Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Downtown
Parking in rear sounds fine in theory, but just won't work for big-box retail. Any kind of retail, actually.
First, well over 90 percent of the customers arrive by auto, many of them in a minivan with kids. To keep them happy, you need to minimize the walk from car to entrance and from checkout to car. You can't ask them to walk an extra 200 feet, through a tunnel where a scary guy might be lurking, to get to the front entrance. If you turn the store around, you have the loading docks and blank rear wall lining the sidewalk on Addison.
Second, only a couple of types of retailers (notably fast food, where payment is separated from access) can afford to keep two entrances open. So you end up with signs on the sidewalk entrances saying "enter from parking."
About the best compromise you can hope for is the one used by pre-1970 supermarkets, having the store hug the sidewalk with parking to the side and a corner entrance serving both. But once the store grows beyond 80,000 sq ft, the parking lot becomes a lengthy void to walk past. In fact, that's exactly the site plan of this Kmart, which so infuriated TUP. Other examples include the Jewel on Chicago Avenue in Evanston, or the recently closed Southport store.
Parking on the roof is great, but that extra cost just isn't in Kmart's business model—and certainly wasn't for an in-city store in 1984.
I, too, am sometimes tempted by the idea of a California-style specific plan, that would try to imagine how a neighborhood would build out and set up the urban design guidelines for how it would all fit together. The problem is the one Yogi Berra aptly described: "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." In 1984, the CVS/Home Depot site was still industrial and everyone hoped it would remain so. More to the point, would we be happy today with 1984 thinking about urban design guidelines and how the city should look and function?
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This sounds a little defeatist to me. Of course in 1984 things were different and of course if you are building a Walmart in an exurban farm-field/suburb, there's no incentive to do anything other than drop a box in the center of a massive parking lot.
That being said, I think you've presented a false dichotomy, where the alternative is parking in rear or parking in front, by dismissing working examples of alternatives. Maybe that Kmart needs to have lots of parking. It doesn't need to have parking just like that. A parking lot facing the street with the building sitting at the rear is the worst-case-scenario. It's reasonable to argue that we need to have *some* large retail and car-centered development but it isn't reasonable to say that we have no option other than to sit back and accept whatever Kmart wants.
First, if meeting a standard of simply "very bad construction" isn't in a company's business model, then they shouldn't be allowed to build in a place that cares about its urban environment. If their business model requires acres of ugly parking, then they should change that model or fail to succeed in a city like Chicago. There's no law that says every neighborhood needs a Yarn Barn.
The Jewel at Kinzie and Desplains has a large, ugly parking lot and the Jewel itself only presents one entrance, facing the parking lot, not the street. Still, the street is much, much more pleasant to walk by than if the store was set back and there was a parking lot at the corner. I recently walked by a crummy one-story Medical building on Grand that had it's 10-car lot in the back instead of the front, and even though the foot-print of the parking, the curb-cut and the itself building were nearly identical to all of those crummy MRI centers with 10 spots right off the sidewalk, the environment was substantially improved by parking in the rear. I don't like strip-malls, but some have inward facing entrances, with buildings lining the perimeter of the lot and surface parking in the interior. These are much less offensive than the alternative.
I don't think its reasonable to say looking to minimize the damage done to our urban experience by parking is some sort of new urbanist fantasy. That Kmart is the way it is; but it is non-optimal and the way it presents itself to the neighborhood could be better. If a business like that can't exist without killing a pedestrian experience, then it shouldn't be permitted.
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