Illinois Real Estate & Relocation Guide

Champaign, Illinois

Population: 75,220

Located in Champaign County

The city is notable for sharing the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with its twin city of Urbana. In addition to the University of Illinois, Champaign is also home to Parkland College. A Kraft Foods plant (and adjacent AC Humko plant), the world's largest steam factory, and Herff-Jones (formerly the Collegiate Cap and Gown) form part of the city's industrial base.

The city also features a large technology and software industry mostly focusing around research and development of new technologies. The Research Park, located in southern Champaign and backed by the University of Illinois, is home to many companies including iCyt (a biotechnology company), the Illinois Natural History Survey, the Illinois State Geological Survey, the Illinois State Water Survey, Instarecon, Motorola, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Phonak, Power World, Science Applications International Corporation, and Tekion (a fuel cell company). Numerous other software and technology companies also have offices in Champaign including Wolfram Research, AMD, Sun Microsystems, Intel, IBM, Amdocs, and Volition, Inc.. The United States Army Corps of Engineers maintains the Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL) in Champaign.

The Champaign City Building.The Champaign City Building serves as the City Hall and is a recognizable landmark. As one of the most visible buildings in the downtown district, it serves as a city symbol, with its likeness featured on the city seal. The ornate decoration, art deco architecture, and copper roof distinguish the building. The building was originally used by the city as the headquarters for the fire department. It later became the headquarters for the police department, complete with indoor shooting range, before becoming the current city offices.

The newly-renamed Tower at 3rd (formerly Champaign Hilton, Century 21, Quality Inn, University Inn, Presidential Tower) is located in the Campustown district and is over twenty stories high. A hotel until 2001, it currently houses student apartments and several University of Illinois offices, including the Office of Continuing Education. The Tower and a massive orangish-reddish apartment complex a few blocks away form a scenic duo in the central of Campustown with a city feel to it.

In the 1980s part of the downtown Champaign area (Neil St.) was closed to vehicular traffic to create a pedestrian mall, but this short-lived experiment was scrapped when business declined. The downtown area of Champaign was recently the target of a largely successful revitalization effort designed to bring more businesses into the area and return the downtown district to the center of city life. In addition to efforts which restored the facades on many of the historic buildings, additional construction projects including restaurants, bars, shops, office space, and condominums, have recently increased the size of the downtown area, while still maintaining the distinct turn-of-the-century architecture associated with the city. The new growth in downtown Champaign has coincided with the larger growth of the "north Prospect" shopping district on the city's northern boundary, similar in a smaller scale to the sprawl famous with areas like the Chicago suburbs, Atlanta, and Houston. The growth in the north Prospect area relies, in part, on leapfrogging, moving out to the countryside and developing more remote farm land that eventually connects to the main development. Given the overwhelming success of such suburban shopping areas nationally, new development within any city center represents an alternative to the dominant movement out and away from the cities.

Boardman's Art Theatre, which shows critically-acclaimed independent and foreign films, was built in 1921 as the Park Theatre. It has since undergone extensive remodeling and was equipped with state-of-the-art technology.The theatre is the only single-screen movie theater still in existence operating daily as a movie theatre in Champaign-Urbana.

The Historic Virginia Theatre is a recently-restored 1525-seat movie theater, dating back to the 1920s. It has an ornate, Spanish Renaissance-influenced interior, full stage and dressing rooms, and an elaborate Wurlitzer pipe organ. It hosts Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival and has a single 56' x 23' screen. The theater does not have a daily show schedule, but schedules special screenings and live performances several times each month.





Source: wikipedia.org
Photo Source: downtownchampaign.com, ci.champaign.il.us and oar.uiuc.edu