New Carbondale Event Plaza designed to revive the local music scene

The City of Carbondale has been chosen for a grant of $2,055,040 to build an Entertainment and Event Plaza at the Washington Street venue.

According to the Explore Carbondale website, the grant is from the Rebuild Illinois (RBI) Downtowns and Main Street Capital program with Governor JB Pritzker and the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO).

The Economic Development Director for the City of Carbondale, Steven Mitchell, said the grant was capped at $3 million, but the entire Plaza cost more than $4 million.

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“We didn’t have enough money for all of it,” Mitchell said. “So we chose to do what we thought would be the most impactful, which was the actual permit stage portion of that design.”

The design of the grant was put together with the help of a local architect and the Carbondale Musicians Advisory Council, Mitchell said.

He said the city has had ownership of the space the Event Plaza will be built since the early 2000s but has not done much with it until a few years ago.

“In 2017, when the Great American Eclipse came across through Carbondale, Carbondale was identified by NASA as the point of longest duration,” Mitchell said. “So we had a huge influx of people from all over the world come to Carbondale and we set up a series of concerts at that location to entertain the visitors.”

Mitchell said having the stream of people come to Carbondale in 2017 was able to bring more business to the area.

“Since 2017, we estimate we’ve tracked with probably 24,000 or more people to downtown that wouldn’t have otherwise been here,” Mitchell said. “We estimate that those 24,000 people have brought in or generated about a million dollars in economic activity into the community.”

Along with trying to attract more people to the Downtown Carbondale area, the goal is to also help bring life into the local music scene once again, Mitchell said.

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“For decades, Carbondale has really had a really strong, vibrant local music scene,” Mitchell said. “All kinds of musicians have sprung up out of Carbondale and our hope is to reinvigorate that as well.”

The idea for the plaza happened a few years ago before organizers found out about the grant, Mitchell said.

“The city manager had the idea two-three years ago, I guess, and we’ve been talking about it for some time,” Mitchell said. “Once the grant came out, it was an opportunity to really kind of kick that concept into gear.”

The City Manager of the City of Carbondale, Gary Williams, said the space has always been very accessible for the community and always got good feedback from events held there.

“We’ve had this concept of a stage and we did some conceptual plans probably five years ago,” Williams said. “We knew it was going to be just something that we would have to prioritize at some point to pay for or find some sort of funding mechanism like a grant.”

Williams said in 2015, more music events was something the council and mayor campaigned for.

“It’s been brought up by the council a number of times,” Williams said. “It was an idea that our city council asked us to explore and we were fortunate enough to find an opportunity and then secure funding.”

Williams said, after having multiple musical acts perform in the space, he was able to get input from them.

“This is going to solve so many problems because every time we have a show, it’s ‘we have to secure a stage and we have to get staff and we have to get porta potties and on and on and on,’” Williams said. “There’s a lot of moving parts, so this will…  ease a lot of those logistical headaches that we go through on show after show.”

The Economic Development Coordinator of the City of Carbondale, Cody Lueker, said the program is in response to the impact of COVID-19.

“Since restaurants and bars and everything had to limit their capacity and at one point it closed down,” Lueker said. “So these grants were sort of ways to respond to the economic harm caused by COVID-19.”

The space the event plaza will be built has already been utilized for music events in the past, like the ongoing concert event Off the Rails, Lueker said.

“We’ve been having local bands and also some bigger regional acts come in and play at that location,” Lueker said. “But just the fact that we have to keep bringing in a temporary stage is sort of cost prohibitive and it kind of limits our ability to bring in bigger acts.”

Lueker said, with the entertainment events that happen in this space already attracting people to the Downton Carbondale area, a permanent venue will expand capacity and attract even more people.

Williams said organizers are in the pre-contract phase since nothing has been formalized in an agreement with the state.

“There’s some other fairly really competitive grants that we’ve been able to secure, so we’re still extremely excited,” Williams said. “We’re all still very proud of the achievement, but at the same time…almost pinching ourselves that we actually have the money to do this.”

Staff reporter Jamilah Lewis can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @jamilahlewis. To stay up to date with all your southern Illinois news, follow the Daily Egyptian on Facebook and Twitter.

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