Tag Archives: Shoppes at Grand Prairie

Peoria Journal Star, Television

Bar Louie is gone

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I thought this was kind of funny. On page B1 of the Journal Star Thursday, December 30, there’s this little blurb:

What’s up with Bar Louie?

Blogger and entertainment editor Danielle Hatch is still trying to find out details on why there’s a closed sign on the door at the Bar Louie restaurant a the Shoppes at Grand Prairie. If you know more, join the conversation online.

So I go online and just type “Bar Louie Peoria” into Google. WEEK’s site pops up, where this story is posted with a date of Wednesday, December 29:

The General Manager at the Shoppes, Dawn Shipman says Bar Louie has closed “as a normal course of business.”

Bar Louie’s lease at the Shoppes has expired and closed immediately.

Mystery solved! Can someone from WEEK drop the Journal Star a line letting them know what’s going on over there at the Shoppes? They’re looking for details….

City of Peoria

“Within walking distance”: Fact or fantasy?

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I just have a minor quibble about this article from the Journal Star:

Putting a new piece in the latest lifestyle trends puzzle, Cullinan Cos. LLC said Thursday it will build upscale apartments within walking distance [emphasis added] of The Shoppes at Grand Prairie. Ground was broken this week on the Apartments at Grand Prairie, a 160-unit complex going up in the field behind the Rave Motion Picture theater.

I’m not sure why Paul Gordon chose to describe the proximity of these new apartments as “within walking distance,” but I find it a bit misleading. Normally, when you talk of something being “within walking distance,” it implies that you can actually walk there with reasonable ease. I don’t believe that’s the case here.

The apartments may be technically “within walking distance,” as the crow flies, but how would you walk there? Answer: not easily — or safely. While the center of the Shoppes is designed specifically for pedestrians, once you’re on the outside of the inner sanctum, all bets are off. Try crossing Grand Prairie Drive on foot to get to the restaurants across the street.

Or suppose you want to walk from the Shoppes to Rave theater. How would you do it? No path is clearly marked out. You just have to start walking across the parking lot in the general direction of the theater and be prepared to circumnavigate or hurdle some obstacles (out-buildings, a berm, American Prairie Drive, another berm, and another parking lot). In fairness, there are some intermittent sidewalks along the way. But overall, you have to blaze a path through a landscape designed for automobiles, not pedestrians.

And the apartments are going to be behind Rave, no doubt separated by a transitional buffer yard and other barriers that will make it physically impossible (or nearly so) to walk between the two even if the tenants so choose. I think the whole “walking distance” language is nothing more than a marketing slogan designed to elicit nostalgic feelings of traditional neighborhood design and sell an artificial impression of walkability in a place where it doesn’t really exist.