Make No Small Plans: What Daniel Burnham Can Teach Streator

Lessons Ignored: Streator vs. The Great City Thinkers
This is the final article — for now — in Lessons Ignored: Streator vs. The Great City Thinkers, a continuing series in The Streator Standard exploring the proposed Beck’s development through the lens of some of the most influential voices in city planning—Jane Jacobs, Charles Marohn, Christopher Alexander, William H. Whyte, Jim Heid, Christopher Leinberger, Daniel Burnham, and others. Each installment examines how their ideas apply to Streator’s future and what we risk losing when we trade vision for short-term fixes.

Make No Small Plans: What Daniel Burnham Can Teach Streator

By The Streator Standard Staff

When Daniel Burnham unveiled the Plan of Chicago in 1909, he didn’t simply sketch a few better streets or plant a few more trees. He asked an entire city to dream again — to imagine itself not as it was, but as it could be. His famous charge, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood,” was a call not for grandiosity, but for the courage to pursue a coherent, uplifting vision that would outlast the men who made it.

Burnham’s Chicago was a world city. Streator is not. But the principle is the same: a community that believes it is “too small” for big ideas has already made its plan — a small one, destined to inspire no one.

Streator Once Dreamed Big

Our city’s early decades were not timid. This was the Glass Capital of the World, a manufacturing hub whose factories lit up the prairie with jobs and opportunity. Civic leaders like Ralph Plumb understood that schools, parks, and public buildings weren’t extras — they were the foundations of a healthy, prosperous city.

They didn’t wait for outside investors to define their destiny. They built it themselves, guided by the belief that a well-planned, well-loved city was worth their time, energy, and money.

This is the spirit Burnham tapped in Chicago — a broad civic coalition of merchants, politicians, and ordinary citizens united by the idea that a city’s design should reflect its values. They believed in beauty, public life, and purposeful infrastructure. And they understood that short-term expedience is the enemy of lasting greatness.

Vision on the Shelf

Burnham’s Plan of Chicago wasn’t just about fixing problems. It was about creating coherence — ensuring that streets, green space, public buildings, and neighborhoods worked together as a whole.

In 2014, Streator produced its own Downtown Strategic Plan. It called for:

• Activating our streets with retail, dining, and events.
• Improving building facades to enhance civic pride.
• Encouraging residential life downtown.
• Connecting downtown to City Park with a vibrant streetscape.

It is a thoughtful, Burnham-like document — scaled to our size but no less ambitious in spirit. Yet, a decade later, most of it remains unimplemented. It sits, collecting dust, while decisions are made that run directly against its recommendations.

The Beck’s proposal — demolishing St. Mary’s Church, the rectory, the parish hall, and the industrially distinctive Flink building for a single gas station — is the clearest sign yet that our problem is not a lack of ideas. It is a lack of will to follow through.

Burnham’s Vision vs. Beck’s Reality

Burnham believed in using prime urban sites for the public good — places that inspire civic pride and serve as magnets for public life. In Chicago, that meant reclaiming the lakefront from rail yards and industry, ensuring “forever open, clear, and free” access to the water.

In Streator, our “lakefront” is City Park — the green heart of the community. The block beside it should be developed to complement and enhance the park, making it part of a continuous civic space that connects seamlessly into downtown.

Instead, the Beck’s plan treats this block as if it were an interchangeable parcel on the edge of a highway. Wide curb cuts. Asphalt expanses. A use designed for passing motorists, not parkgoers or pedestrians.

It’s impossible to imagine Burnham standing at the corner of Park and Kent and declaring, “Yes, the best and highest use here is sixteen fuel pumps and a car wash.”

Lessons from the Great City Thinkers

• Jane Jacobs taught us to “watch the sidewalks” because lively, safe cities depend on people in public spaces. A gas station interrupts that life, replacing it with curb cuts and driveways.
• William H. Whyte showed that successful public spaces are shaped by how people actually use them. Beck’s caters to the car, not the park.
• Charles Marohn warns against “growth” that costs more to maintain than it returns — a likely outcome here once environmental remediation is needed.
• Christopher Leinberger speaks of “option value” — the flexibility of high-potential land. Beck’s locks this block into one low-value use for decades.
• Jim Heid champions small, incremental, adaptable projects. Beck’s is a single, irreversible bet.

Burnham would agree with all of them: vision means thinking beyond the quick win to the lasting good.

What a Burnham Plan for Streator Could Look Like

If we applied Burnham’s lens, we’d treat this block and City Park as a single civic zone — a seamless extension of downtown. That could mean:

• Preserving and adapting St. Mary’s Church as a cultural venue, gallery, or performance space.
• Converting the Flink building into a market hall, brewery, or maker space that opens to the park.
• Using the parish hall for community gatherings or flexible commercial use.
• Restoring the rectory as offices, boutique lodging, or upper-floor housing.
• Adding park-facing patios, wide sidewalks, and landscaping to invite strolling between downtown and the park.

This would not happen overnight. Burnham’s Chicago didn’t, either. But each phase would add value without destroying the foundation for the next.

The Cost of Small Plans

Burnham warned that small plans fail not because they are technically flawed, but because they lack the magic to inspire action. A gas station beside City Park may generate fuel sales, but it will never stir the imagination. It will not make a child want to come downtown on a Saturday. It will not draw visitors to linger. It will not anchor the kind of reinvestment our downtown needs.

And when it reaches the end of its life — when fuel demand shifts, when tanks need replacing — it will leave behind a contaminated site that costs more to fix than it ever returned in property taxes.

The Choice Before Us

The Plan of Chicago succeeded because its champions refused to settle for what was easy or obvious. They built something worth keeping.

We can do the same — if we choose to believe Streator deserves more than the minimum. If we stop saying, “We’re just Streator” and start asking, “What if we built the best version of ourselves?”

We have a river that could sing. A downtown that could shine. A block beside our park that could become a civic jewel instead of a corporate convenience store.

Make no small plans, Streator. There’s still magic to be stirred.

And though this is the final article in Lessons Ignored: Streator vs. The Great City Thinkers — for now — the conversation doesn’t end here. Burnham knew that big plans take decades of work. We’ll be back to keep asking the question that matters most: What kind of city do we want to become?