Eateries, Pubs Transform A Downtown

Interesting article in the Kane County Chronicle about changes in downtown Geneva, Ill. as a load of restaurants and bars come to the area. Some like the transformation of the town's Main Street, saying there's energy and activities that draw people to the area. Others, though, mourn the loss of conventional retail, complaining that the concentration of eateries is leaving little else in district.

It's an interesting issue, especially as I look at how Waltham transformed Moody Street into "Restaurant Row."

The owner of a specialty retail shop that's closing on Main Street, Geneva, Ill. makes an important point: It's not the high number of restaurants that's forcing her out; it's the presence of nearby chain retailers hurting her business. So, it's quite possible that for some communities, an eatery/entertainment theme is a more viable option for downtown business districts near major strip malls and shopping malls than trying to compete with the big-box stores and other national chains.

There's another issue in Geneva, Ill., though:

Mayor Don DeWitte attributed the growth of the pubs and restaurants along Main Street, in part, to the removal of on-street parking. That stemmed from the widening of the Main Street bridge and the rest of the street in 1997. The move eliminated on-street parking and narrowed sidewalks.

"I felt the removal of parking along Main Street would reduce the pedestrian-friendly environment," DeWitte said.

Aha, another important point. As I've said before, few downtowns can compete with malls for plentiful, convenient parking; their advantage is in streetscape and appealing sense of place. Waltham isn't trying to be a smaller version of Rte. 9 or the Burlington Mall. By offering something completely different, including an appealing park-once, walk-to-multiple-destinations streetscape - with a movie theater as anchor that offers some art cinema and foreign-film titles as well as commercial films - Waltham has created a downtown that draws people from nearby apartments/condos as well as residents of other communities.

What is Framingham creating in its downtown that will encourage anyone to come who doesn't have to, or anyone to stay and go to a second destination once they've gone to one?

‘The Day That Changed Edmonton Forever’

On the 50th anniversary of the opening of Westmount, Edmonton's first shopping mall, the Edmonton Journal's Mike Sadava (subscribers only now, sorry) can't help but wonder what the city would have been like without it and the flood of malls that followed.

Imagine Edmonton without the Eighth Wonder of the World, no seas of pavement, no food courts filled with Saturday afternoon shoppers. ...

Shafraaz Kaba, a local architect, thinks we have sacrificed plenty for our love affair with shopping malls.

'The first thing that comes to mind is that we would have been a little bit European in city planning,' Kaba says. 'They grew without the whole shopping centre paradigm.'

He thinks of London, which has a series of High Streets and town centres, little villages where people can walk to the butcher, baker or post office and rarely venture into a mall.

Kaba says without shopping malls Edmonton might have had numerous shopping streets with more commercial development intertwined with residential neighbourhoods. We might have been a city with a dozen pedestrian-friendly streets...

And what might the Framingham-Natick Golden Triangle have been, if it were planned as something besides a series of indoor malls, outdoor malls and strip malls? Rte. 30 could have been a pedestrian-friendly commercial boulevard, with storefronts at the sidewalk, outdoor seating at restaurants where you could watch people go by - picture Panera's and John Harvard's outdoor seating fronting a lively street scene instead of buried in parking lots. If planned differently, Rte. 30 could have had a pleasing street divider and well-designed crossings so people would be encouraged stroll from one side of the street to the other.....

Actually, it still could be that someday, if planners started now to demand such things in the area's zoning. It might take another generation, but at least it could happen.

A Happy Big Box Wasteland

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford speaks for many of us when he rails against the soul-less sameness of strip-mall America.

Do you want to feel like you might as well be in Tucson or Boise or Modesto or Wichita or Muncie and it no longer freakin' matters, because we as a nation have lost all sense of community and place?...

There is the Target. There is the Wal-Mart and there is the Home Depot and the Kmart, the Borders and the Staples and the Sam's Club and the Office Depot and the Costco and the Toys "R" Us and of course the mandatory Container Store so you may buy more enormous plastic tubs in which to dump all your new sweatshop-made crap....

Our crazed sense of entitlement, our nearly rabid desire for easy access to mountains of bargain-basement junk has led to the upsurge of soulless big-box shops which has, in turn, led to a deadly sense of prefabricated, vacuous sameness wherever we go. And here's the kicker: We think it's good. We think it helps, brings jobs, tax money, affordable goods. We call it progress. We call it choice. It is the exact opposite.

Result No. 1: Towns no longer have personality, individuality, heart.

I actually like the Container Store - and Borders, with the upstairs cafe (although I wish the deck looked onto a much better streetscape than the parking lot and Rte. 9) - but he has a point, and the column is worth a read.

It's a corollary of what Paul Krugman was talking about in his outstanding column French Family Values, when he noted that a "French family, without question, has lower disposable income [than an average American family]. This translates into lower personal consumption: a smaller car, a smaller house, less eating out. But there are compensations for this lower level of consumption." French schools are uniformly good, so families don't have to worry about getting kids into a decent district. They also don't worry about "losing health insurance or being driven into bankruptcy by medical bills.

"Perhaps even more important, however, the members of that French family are compensated for their lower income with much more time together. Fully employed French workers average about seven weeks of paid vacation a year. ... To the extent that the French have less income than we do, it's mainly a matter of choice."

How do we define quality of life? Is it how much money we have, how large our house is, how expensive our cars, how many TVs and computers we can buy? Or do things like leisure time, social ties and sense of community matter, too?

How do we definte quality of community? Is it strictly increasing tax revenues, higher property values and an attractive environment for large corporate development? Or do things like sense of place, walkability and appealing streetscapes matter too? I say they do. And I'm not alone.

Pittsfield Merchants Want Slower Traffic

While local officials in some communities worry about how to better speed traffic through their downtown centers, others actively seek ways of slowing traffic in order to make a more appealing commercial center for pedestrians. Among the latter: Pittsfield, Mass., where "increased parking and slowing down traffic on North Street were the two biggest areas of concern for shop owners," according to Capital News 9 TV.

"Slowing the traffic for pedestrians is the key to bring more people downtown," said Giora Witkowski of USBluesware, according to capitalnews9.com.

Downtown business districts may not be able to compete with a suburban shopping mall for easy, free and convenient parking; but if properly designed, they can strongly compete in the battle for shoppers with streetscape, ambiance and unique sense of place. After all, upscale consumers don't flock to Newbury Street because it's easy to park. And they don't patronize Waltham's restaurants and movie theater because Moody Street is quicker to drive down than Rte. 9.

New URL: PedestrianFriendly.com

After a year & a half doing this blog, I think it finally deserves its own URL. All the gartenberg.com/planblog links still work - and gartenberg.com/smartgrowth still redirects here - but now Planning Livable Communities is also at www.pedestrianfriendly.com .

Thanks for visiting, whichever URL you use!