Jordan Creek project hits milestone with reopening of Boonville Avenue

The reopening of Boonville Avenue after an eight-month closure was a milestone for Renew Jordan Creek, the city of Springfield’s project to bring the buried waterway back to the surface while creating a public park area around it.

Project officials believe the project will reduce the impact of downtown flooding while creating a public amenity and providing economic development opportunities.

The section of Boonville between Water and Mill streets closed to traffic in late October, but it reopened July 1 after a period that included the installation of a new box culvert system, sanitary sewer extensions, creek diversion, railroad crossing improvements and a reconstruction of the roadway, city officials noted in their announcement of the reopening. They added that streetscape improvements continue with sidewalks, lighting and other hardscape elements expected to be completed later this summer.

On the west side of Boonville, landscapers could be seen July 8 planting trees and readying groundcover, with a layer of straw placed over newly seeded grass. Meanwhile, work alongside and beneath the road continued at a fast clip.

On the east side of Boonville, crews continued culvert installation in the Missouri State University Efactory parking lot, where Jordan Creek will continue its route underground.

“We went open-channel where we could between Boonville and Main,” said Kirkland Preston, the city engineer who is serving as project manager for Renew Jordan Creek. “Where there’s existing infrastructure and constraints, we had to go underground.”

Preston pointed out that alongside the area where the creek has been returned to the surface, the contours of the thoroughfare are taking shape.

“It’s really starting to look like something,” he said of the approximately 1,000-foot length of restored open channel. “The project at its core is largely a floodplain mitigation project, and I’m a stormwater engineer, so for me, the most important piece is the floodplain piece.”

Still, Preston said, there is a lot more to it.

“It’s a quality-of-place project, too,” he said. “It’s so much more than a stormwater project. There’s hopes it can be an economic catalyst for this part of downtown.”

He said economic development is likely to follow.

“There’s a hope that by bringing people downtown, businesses will want to be where the people are, and there are some underutilized pieces of private property that are ripe for development,” he said. “There’s just a hope that people will see that and come in invest in this part of downtown.”

Completion of the current phase of the project is anticipated later this year, according to the announcement from the city. It adds that later phases envision improvements at Founders Park and at city-owned property at 404 N. Jefferson Ave.

The groundbreaking for Phase 1 was held in March 2025.

The project cost is expected to total $33 million, according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting. Funding for Phase 1 construction comes from the city’s level property tax, its quarter-cent capital improvement sales tax and its Department of Environmental Services’ green infrastructure and clean water funds.

External funding sources are local and state American Rescue Plan Act funds, including ARPA allocations from the state Department of Natural Resources and Department of Economic Development. Grants from the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Natural Resources are also in the mix, as is Clean Water State Revolving Fund program assistance.

Downtown activation
Crystal Quade, executive director of the Downtown Springfield Association, said conversations are underway with the DSA, the city and the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce about what the Renew Jordan Creek project area will look like as it’s activated.

“We’re looking toward things like festivals,” she said. “We want to potentially move Cider Days down to the Jordan Creek activation area.”

Meanwhile, conversations include mundane details, like what electrical service looks like and where food trucks can be hosted.

“Those type of infrastructure conversations are happening now,” she said.

There is also talk about what type of businesses are desirable in the area and what the land around it is able to sustain, she said.

“We’re beginning those meetings, and so we’re really excited to see what’s going to come out of them,” she said.

The project is bounded on the south by MSU’s Brick City complex, a group of restored buildings from the former Springfield Ice and Refrigerator Co., now housing the university’s Department of Art and Design in the 200-300 block of West Mill Street.

On the north side of the creek are commercial and residential buildings, like Oliver’s Garage at 213 W. Olive St., with loft apartments above it, or like the Ozarks Regional YMCA, housed in the historic Yellow Bonnet building, formerly a Springfield Grocery Co. facility and still topped by a painting of a smiling woman in a bonnet, located at 323 N. Patton Ave.

Whether new businesses will gravitate to the area remains to be seen, but Tim Rosenbury, Springfield’s director of quality of place initiatives, is optimistic.

“There was a business owner before we began construction who was quite interested in property on the north side of the park and west of Campbell,” he said. “He wasn’t able to get very far because he was not able to come to terms for acquisition of the property.”

But Rosenbury said with the city doing deferred maintenance in conjunction with the project, city assets surrounding it are also improved.

“That’s a big benefit to the community,” he said. “It also makes private properties around it a lot more development-ready.”

Rosenbury predicts people will be drawn to the project area, though he noted programmed activity will have to be the catalyst for them to gather.

“To be candid, this is not a big, wide-open area,” he said. “Once you take care of the water needs of the site, there’s not a whole lot of open space left.”

It’s not a place for an outdoor pops concert, in other words, Rosenbury said.

“There are a series of smaller open spaces that will work really well for downtown folk and especially people in the Jordan Valley and Brick City area,” he said. “It’s not going to be all things to all people, and it wasn’t intended to be that, but I can see them developing a series of spaces that are big enough for small groups to gather.”

It will be another example of placemaking in the city, Rosenbury said, like multimodal routes on Grant Avenue Parkway, or like the Route 66 Plaza development that opened this year at the corner of St. Louis Street and Jefferson Avenue.

“Placemaking matters – particularly those spaces that are not necessarily programmed and that don’t have a specific function but that have a general purpose of bringing people together,” he said. “They can be of different scales because the community gathers in different scales, whether it’s a small group on date night or a class of children – or a whole church congregation, or even a segment of the community or the entire community.”

Flood mitigation
It was industrial and commercial development that led city officials to bury Jordan Creek in culverts and tunnels in the 1920s. The move was also intended to prevent events like the great Jordan Valley Flood of 1909, which impacted the entire area from Park Central Square north to Chestnut Expressway. The effort did not solve the flooding problem, however, with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recording major flood events occurring in 1932, 1951, 1993 and six times since 2000. It notes that a July 12, 2000, flood swept through some 124 homes and displaced 100 people.

“The city has grown accustomed to dealing with flooding, but, due to the flashy, unpredictable nature of the flooding, there is usually insufficient time to prepare for flood fighting,” a 2013 report from the Corps of Engineers stated. “As a result, the city cannot construct an effective emergency flood warning system.”

Preston said bringing the creek back to the surface and improving culverts in areas where it continues underground will greatly reduce the severity of flooding, though the area remains a floodplain.

At times, the resurfaced creek will be fuller, as with spring rains, and in times of drought, its flow will be greatly reduced, Preston said. The view will be ever changing for families who gather for picnics or workers who enjoy brisk lunchtime walks.

“There are so many layers on the project,” said city spokesperson Kristen Milam. “It’s not just stormwater; it’s not just placemaking; it’s not just water quality. There’s history here, and it’s really cool that Springfield will continue to grow up on the banks of the Jordan.”