DOWNTOWN: Coeur no more

This past Friday, not having been downtown for quite a while, we decided to park by NIC, walk through town, then have dinner.

Backtracking to 1979-80, downtown business and property owners had been fretting for months at the prospect of downtown ruination due to the upcoming Silver Lake Mall. To finally put an end to this unproductive griping we gathered a number of business owners with the emphasis on those who owned their own properties. The plan was for the Coeur d’Alene Development Association to revitalize the downtown area to make it unique and its success separate from and immune to the fortunes of the mall.

A feature of the draft plan was to make the downtown core more pleasant for walkers, diners and buyers by skirting through-traffic via one-way streets around the core which would be mostly pedestrian. That didn’t happen.

Now, sitting at a sidewalk café, or just walking, is a thoroughly unpleasant experience and altogether different from that of a European style café. Hundreds of cars and motorcycles, separately or in packs, pace the street, back and forth with the majority belting out testosterone induced throttle blips. The vehicles come from all over, including many from Washington and Texas (a club?), Oregon and Montana. Bumper-to-bumper, noisy and not at all conducive to a pleasant shopping or dining experience, more likely to crush rather than foster business.

I don’t see how this can be good for business nor, the die having been cast, how it might ever be changed.

Will it remain perforce that Coeur d’Alene will become Coeur No More?

PAT TEBO

Hayden Lake