says she lives in “Traditions at Harvest Hills” because that is the section of that development in which her home is located.  That kind of description is absolutely alien to my ears, but it is an integral part of her world.  With the older, historic sections of town, that kind of neighborhood mapping simply does not exist because it cannot work there. One should not attempt to superimpose a suburban point of view on an area of the city that pre-dates suburbia.

I define my “neighborhood” as the area bounded by Main Street to the South, the train tracks to the North, Route 31 (or maybe the Fox River) to the East, and Dean Street / 9th Street to the West.  This has nothing to do with what subdivision I live in and everything to do with the mental mapping of neighborhoods described earlier; I am certainly not alone in this view.  I asked the very simple question “is the Applied Composites site in your neighborhood?” to over a dozen people who live in this neighborhood and the answer that came back was absolutely unanimous: every single person I asked did not hesitate for a moment in responding that yes, they saw the Applied Composites site as an integral part of their neighborhood.  Because of this unanimity, I believe it is disrespectful to the residents of this neighborhood to tell us that we should not care what gets built back there because it is not our neighborhood.  It is our neighborhood and we care deeply what gets built back there.  Telling us that what we think does not matter and that we just should not walk our dogs back there if we do not like what ultimately gets built is a real slap in the face to every resident of this neighborhood.