Michigan City: new restaurants eyed for Riverfront District.

• Author: Richards, Rick A.
• Position: REGIONAL REPORT: NORTHWEST

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AS PLANS GO, WHAT Michigan City has on the drawing board for its North End and the adjoining Trail Creek Corridor is pretty ambitious.

For a city that has struggled for the better part of three decades to pump life into downtown, Mayor Chuck Oberlie is excited about what has taken place over the last 12 months. Moreover, he's especially enthusiastic about what he wants to happen in the next 12 months.

Early in 2008, after months of study and public input, the Michigan City Common Council approved a North End concept plan drawn up by the Chicago design firm Lohan Anderson. It calls for an extensive reconfiguring of Michigan City's downtown, including converting the now one-way Franklin Street through downtown into a two-way street as a way to encourage more traffic.

Dick Lohan, a partner in Lohan Anderson, is intimately familiar with downtown Michigan City. He owns a home just north of Michigan City and says he's wondered for a long time why Michigan City's downtown wasn't redeveloping like some other communities along the Lake Michigan shore.

"People come to where life occurs. You must find a developer or developers who will come into town and make a commitment to undertake such a project," he says.

To encourage people to come to the city's downtown, the Lohan Anderson plan calls for creating a Riverfront District along the six-block Trail Creek that would convert the corridor, which used to be home to public housing and factories, into a retail and restaurant mecca.

The city has acquired all but three properties along the west bank of Trail ,Creek that fronts Blue Chip Casino, where a $130 million, 22-story hotel is under construction.

"We're in very positive discussions right now," Oberlie says of the largest of the properties to be acquired, currently occupied by Blocksom & Co., a filter manufacturer. The other two, occupied by a shuttered ice house and Weber Sign Co., are in litigation since the city filed for eminent domain on them last year after purchase offers were rebuffed.

"We recognize the importance of the facilities created at Blue Chip Casino and we think that even with the new hotel, there is room to encompass another hotel...