“Loyola Forward 2025,” the effort by Loyola Academy in Wilmette to create a long-term master plan for its 1100 Laramie Ave. campus, has taken some first conceptual shapes with help from a planning consultant, and with input from neighborhood residents who want to keep existing Loyola-owned green space and solve problems like traffic congestion.
That doesn’t mean that the private Jesuit school will have a more concrete plan ready to show Wilmette zoning officials before the end of May, according to Dennis Stonequist, Loyola’s executive vice-president.
May was the target date land-use consultants from the Lakota Group put on a timeline they created, along with four concepts for a reordered and expanded campus featuring a new theater, athletic pool and more parking. The Chicago-based consultant shared both with neighbors and other village residents at a January open house.
Each of the four conceptual drawings features:
* New theater and fine arts space, either combined into a single separate 66,000-square-foot department and theater space, or separated into an 800-seat theater in a 47,000-square-foot building and another 46,600-square-foot fine arts building. The buildings would both be located south of the existing school or connected to the school at its north end;
* All concepts include a 9,000-square-foot aquatic center, slightly expanded in the existing school building;
* Increasing parking from the current 627 spaces to either 708 or 834 spots. The layout of the expanded parking differs slightly in each drawing; all include bringing parking farther south on the campus, and one envisions a three-story parking garage providing 376 spaces next to the school’s football field;
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* Retention of some, but not all the green space – two small fields on the west side of Laramie opposite the school and across from each other on either side of Thornwood Avenue – that neighbors have fought to keep open. One of the plans foresees demolition of existing school-owned houses along Illinois Road to create new green space, while the rest retain the houses. All include at least some parking spots on the northern field that neighbors wanted to save, and three of the plans include an 8,000-square foot administration building on that field. All appear to leave the south field alone;
* Different traffic drop-off and pick-up routing plans with more clearly marked pedestrian safety zones.
“There’s so much involved,” Stonequist said. “We have to get an architect ready, and so much more … When you put these timelines together, you put the best possible date in. We would love it if we were turning something in to the village in May.”
The school’s board of trustees had its first meeting with Lakota at the end of February, and is forming an ad hoc committee that will oversee the planning process, Stonequist said.
“We’ve obviously had our own campus master planning committee that helped us formulate a nice merge of what the neighbors deemed important and what we deemed important,” he said.
He added that the school was “grateful” for input it received from the neighbors through several days of Lakota interviews late last year, the open house and other input methods. The school would continue to keep lines of communication open with neighbors, he said.
Fine and performing arts are a priority for the school, as is replacing its existing athletic swimming pool, he said.
Whatever solidifies enough to be presented to the village as a zoning request will also have to address Loyola’s repeated violations of a 2,000-student enrollment cap it agreed to in 1993 as part of an earlier zoning request, Village Community Development Director John Adler said last month.
He said that could involve providing a solution to the violations that school authorities acknowledged last year after neighbors brought them to village attention.
The enrollment issue helped halt Loyola’s 2016 plans to turn the Thornwood fields into parking lots. Beginning in January 2016, neighbors rallied against the plan, eventually creating an official group, North Shore Neighbors to Preserve Green Space. That group uncovered the enrollment overages, after which Loyola scrapped its original plans and announced “Loyola Forward 2025” in October.
It might also involve the school requesting that the cap be changed in some fashion, Adler said: “We don’t know how they’re going to handle it.”
Stonequist said March 1 that he didn’t have an answer about how Loyola planned to address its enrollment
Some, but not all, of Loyola’s residential neighbors said they were hopeful that the increased communication between them and the school marked a change in the relationship with Loyola.
“I think Loyola sincerely wants to dialogue with the neighbors and the community at large,” Manor Drive resident Anne Nagle said. “I liked the thought that they have given in several different concepts, and I think there were lessons learned from where they were a year ago.”
Ariel Weissberg, a spokesman for North Shore Neighbors, said the group was still cautiously optimistic about discussions with Loyola: “They’ve engaged us directly and through the Lakota group, and they’ve indicated a strong desire to continue these discussions … I think everybody is proceeding in good faith.”
But Thornwood Avenue resident Dory Hixon said that all the concepts still add parking to one of the previously open fields, and that one includes a parking garage.
“I understand where they’re coming from and I know it’s their land, but I think they have to address the over-enrollment,” she said. “My theory has been, all along, that to compensate for that, they should donate the two pieces of land to the park district.”
Twitter: @pioneer_kathy