In Search of a City: So Long City Center
Hurray for Capitol South for demolishing City Center and creating a site for future, long-term development. Finding an adaptive reuse for City Center is next to impossible. The building is about as versatile as a vacant big box store.
Small-scale, incremental development on a traditional street grid is what makes a downtown work. The best downtowns evolve over many years.
BIG IDEAS often get cities in trouble. In the 1950s, the BIG IDEA was building highway canyons into downtown areas and ripping down tens of thousands of houses. The 1960s brought us urban renewal, which cleared hundreds of acres of “slums,” further destabilizing urban neighborhoods and fueling flight from the center city.
The BIG IDEA in the 1970s was skywalks, built as part of a plan to make downtown one big bunker. The bunker plan got refined in the 1980s, when downtown malls were built to make downtown feel just like the suburbs. Neat!
Now is the time to get out of the way and let entrepreneurs rebuild downtown one building and one storefront at a time. A little patience will get us the best result.
February 24th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
I had originally hoped that the building could have been salvaged and “turned inside out” to make it more outward-facing and pedestrian-oriented, but I completely understand the decision to go the more economically feasible route and knock it down instead. The building was never really meant to function as anything other than a big enclosed suburban-style mall.
Anyway, the 9-acre park is a better short-term solution than a big empty abandoned zombie mall.
And the longer-term mixed-use development is pretty much what I wanted to see come out of a re-use of the space anyway, so I’m happy that the ball is starting to get rolling.
I totally agree that this type of redevelopment is best when organic and entrepreneurial. Downtown has come a long way in the past 10 years, and I can’t wait to see where we are in another 10.