photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

The smokestack at 15th and Learnard is pictured on Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025.

You can’t miss the chimney at the corner of 15th and Learnard. For almost 100 years, it’s stuck out from what would become the Barker Neighborhood.

“It was there before that part of Lawrence was part of the city,” former planning commissioner Jim Carpenter told the Journal-World on Wednesday. Back when it was built in 1926, it was used to heat the greenhouses on the property, but now, he said, “it may not be salvageable.”

“It’s been allowed to deteriorate over the years,” he said.

If it’s still standing in the future, it may be sticking out over a parking lot.

Longtime Lawrence developer Doug Compton filed plans recently at City Hall to turn this property, which once housed the Sunrise Garden Center, into a 234-space surface parking lot that would serve a new, dense apartment development proposed for the Oread neighborhood about one mile to the west. And on Wednesday, about 100 people – mostly from the Barker Neighborhood and nearby East Lawrence – met at Vintage Church to voice their disapproval of the idea.

Partway through the meeting, the host, Lisa Harris-Frydman, called for an informal poll on who supported the parking lot plan. “I’d like to get a show of hands,” she said.

Not a single hand in the room went up in support. And that didn’t change when she asked if they’d support the project with conditions on it.

“So, pretty clear point of view here,” Harris-Frydman said.

The property doesn’t currently have the zoning for a commercial parking lot, and Compton’s group has filed for rezoning to a version of light industrial zoning that would allow for it. But Harris-Frydman stressed early in the meeting that even if the property’s zoning doesn’t change, the current zoning does allow for a lot of other uses. She said nine different light industrial uses were currently permitted on the property by right, which means an owner could get some projects approved administratively without the Planning Commission or City Commission even being involved.

Lance Adams, of Adams Architects, spoke briefly on behalf of the developers and said he wanted to reassure the neighborhood that the project wasn’t going to “slide something in” from those other uses. That could involve putting conditions on the project as it goes through the approval process, he said.

“Make as many conditions as you think you need for this to be acceptable,” Adams said.

Adams went over the details of the plan so far – that the parking area would be fenced in, that it would use shuttles to get the apartment residents to and from the site in the morning and evening. And he offered to work with the neighborhood to provide some kind of community space on the site, too.

Some buildings would remain on the site under the current plans, as the Journal-World has reported. The smokestack would stay, and so would the building used by Seeds from Italy, a local seed business owned by Dan Nagengast. One resident said he had artwork on the mulch bins on the property, and Adams said that could “absolutely” be preserved.

“Can we open up the area around the smokestack,” Adams wondered, and make it a gathering place? “That’s why I’m here,” he said, of listening to the neighbors’ ideas.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Lance Adams addresses a Barker Neighborhood meeting on Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025 at Vintage Church.

But the property might not be the kind of community space that some envisioned back when the current owners, the Millstein family, purchased it a decade ago.

The Millsteins have been longtime business owners and historic preservationists in the community, restoring multiple downtown buildings over the years. When the Learnard site was purchased back in 2015, it was going to be used not just for the Millsteins’ Central Soy Foods, but also for the Sunrise Project’s programming and for some other local operations. Back then, Melissa Freiburger of Sunrise Project said that “We really just want to create a very vibrant green space in the community.”

Nagengast’s Seeds from Italy was one of the original businesses involved in the site’s new use in 2015. “We bought a garage that belonged to Sunrise,” he said, “and we rehabbed it to our purposes.” Currently, he believes his company is the only one using the property right now. He said One Heart Farm had used greenhouses there this summer, and Sunrise Project left this summer.

As he understood it, there hadn’t been any offers to buy the property other than the one from Compton’s group.

“This is the one offer that came forward,” Nagengast said.

Harris-Frydman said the likely reason for the lack of offers was the property’s price of nearly $1 million, which she said was a consequence of its industrial zoning. During the meeting, neighborhood residents remembered its selling price in 2015 being about half that amount.

Because Compton’s development group still hasn’t purchased the property, some at the meeting wondered whether it would be possible to find another buyer and even floated the idea of neighbors pooling money to buy it.

“Ownership is the name of the game,” said Barry Shalinsky, past president of the East Lawrence Neighborhood Association. He said situations like this had happened in Lawrence before. When the Riverfront Mall parking garage was being developed, he said, it had to be much smaller than originally planned, because neighbors bought a property on Rhode Island “that was going to be in the middle of the parking garage.”

“A hundred people with $10,000 buys that property,” Shalinsky said of the Learnard site. “That is very doable.”

If the Learnard project goes forward, many of the neighbors are convinced that it won’t offer any community benefit at all. Some had concerns about traffic from the lot being a safety hazard, especially with Liberty Memorial Central Middle School nearby. Others were worried about stormwater drainage from a parking lot – Adams noted that drainage studies would be required – or about students walking to and from their cars late at night.

And still others thought it just wasn’t the right project for the neighborhood or the city. One attendee said that “the only place you see things like this” – a parking lot this far away from the building it’s meant to serve – “is big cities. International big cities.”

“You’re selling a parking lot,” another resident told Adams. “… You can’t make that beautiful. It’s a parking lot.”

Adams said he would love for the site to have some benefit – “I would love for it to be a nursery,” he said. But he also said it likely wouldn’t stay the same.

“It’s just going to change,” he said.

And Nagengast, who has seen users of the property come and go, said he could see that side, too.

“It’s a big, deteriorating facility,” he said. “Which, letting it sit there and deteriorate is not good for the neighborhood, either.”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Residents show their neighborhood affiliation — Barker or East Lawrence — with a show of hands at a meeting Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025 at Vintage Church.