photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Consultant Bill Madsen presents about transportation in North Lawrence at the meeting of the North Lawrence corridor study steering committee on Wednesday, June 10, 2026.

A grocery store at one end, a food truck park and apartments at the other – this is one way North Lawrence could grow in the future, according to the consultants the city has hired to study it.

At the Union Pacific Depot on Wednesday, the Kansas City-based consulting firm HNTB Corporation met with a citizen steering committee for an update on the North Lawrence corridor study. Previously, these meetings have been more about big-picture goals for the area north of the river, but at this meeting, HNTB’s Bill Madsen and his team presented more concrete ideas for where developments could locate and what kinds of developments might be possible.

Two ideas were particularly important for North Lawrence, they said: a multi-use development near the turnpike interchange, possibly with a grocery store, and housing and recreational uses along the levee.

“The two projects we’ve talked about are essentially at each end of the corridor,” said Dan Guimond, one of the consultants. “They become really the anchors for a revitalization plan all the way along the corridor.”

The city is spending just under $400,000 for the study, which will ultimately help inform future decisions about areas north of the Kansas River and just to the south of it. HNTB said it’s aiming for an Aug. 27 “deliverable” date for the study, and that there will be an open house meeting on July 8 where community members can give their suggestions, too.

One major thing has changed since the last update on the study – the lawsuit settlement that will allow the city to take control of the former Riverfront Mall building next April. The property is in the study area despite being south of the river, and while the consultants haven’t researched it in detail yet, they have it on a list of five sites that they’ll provide more detailed development concepts for.

The others are the I-70 Business Center; the area behind Johnny’s Tavern; North Second Street near its intersection with Lyon Street; and a site on the east side of the neighborhood near the ICL chemical plant. Here are some of the possibilities the consultants saw.

From I-70 Business Center to ‘neighborhood shopping center’

Guimond noted that one of the biggest things North Lawrence residents have been asking for is a grocery store, and that there might be a way to bring one to the I-70 Business Center near the Kansas Turnpike interchange.

North Lawrence isn’t large enough to support a true supermarket, he said – that would require about 7,000 households to be viable. But the business center site, with its visibility and access from the highway, could support a smaller grocery store, he said: “Ideally we’d want to see something like an Aldi.”

It might require some sort of city incentives to be viable, but Guimond said that a grocery store could help bring new businesses into that part of town. He said it could support “essentially a neighborhood shopping center” with three to five other businesses around it; a hardware store or restaurants might be a good fit, the consultants said.

“That site would ideally be a location for that, and a small grocer would ideally be the kind of anchor that a redevelopment on that site would be suitable for,” Guimond said.

If not a grocery store, the consultants said this part of North Lawrence might be a good place for a hotel. Another possibility in this area could be a multi-story residential building with smaller retail or office space on the first floor. In particular, Guimond said there was potential for a senior housing project.

Ted Boyle, a steering committee member and longtime president of the North Lawrence Improvement Association, said the consultants’ presentation sounded to him like the pitch for the Tanger Outlet Mall before it came to that site in 1993. The Tanger mall had 22 stores when it opened, but most failed within a few years, and by 2004 only one of the original businesses was operating, as the Journal-World reported back then.

“I can remember when they made their presentation,” Boyle said, “how that was going to bring traffic and business and prosperity and shopping. It fizzled out in less than five years, because they were anticipating people off of the highway, the turnpike, patronizing those businesses. It didn’t happen.”

“There’s definitely some lessons learned from that,” replied Melinda Harger, assistant director of the city’s Municipal Services and Operations department.

The consultants said that from their point of view, the main reason the Tanger mall failed was that it was focused entirely on retail. A new development at the site with a mix of uses and stores that North Lawrence residents wanted might be different, they said.

Guimond also said that a mixed-use development might be the best way to get a grocery store to locate in the corridor.

“Most grocery stores are not in the business of doing real estate development,” he said. They want a site that’s already suited to them, and the idea would be to find a developer willing to do a bigger mixed-use project with a grocer as the anchor tenant.

Entertainment and housing by the river

At the south end the consultants said the Lawrence developers might take some inspiration from Boulder, Colorado. There’s an attraction in Boulder called the Rayback Collective, which is a food truck park, bar and outdoor gathering space alongside that city’s Goose Creek walking path.

HNTB said a similar space could be a good fit for the levee area, right at the end of the Kansas River Bridge and connected to the levee trail. The consultants said it would help bring more activity in from the other side of the river.

Guimond called this a potential “low-cost entertainment/retail space.” “It’s something that we think could be built at a trailhead at a riverfront location, and it’s kind of a very popular destination, something that with support from the city maybe could be developed here,” he said.

Boyle said he knew someone in the neighborhood who was already considering this type of development on North Second Street – “a place where people can go and eat and recreate.”

“We’re way ahead of the game over here,” he said.

HNTB also floated the idea of a restaurant space overlooking the river. And the consultants said the area behind Johnny’s Tavern was one of the best spots in North Lawrence for adding more dense multi-family housing.

Denser housing would be important for attracting businesses, Madsen said, because companies would see a larger community that could support them better.

“The more households you bring in, the market capacity goes up,” Madsen said.

Small shops and slower speeds on North Second

Between these two ends of town, the developers said there were good opportunities for smaller commercial spaces on North Second Street. They characterized these as “breadcrumbs” that would lead visitors up the corridor.

Guimond said these could be “somewhere between a Starbucks and a McDonald’s” in size, and they could house things like restaurants or coffee shops, small banks or credit unions, or small retailers like cellphone stores.

The consultants also said North Second/North Third could be a good candidate for a “road diet,” or lane reduction, to reduce drivers’ speeds.

“We’ve heard concerns about speed of traffic,” Madsen said. With four lanes on North Second/North Third, it “still feels like a highway coming through that section of town.”

Technically, it is a highway – part of U.S. 59. But Madsen said the Kansas Department of Transportation had seemed receptive to the idea of lane reductions or lower speed limits.

Another way to reduce the speeds of people coming off the highway, Madsen said, could be to replace the light at the turnpike interchange with a roundabout. “If you hit a green light, there’s nothing to slow you down right now coming off of the highway,” he said. He added that KDOT had added roundabouts on some highways before, depending on traffic volume.

Other changes to traffic might focus on new routes for trucks that don’t have to pass through as much of the neighborhood. Madsen said one way to do that might be to use East 1600 Road as part of the normal route for trucks coming off of U.S. 24/40.

But committee member Nancy Thellman noted that the road was currently a gravel road and was outside the city limits, so Douglas County would have to be involved for major changes to happen.

Questions about the land near ICL

Out to the east, HNTB thought a piece of land near the ICL chemical plant might be good for adding more dense housing. But some on the committee had questions about that idea.

The land is just to the west of the plant, between Lyon and Lincoln streets. HNTB showed a concept that would include a mix of single-family and multifamily housing units there.

But Boyle said that probably wouldn’t work. He said ICL owned that land, and that it bought it specifically for use as a buffer for the plant.

Thellman said she understood that idea. “It is a chemical plant, and I can imagine they don’t want more houses,” she said.

Harger and the consultants said this could still be included in the study, though. “I think things change,” said Guimond, noting that ICL could decide to sell it one day. And the consultants also said that this idea could be considered if a similar parcel became available elsewhere in the neighborhood.

A few residents who weren’t on the committee had showed up to watch the meeting, and one was vocal in her dislike of that idea. “Over my dead body!” she said, talking over the discussion. “Over my dead body!”

Madsen, for his part, said that his firm’s job was just to look at possibilities for how North Lawrence could achieve some of the study’s goals, such as adding more housing.

“We’re not developers,” he said.

Riverfront, bridges and priorities

The fifth site up for more study is the Riverfront building, and it’s the one the team has studied the least.

Guimond said the team hadn’t done any planning at all for how that site could be used. It’s only been about a month since the City Commission approved the lawsuit settlement that will allow it to take control of Riverfront in April.

However, it is within the corridor study’s area, and “it’s clearly a redevelopment site that we should be looking at,” Guimond said.

Wednesday’s discussion did touch on the property briefly, though. Committee member Sarah Hill-Nelson referenced the idea of using Riverfront for a farmers market site, which city leaders have raised in the past. She said if there were a new pedestrian bridge across the river, North Lawrence residents could walk to the market and back home easily using the bridge.

A couple of other bridge possibilities came up, too, including a new motor vehicle bridge at East 1600 Road, an east-west pedestrian bridge and making the existing bridges that connect to downtown more friendly for pedestrians and cyclists. HNTB said that could involve changing the width of lanes on the existing bridge deck and improving its guardrails.

But city transportation planning manager Jessica Mortinger said bridge projects would be big commitments.

“There’s a lot of bridges here. We’re not going to be able to afford them all,” she said. “So we’re going to have to talk about priority and preference.”

Madsen expects those kinds of talks will be happening next month at the open house. He said attendees might be asked to say where they would like the finite resources for projects in North Lawrence to be spent.

“We’re going to be looking a lot at priorities,” he said. “We may give someone figurative(ly) a dollar, where would you put that dollar as community members?”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Consultant Dan Guimond, standing, talks about economic development opportunities in North Lawrence at the meeting of the North Lawrence corridor study steering committee on Wednesday, June 10, 2026.