I think this is a good move for Janesville.

Hannah,
This is the point I'm trying to make.
You want the shops to stay open.
The shops need to justify the overhead costs of staying open additional hours.
Would it be worth their while to stay open / would extra hours bring in more customers?
What comes first, the chicken (extra hours) or the egg (more business)?

so the city and us taxpayers are building a parking ramp and lending him money-why are there no janesville contractors working on this project?

irebout, you seem to have misunderstood me. If LaCrosse is doing as well as you say, I think they probably are doing some things right that other cities could duplicate. (It can also be luck; hard luck is what cost Janesville Parker Pen and GM, not anything that the local authorities did.) But we have to work with modern situations. I think Forward Janesville and the former DDA have been quite pragmatic in their approach and it has kept our downtown limping along with periodic glimmers of real resurgence, but we haven't really succeeded the way we would like.
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The key is when we have a developer like Sara that is interested in the downtown and has the experience to succeed, we run with that opportunity. I think the city has done that with alacrity here.

In accordance with the mechanism of evolution, the egg came first: it was laid by something that was almost a chicken.

Open your business here.

What comes first the chicken or the egg? If I want to relocate my business to downtown Janesville I have to ask myself, what is there to attract a customer base AND what is there to benefit/support my employees? If I'm opening a bar/restaurant I have to ask myself, Is there enough interest/attraction to this area to count on market growth via new business. We, as a city, need to display Janesville in a good light. A place that a business or manufacturer would WANT to relocate to. A place that would make it easy for an existing company to convince it's employees to relocate to.

localboysince1968:
Sorry but you are wrong about the ghost town. Have you even been to either Game Day or Zachow's ? I suggest you take the time to visit before you speculate.
Both are doing very well despite the fact that GM is closed.
Zachow's has expanded their hours and currently sponsor more dart teams than any one else in Janesville.
Instead of spreading rumors about local businesses, maybe you should try to support them.
(Sorry If I sound harsh.)

You have to have employment down there to support the downtown dream. If people are working down there, they will be spending money down there. A sample is the area around GM. Those bars/restaurants down there look like a ghost town since GM closed. Nobody has a reason to go down around that area anymore since they don't work there. They can now visit places close to home. You get some good paying jobs downtown, and people will shop/visit/eat in the area. We need to land a major professional job company to locate in the downtown, and the rest is residual.

TO whom who think that reviving downtown Janesville can't be done with some of the things that the fifties provided, your wrong. LaCrosse is a perfect example of this. It went back to it's roots and while it's not completely perfect it is growing inch by inch. Already in the last four years I have seen a huge transition and a wonderful downtown come back. Maybe Janesville should look at other towns such as this to see what is working and what isn't.

Red, I sure think that the Sara/Helgesen project shows that downtown is still a viable commercial district. Even if we did everything perfectly we can't bring back the 1950s and earlier. The mass production of the car changed everywhere, not just Janesville, and we are really fortunate that we still have what we do downtown.

madman1961 Bell Appliance was on the corner where the Helgeson building now stands.

Does anyone remember what was on that corner before the current building was built?

In 1970 something I did a senior class project multi media presentation for civics class called, "In My Little Town". The music was Simon and Garfuncle "in my little town I grew up believing God keeps His eye on us all . . . nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town." It featured a slideshow of all the boarded up businesses in downtown Janesville. I wish it weren't true but come on people you're gonna have to start thinking outside the "box" to reinvent Janesburg. Difficult times call for daring inovation. Only 50 years ago Janesville had a vibrant, living downtown with 2 movie theatres, Woolworth's with a lunch counter, Sears, Pennys, Bostwicks, banks, florists, Bell appliance, sporting goods stores, bars, the Gazette, Parker Pen, auto dealerships, music stores, churches, etc. Maybe it's better to let an old dog die but if it were on my watch I'd sure try to breath some new life into what once was thriving and viable.

I was at the new restaurant (can't remember the name) that's in the building, and I thought I was imagining things when I noticed the floor looked the same as it did the last time I was there back in the 70's. Maybe I wasn't imagining things after all. More seriously, why do I remember flooring in a place I visited once back in high school? It will be exciting to see what it looks like, and the parking ramp after remodeling. Hopefully the ramp won't fall apart like the last one.