These two people could be credited for Springfield’s revival

Like seeing the first pink dogwoods of spring, I remember the moment I realized downtown Springfield had blossomed. It was July 2022 and, as a volunteer at the World Athletics Championships, I was in the Autzen Stadium press box, being a gopher for reporters and photographers from all over the world.

And there on the giant video screen was a live shot of women marathoners rounding what was then known as the Lovely Building at Fourth and Main.

The scene — beamed around the world — sent a surge of pride through me. This was only two years post-COVID, so part of my emotionalism was a rare sense of oneness, of unified community, local and global. And part of it was something I hadn’t felt in a while: regional pride.

Downtown Springfield looked big time. It was neat, clean, colorful and lined with cheering spectators, as if an exclamation mark on a sentence that had begun 15 years earlier when Springfield’s David and Nita Loveall cast a vision for change and later became the catalysts to help carry that vision forward.

Nita’s “ah-ha” moment for downtown Springfield came years before.

“It was the moms and strollers,” she said over a coffee cup at the Washburne Cafe. “To me, the mark of a safe, vibrant, inviting downtown is a place where women will bring their babies. One day, I just noticed that that was happening. Moms were here. Babies were here. People felt safe.”

Twenty years ago, the stereotypical downtown Springfield image was strip clubs, second-hand stores and vacant buildings that echoed emptiness. That was the kernel of truth inside the stereotype suggesting Springfield was the City Built by Skoal. The city that only came to life during the annual state logging conference in Eugene, when the strip clubs were packed.

“You’d see more and more vacant storefronts,” said Ken Eilers, former president of the Downtown Springfield Association. “The only businesses that seemed to thrive were rowdy bars and strip clubs — three of them within a half-mile stretch. And lots of ‘working ladies of the night,’ offering their services.”

“I mean, right over there was a gun shop,” said David, pointing to where co-owner Charlie Hester was brewing my hot chocolate in the Washburne Cafe.

Now, downtown Springfield is the chatter of a dozen Washburne conversations, the allure of out-front fruits and vegetables next door at the Main Street Market and the smell of fresh-off-the-grill food from restaurants to the east.

It’s a closed-street block party that draws thousands, people living above the storefront businesses below and “Coming Soon” signs instead of “Going Out of Business” signs. It’s a two-story Ken Kesey mural and the Emerald Art Center inviting in the public to have their photo taken on a couch with some of the Simpsons gang; the TV show’s creator, Matt Groening, said Oregon’s Springfield inspired his fictional town.

And it’s a 35-year-old father and 7-year-old daughter munching burgers outside Plank Town on a recent sun-splashed Friday.

“Good burgers, sunshine and a nice excuse for a bike ride along the river,” said Alex Wentz, 35.

Wentz works out of his Eugene home in a medical-device manufacturing business and his daughter attends O’Hara Catholic School in Eugene, but, no, it was downtown Springfield for lunch.

“Forty-eight hours ago, I was doing business in Costa Rica and here I am, lunching in Springfield.”

True, downtown Springfield still has a few vacant storefronts; this isn’t nirvana. But, generally, it’s light years from what it once was.

“There was a time when people joked everybody who lived here had wheels under their houses,” David said. “But that’s changing. Once we got the picnic tables out there, about 2019, it was fun to see people from Eugene saying, ‘Wow, I never knew Springfield had this side to it.’ They were wide-eyed and their jaws dropped.”

“One time, we were showing our business partners from California around, and here was a Mercedes parked next to a BMW,” Nita said. “I don’t think we’d ever seen that before.”

Oregon Coach Dan Lanning has brought recruits to the new Tavern on Main for lunch. In 2024, actress Julia Roberts, in town to visit a son who attends UO, ate at George & Violet’s Steakhouse. The PublicHouse, a former church converted into a pub, made Men’s Journal’s list of “The Coolest Places in America to Drink Craft Beer.”

What began for the Lovealls as the purchase of one building, the Washburne, in 2008 has turned into much more. They’ve bought seven buildings, which, in the last 17 years, have become home to nine businesses and 32 apartment units.

In the summer of 2018, after a decade of moving the ball forward, the Lovealls decided to throw a block party to celebrate the kinder, gentler and, yes, yeastier — microbrews have replaced Hamm’s  — version of downtown.

“Honestly, we were like, ‘Do you think anyone will come?’” David said.

Two thousand people showed up. By 2022, the summer event had gotten so large that a professional event planner, Benjamin Wilkinson, was hired to run it.

The organizers of Herencia Hispana (Hispanic Heritage Night) invited The Block Party to share their date. The combined events shot attendance over the 10,000 mark in 2024, a year after they began blocking off Main Street for the festivities.

So, why the turnaround for downtown Springfield?

Over the decades, a lot of individual, civic and business energy has gone into the downtown blocks. The Southern Pacific Depot became the Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Center. The Wildish Performing Arts Center replaced a dormant movie theater. The Springfield Museum — it of the gigantic Kesey tribute — opened.

But the Lovealls’ decision, in 2008, to cash in their 401(k), bring in a California couple they know to invest and, together, buy the Washburne Building has been huge. This wasn’t just a business decision to line the couple’s pockets, this was a let’s-help-breathe-life-back-into-this-place decision.

“They’ve definitely been a driving force,” said Vonnie Mikkelsen, president and CEO of the Springfield Chamber of Commerce. “David and Nita have been out front on this with their typical pedal-to-the-medal approach.”

Indeed, when doing anything, the Lovealls — both are 63 — are known not only to jump in with both feet, but often off Acapulco cliff heights. They not only serve as missionaries in Uganda but adopted a son from there and named their new company Masaka Properties after a town in Uganda where their ministry is headquartered. David not only has spearheaded the redevelopment of downtown but ran for, was elected, and is already hoping for a second term as a Lane County commissioner.

In 2019, he won the city of Springfield’s Game Changer award and Masaka was named Springfield Business of the Year.

David’s zeal for Springfield goes back to his teenage days when he made frequent visits to Gerlach’s Drug Store’s camera department at Fifth and Main (now Emerald Art Center) to buy photo supplies for a Sheldon High photography class of which he was part.

Eilers, a managing partner of the store at the time and now 83, was impressed with the kid. He was earnest, mature and enthusiastic. Eilers offered him a job.

“Only when it came time to cut his first payroll check did we realize he was only 15 years old,” Eilers said.

Loveall, who became a professional photographer, has long been ahead of his times — and his vision for an upgraded downtown, rooted in his having worked there as a teenager, reflects that.

“What changes an area is when people actually live in a mixed-use zone,” he said. “When you get people to live here, you get businesses to come. And those people who live here expect a certain level of service that the businesses need to provide.”

For example, the Lovealls sensed a need for a grocery store, but they didn’t want a 7-Eleven-type convenience store.

“We were patient,” Nita said.

Eventually, she talked the owners of Eugene’s Friendly Street Market into opening Main Street Grocery, a place with a sort of New York grocery-store panache.

Besides patience, the keys for the Lovealls have been a willingness to risk and the good fortune of finding partners willing to join, and further, their vision.

“It’s been a slow roll of the dice, but we’re seeing people invest in Springfield and seeing a total change in the identity of the place,” David said. “In 1987, when we first moved to Springfield, you had 20 guys who lived under the bridge by the Willamette River coming over here to a bar every day at 2:30 p.m. to buy drugs. You had crack fights, needles lying everywhere — it wasn’t a good place to be. So we said: ‘Let’s build some living space down here for people to live full-time.’”

The two laugh, but that risk helped dilute the darker elements. So, too, did money.

“Sid Leiken, the mayor, asked me back then, ‘David, what do you think we should do to attract more people?’ I said, ‘Raise 3 million, buy out the three seedy bars in town and tell them to get the hell out of town.’ He said, ‘I like that idea.’”

The rebuild hasn’t been easy. Once, the fire marshal, inspecting the Washburne Building, told the Lovealls they’d need to put in an expensive sprinkler system before they could add apartments upstairs.

“Turns out it cost just what we could get for selling my 1965 Sunbeam Tiger,” said David.

Leadership experts will tell you that when leaders roll up their sleeves, others realize they’re the real deal and roll up their sleeves, too.

“This has never been only about money for the Lovealls,” said Mikkelsen. “Their hearts and souls are in this.”

Their Springfield roots led others with local roots to step up. In 2017, Mindy and Derek Weber, both 33 at the time, took over the Washburne Cafe with the help of a Springfield High friend, Charlie Hester.

“When we were growing up, we never came down here,” Mindy said. “It didn’t feel safe.”

But the trio envisioned turning the cafe into a local hub with a coffee shop that used quality local ingredients, that offered a warm, welcoming atmosphere, and might serve as a contributing stream to the river of downtown revival.

“We asked ourselves: What if we could be part of changing our own hometown?” said Mindy.

When they met David Loveall, they realized their visions aligned.

“He was incredibly encouraging to us,” she said. “We changed everything about the place but the name. It’s been a ton of hard work, but over the years, we’ve seen people’s opinions of their own town change to something more positive. It’s been an incredible thing to witness.”

Eilers, who began his job at Gerlach’s in 1961, remembers a vibrant, cozy downtown that deteriorated over the decades when many downtown retailers left for the malls and were replaced by strip clubs and vacancies.

Now, he says he’s been proud watching David Loveall “come full circle. His newest development, the three-story Rivett Lofts building, is directly across Fifth Street from the Gerlach Building, where he got his first job.”

And proud watching downtown Springfield blossom anew. He talks of how he, his wife and a friend recently decided to go downtown for takeout food. They had to circle a few times just to find a parking place, then found the restaurant so packed they had to wait.

“It was exciting to feel that, finally, some of the hopes, dreams and goals of the old Downtown Springfield Association had actually been realized. I’ve begun to think that downtown Springfield is Lane County’s Longest Food Court.”

And well worth the wait.

A previous version of this story misspelled the names of Sid Leiken and Vonnie Mikkelsen. Lookout regrets the errors.

Bob Welch writes a weekly independent column — Heart, Humor & Hope — on the Substack platform. For info, see bobwelchwriter.com. You can contact him at bobwelch@bobwelchwriter.com.