Roselle’s Petal Plaza, Porch and Promenade project to take root downtown

Roselle’s signature flower pops up in its logo and a mosaic tile mural unveiled for the town’s 100th anniversary.

No, the village isn’t named after one, but what lilacs are to Lombard, roses are to Roselle. Every June, Roselle stages its own Rose Parade and Run for the Roses.

Those rose-themed traditions have inspired a project to renovate the municipal campus into a sequence of three distinct outdoor spaces called the Petal Plaza, Petal Porch and Petal Promenade.

“I think a lot of this is going to spill over into other areas of our town and help us really reinvigorate and have a broader sense of a brand identity as a village but also as a sense of a place for people to join,” Roselle Mayor David Pileski said.

All of Roselle’s municipal services — the village hall, the police and fire departments, plus the public library — occupy one city block. But there really isn’t a place for people to come together and congregate on the campus.

The Petal Plaza, Porch and Promenade, by contrast, are designed to host a range of events and gatherings year-round, off the street, right at the village’s doorstep.

Construction is slated to start this week on the first phase of the project: creating the lushly landscaped promenade and porch sites on the northern end of Prospect Street. Work on the southern end of Prospect — more specifically, the Petal Plaza — should begin in late June and finish by late September.

Confluence, a village-hired landscape architecture firm, designed the plaza as a “village green” with a stage. Renderings show catenary lighting over the plaza lawn.

“By transforming the space between the village hall and the police department, it creates a safe, inviting place where people can host concerts, come together and gather and really enjoy what Roselle has to offer,” Pileski said.

The promenade area is patterned after an urban garden. A walkway — dotted with petal-shaped seating nooks — will link the plaza with the “public porch” at the corner of Main and Prospect streets near the 8,000 Miles restaurant downtown.

The latter structure pays homage to the porches on historic homes along Prospect. It also will provide a shaded seating area for visitors and restaurant patrons.

“It’s our community front porch, so everyone can gather together and enjoy each other,” the mayor said.

The village board last month approved a contract to pay Landmark Contractors Inc. up to $2,295,360 for the construction of the porch, promenade and plaza.

To date, the village has secured over $1.8 million in state and federal funding for the project, including about $1.3 million in American Rescue Plan Act dollars.

“We allocated a large chunk of our ARPA money towards this project, which we felt was really in keeping with the spirit of what that money was meant for, bringing communities together and revitalization after the pandemic,” Pileski said.

In addition, U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Schaumburg steered $500,000 in federal funds toward the municipal campus improvements. The village also has applied for another grant that would provide additional state funding for the project. Officials went through multiple rounds of engineering and bidding to bring down costs without losing the “core or the soul of the project itself,” Pileski said.

Work at the northern end of Prospect Street is expected to wrap up ahead of the Taste of Roselle in early August.