Plaza Centro is actually looking very nice and urban as you enter downtown, i'll have to try to get a photo of the construction from that angle.
Plaza Centro garage work greets drivers into Downtown
By Teya Vitu
As you emerge from the Broadway underpass, concrete columns stick out of the ground and a rounded, wooden shell gives the first sense of the Plaza Centro Garage at the very east edge of Downtown.
The rounded south end is the curved ramp for what will be a 370-space garage scheduled to open at the end of August.
What the construction site is not telling you yet is that the Plaza Centro Garage brings with it Downtown’s first truly urban setting.
The Pennington Street Garage from 2005 was Parkwise’s first foray into adding urban touches into a garage. Café Poca Cosa sits on the garage’s street level as do the Parkwise and Downtown Tucson Partnership offices.
The Plaza Centro Garage, 345 E. Congress St., takes that hint of urbanity to the next level.
The tiny 1.93-acre site is wedged between Congress Street, the Fourth Avenue underpass and the railroad tracks and will offer 20,000 square feet of street-level retail, 8,000 square feet of townhouse or office space and 50,000 square feet for an estimated 50 residential units. And, oh yes, the 370-space parking garage on four above-ground levels.
“We are creating a true urban environment,” said Teresa Vasquez, downtown planner for the Downtown Tucson Partnership.
The retail and office/townhouse space will wrap around the western and northern faces to largely mask the garage in back. The 50 residential units would go atop the garage, said Chris Leighton, parking program coordinator for the city’s Parkwise, which operates the parking meters and the Pennington, Depot Plaza, Library and City/State garages.
Parkwise is in partnership with Jim Campbell of Oasis Tucson, who would build the residential and office space.
Plaza Centro has been Campbell’s brainchild for more than five years and would also include mixed-use development on the city parking lot (former Greyhound station) between the Rialto Theatre and Plaza Centro Garage. That lot will close once the garage opens, Leighton said.
Construction so far has focused more on each end rather than the middle. By early February, work had reached the third of the four levels.
“It’s getting to a point where people may start getting a sense of what it will look like,” Leighton said.
D.L. Withers Construction is building the garage. D.L. Withers moved its offices Downtown a year ago to 147 N. Stone Ave., and was the title sponsor for the Downtown Parade of Lights in December.
Construction started in October on the $6.5 million Plaza Centro Garage, at the same time Parkwise opened the 286-space underground Depot Plaza Garage next to the new Martin Luther King Jr. Apartments and the One North Fifth Apartments.
Drivers really haven’t found the Depot Plaza Garage yet because the plaza atop it remains a fenced-off but unworked construction site. Access is on Fifth Avenue just behind One North Fifth and across from the west end of Hotel Congress.
“It’s very low usage right now,” Leighton acknowledged. “It’s a very convenient location for the east end of Downtown.”
Half the garage is set aside for monthly rentals from One North fifth and MLK tenants, and half are available to the public at the same rates that apply at the other Parkwise garages: a free first hour and $2 for 2 hours.
But the Depot Plaza Garage is the only Parkwise-operated garage where you can pay by credit card at the gate if you forget to pay before you get back to your car.
The city leases the Depot Plaza Garage from the Rio Nuevo Multipurpose Facilities District, which owns the garage, and Parkwise operates it.
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