Campus beautification bogged down in brick

With all the grand plans for beautifying the central part of campus, has anyone else besides me noticed how ugly NIU has become in that area in the last year and a half?

As I walk along Carroll Avenue, I feel like I’m walking through one huge parking lot. Plus, it used to be easy to get to the Holmes Student Center by using Carroll. Now, if I want to get there, a nice tour of Neptune Halls awaits me.

Don’t get me wrong. The idea of bricks falling on my head isn’t very exciting, so I can understand why the barricades have become NIU’s answer to the Berlin Wall. And even with part of Carroll now a parking lot, I no longer have to have a written will before I cross the street. But it just seems that while NIU already has plans and designs for improving campus aesthetics on paper, the university is going backwards on the streets.

Of course, it is obvious that a lot of what has happened in this area was not planned or desired. I also know this campus will not be transformed overnight into a beautiful campus.

I cannot blame the administration for wanting to unify and beautify this campus. With any luck, the area between Normal Road and Annie Glidden Road can become as beautiful as the east side. Making some changes in the campus would be good, but with the possible exception of Carroll Avenue, this campus is not too bad.

I’ve only been on a few other campuses long enough to make a legitimate comparison to NIU, but many of those are no better than NIU. At least NIU has a lot of open space, unlike Marquette. And if you think Carroll, Normal and Annie Glidden are bad, take a trip to Illinois State, where highrises and streets are spread in all directions.

It would certainly be nice to expand King Commons Mall into a park area because the areas by the east and west lagoons are not always easy to reach when you only have a few moments to relax. Plus, NIU could use some more trees in this area so that when the temperature and humidity reach 100 during the summer and you can’t afford air conditioning, there is at least some cool place to hide.

Still, I have a few questions and doubts about some of NIU’s plans. How does the university’s look improve by putting a parking lot next to the library? Granted, the houses that formerly belonged there might have come straight from the set of Animal House. But a parking lot?

One answer, of course, is the persistent parking problem—about two times as many permits are sold as there are spaces available. The university wants to increase its parking total by about 1,200 spaces, but this lot barely makes a dent in that total.

While NIU President John LaTourette and Jim Harder, vice president for business and operations, say it would cost too much to build one huge parking garage instead of several small ones, I still think that would be the best route. Parking lots are ugly, and if you can convert the area near University Village apartments into a garage with a shuttle bus onto campus, you help solve the parking problem without taking up valuable space where it is most crowded: on campus.

Because NIU used bond revenue to pay for the lot adjacent to the library, it had no choice but to put a lot in. Any property bought with bond revenue must be revenue-producing. I also suppose LaTourette did not want Godfather’s Pizza to buy the property from the Wesley Foundation, but once the property is paid for, the university might try to replace it with an academic building.

I also don’t understand why there rarely is talk of expanding west of the dorms. LaTourette said it is more expensive electrically, but again, there is almost too much open space there and precious little the rest of the way.

Maybe the powers-that-be will think of these ideas after I’m gone. But at the same time, at least this is one time the university has a clear idea of where it wants to go.