Chicago’s ‘Great Street’ Faces the Future With Face Lift From the Past : Consumers: State Street soared from a fur trade trail to the main drag of the Midwest. But it lost most of its customers to suburban malls.

It’s forward to the past for Chicago’s famed State Street, as stores and shoppers--long lured away by suburban shopping malls--are beginning to return to the once-splendid Main Street of America’s Midwest, for years let go to seed.

Where six grand department stores once reigned, shoppers today find only two among the cut-rate lingerie shops, discount shoe stores, fast-food restaurants and pharmacies. Vacant lots remain empty, their rebuilding plans on hold, and the glamour shops stay where they drifted, to another part of town.

But there are signs of hope. State Street captured a handful of new stores last year, a new city library and a university are expected to draw people and the street is rebuilding a shopping base among downtown workers.

Like many old downtown districts, urban planners say, State Street is being forced to reinvent itself.

“Every town faces the same sort of problem; why should Chicago be any different?” asks Gary Rejebian, marketing vice president for the Illinois Retail Merchants Assn.

From 1834, when a settler of what was then called State Road--a muddy, frog-infested stretch favored by fur traders--wandered out of his cabin and killed the last bear seen in the center of Chicago, to the 1950s, State Street grew steadily.

Less than 30 years after the street was laid out in the 1830s, retail baron Potter Palmer sensed its destiny and bought up a mile of land along it. He built the Palmer House hotel and was an original partner in the Marshall Field department stores.

The strip boomed.

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 hardly slowed its growth, and expanded public transportation after the fire made it easier to reach State Street stores. In its heyday, its mile of shops, theaters, restaurants and night spots drew thousands of people from around the Midwest.

In 1922, songwriter Fred Fisher immortalized State Street in his tune, “Chicago,” as “that great street,” where “they do things they don’t do on Broadway.”

During the 1920s, stores along the street rang up more than $400 million a year in sales, according to periodicals of the time, and provided jobs for 50,000 to 75,000 people. By the time incandescent lamps first glowed on State Street in 1926, the magazine Chicago Commerce was complaining of traffic jams.

But in 1949, the specter of decline arose: Chicago’s first suburban shopping center, Park Forest, opened in a cornfield southwest of the city. And just two years later, the now-defunct Chicago Daily News warned that traffic and suburban housing developments threatened the street’s prosperity.

The paper optimistically concluded State Street would always be great: “Trust Mrs. Chicago to know the difference between the corner grocery and the super supermarket.”

But it became the lowly corner grocery, where office workers filled prescriptions or bought umbrellas while waiting for the bus.

Many Chicagoans believe the street’s glamour finally was doomed by an ironic effort to mimic the suburban malls that had drained away its business.

In 1980, a $17.2-million open-air bus mall opened that limited traffic to public transportation and pedestrians. Some 120 buses an hour--one every 30 seconds--rumbled and fumed down the street.

Sidewalks were widened with slippery, gray stone slabs that one reviewer called “unspeakably depressing.” With no cars, State Street began to feel empty and dangerous. The glittering store windows lost some of their allure when potential customers no longer could see them from cars.

Almost nobody liked the mall. The Chicago Tribune called it “a civic embarrassment,” an “aesthetic failure” and “a particularly harsh disappointment.”

“It never worked, never worked,” Mayor Richard Daley recently said on a WBBM radio talk show. “It’s a failure. Everybody knows that.”

Daley wants to tear up the mall and reopen the street to autos, but the city needs $30 million to carry out the plan.

Sara Bode, executive director of the Greater State Street Council, is optimistic about improvements, but said there’s no point trying to recapture State’s Street’s glory days.

“We will never be what we were then,” Bode said. “But that’s no problem. What we’ve got to do is stop saying we’ll never be what we were. I’ll never be 21 again, either.”

She thinks State Street and other downtown shopping districts can prosper if they avoid mimicking suburban counterparts.

Jim Anathan, president of Filene’s Basement Corp., likes State Street just as it is. The store Filene’s opened there last year did better than expected, Anathan says.

North Michigan Avenue, with its upscale Gucci and Chanel, Burberry’s and Henri Bendel, Saks Fifth Ave. and Tiffany and Co., draws more tourists and suburbanites, but State Street gets more downtown workers, Anathan says.

The Filene’s opening was one of several signs the street may be shaking off its malaise.

T. J. Maxx opened a new State Street store last fall, Marshall Field’s is emerging from a $115-million renovation and the Chicago Theater, built in 1921 but allowed to go to seed, was reopened in 1986 after a $4-million renewal.