Garden Avenue may bloom

COEUR d’ALENE – Old-fashioned lamp posts and perennial flower beds could spring up on Garden Avenue to spruce up the neighborhood and increase pedestrian traffic on the street.

Garden is one of the few east-west thoroughfares downtown. Planning consultants have identified it as a critical traffic corridor, with the potential to link older residential neighborhoods to North Idaho College and beach access.

The Lake City Development Corp. is considering a $200,000 public investment in Garden Avenue to help nudge that vision along. Board members will host an open house from 5 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at First Presbyterian Church, 521 Lakeside Ave., to explain the proposal to the neighborhood.

The agency is targeting four blocks of Garden Avenue between Government Way and Fourth Street for the improvements. The proposal includes new street lights, perennial plantings enclosed in decorative iron fences, and floral-themed street signs.

“An old-fashioned, gardeny neighborhood is the feeling we’re after,” said Deanna Good- lander, a City Council member who also sits on the board of the LCDC, which is the city’s urban renewal agency.

The open house will give the neighbors a chance to ask questions and comment on the proposal. The work won’t move forward without neighborhood acceptance, said Dixie Reid, another City Council member and LCDC board member.

“It’s a pilot project to show other neighborhoods in the city how they can create a sense of place,” Reid said. “It gives them a way to take pride in their neighborhoods. …When people ask you where you live, you can say, ‘Well, I live in the Garden District.’ ”

Reid hopes the pilot project will spur a bit of competition among downtown districts. Other residents could adopt their own themes, and plan their own beautification projects. Unfortunately, Reid said, the agency has funds for only one project.

Garden Avenue was chosen for the pilot program because of its strategic location.

“When you look at an aerial map of Coeur d’Alene, Garden is one of the few east-west streets that cuts all the way across town,” said Tony Berns, agency director. “Foster doesn’t do that. Lakeside doesn’t do that.”

An earlier study, done by Mark Hinshaw of LMN Architects in Seattle, envisioned North Idaho College instructors and students living in midtown and using Garden to bike and walk to classes.

Garden could become the “connector” that provides easy access to the campus, and helps revive interest in midtown’s residential area, said Hinshaw, who will be at Wednesday’s open house. Midtown is one of the city’s older neighborhoods. It’s going through a period of gentrification, as people buy and fix up homes built in the early 1900s, but midtown still has blighted areas that could be redeveloped.

Hinshaw also suggested that the city connect the east and west portions of Garden Avenue by providing a crossing on Northwest Boulevard. The street provides the main access to NIC’s campus, but it dead-ends in the Fort Grounds District and starts up again east of Northwest Boulevard.

Several other planning efforts are looking at traffic issues related to NIC, including making Garden a through street, Berns said. The issue is being examined in the city’s “Four Corners” study, and the master planning for the educational corridor.