Admit mistake - time to demall downtown
July 04, 2009
TERRY COOKE
The Hamilton Spectator
http://www.thespec.com/News/Discover/article/594177
Maybe we should just tear down Jackson Square and concede that building a suburban mall smack in the middle of downtown was a bad idea in the first place.
Pondering that possibility is an admission that the 1960s Urban Renewal Program has failed to deliver any of its promised benefits to Hamilton.
That type of transformation is exactly what is happening in downtown Rochester, New York. It is a city similar to Hamilton in many ways, and therefore local planners and civic leaders might want to pay attention to what they are doing.
We took our three kids there last week to visit the National Museum of Play in downtown Rochester. It is simply the best children's museum in this part of the world and we had a wonderful adventure.
During our stay, we were astonished by how much the place looked and felt like Hamilton.
I was also intrigued by the city's attempts to turn back the clock on their own unhappy experience with urban renewal.
Rochester, like Hamilton, is a mature industrial city perched on the shore of Lake Ontario. They too have relied economically on a couple of major employers (Kodak and Xerox) that have been in decline for several decades.
Each city has made some headway at diversification, focusing heavily on post-secondary education, the knowledge sector and a vibrant arts scene.
Both cities still have great inner city neighborhoods, and many downtown architectural treasures with tons of potential for adaptive reuse.
But the suburbanization of the two cities in the past few decades has decimated retail activity in each city core.
Urban renewal came a little earlier to Rochester than it did here. Rochester opened the first downtown indoor mall in the United States in 1962. Like Jackson Square, their Mid-Town Plaza was hailed at the time as a planning marvel that would reverse the decline of the core by providing climate-controlled comfort and lots of parking to the shopping public.
But lo and behold, middle-class shoppers looking for chain store stuff and free parking continued to opt for malls closer and more convenient to the suburbs where they now lived. And conversely, those niche retailers who historically thrived on downtown pedestrian traffic watched their businesses shrivel, as much of that action got sucked into the indoor malls.
Now, more than 50 years later, the city of Rochester is going back to the future. The financially failing Mid-Town Plaza is being demolished to return downtown to a traditional grid pattern of smaller block streets, which will accommodate new office towers, housing developments and storefront retail.
And they are also considering excavating and rewatering the historic Erie Canal, which was decked over in downtown Rochester decades ago for highway construction. It now presents a unique opportunity to create an authentic tourist draw for restaurants and hotels similar to the famous Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas.
Given the painfully slow pace of progress in Hamilton on relatively easy and inexpensive changes like one-way street conversions, I am not sure if we have either the political will or the wallet to consider anything as radical as Rochester. Plus we have a rather full civic plate pursuing a Light Rail Transit System and a Pan Am Games bid.
But urban experiments like the demalling of downtown Rochester are happening all over North America and show real potential to renew older cities.
Part of that process involves admitting some of the planning mistakes of the past and debating how we can best correct them, not only in Rochester but also here in Hamilton.