* According to the Roosvelt neighborhood newsletter, opening on the second floor of the building at 701 W. McDowell (the former Emerald Lounge site that will soon house Pei Wei and Starbucks) will be a wine bar and lounge tentatively called the "Second Floor Lounge." The lounge is to open in the fall.
* Here's a thoughtful, though depressing, link arguing that Phoenix will never have a real downtown. I'm not sure when the article was written, but I believe many of its contentions-- that Phoenix is too "car-addicted," afflicted by zoning, or just too hot-- are undermined by the rise of successful downtowns in places like San Diego and Denver. San Diego is car-afflicted and a product of a zoning regime, and Denver has those problems plus frigid weather, and both have built quality downtowns. If it can happen there it can happen in Phoenix as well. And can we stop using weather as an excuse for Phoenix's downtown? Has anyone ever spent time in Boston or New York in the winter, or in DC at any time of year? The weather sucks, and yet those downtowns are thriving. So weather by itself isn't a factor.
* Citing the proximity to the arts district, light rail, and the burgeoning condo market, upscale Layers Furniture has opened its showroom at 824 North Central Avenue in the spot formerly occupied by Greta's Pet Boutique.
* Downtown restaurants get a thumbs up on a web review site, but meanwhile on another site downtown Phoenix in general gets a thumbs down.
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4 comments:
Where can one subscribe (or if its not delivered, find) the Roosevelt Neighborhood Newsletter?
That was a great piece on downtown, very thoughtful and insightful. I got a whiff of some Kotkin-style rhetoric, however. I'm not sure if the "cargo cult" fallacy is real or a kind of ideological counterpunch to ANY effort to induce some urban energy. Still, that's a quibble for what amounts to some very fine analysis.
I agree weather should not be the dagger in the heart of downtown Phoenix. It is too hot in the summer but virtually everything we've in terms of "people places" in outdoors. Desert Ridge, Mill Avenue, the coming Tempe Marketplace, the Biltmore and neglected gems like Town and Country. I'm not sure why interior malls feel so dead, but I suspect it's just the fact of an environment that feels over-controlled and sterile.
Downtown does need heat mitigation, however. Shade trees - LOTS OF THEM - should be planted. The city will opt for desert trees, of course, and it's possible that it's already too hot for non-desert street trees. The downtown microclimate will bake their roots during the summer.
I spent New Year's in Vancouver, which is a kind of anti-Phoenix in terms of the urban form. The weather was HORRIBLE. Cold rain, cold wind, snow and slush. And it was great. People are not insane - they will stay off the sidewalks during the worst of it - but a city magnetizes people outdoors naturally. If Phoenix can ever decode the urban puzzle, that will be true here as well.
Ultimately, getting people out of their cars and onto sidewalks will require lots of girdle-stretching gyrations. A little bit this, a little bit that, and eventually there's some shapeliness. It's true our car-addiction is a fact of life and unlikely to change signficantly minus a severe energy crunch. San Diego is luckier than Phoenix since it had and retained lots of great pedestrian-scaled retail, not only downtown but in its now-flourishing urban neigbhorhoods. Still, there's only so much you can do when the scale has been embedded in concrete: cars, not pedestrians, are the default units of planning in both Phoenix and San Diego. Changing that will be virtually impossible although we should concentrate on making it feasible in certain areas: downtown, Tempe, Central Avenue, etc.
William- I get the newsletter delivered to my mailbox in the Roosevelt neighborhood (I never asked for it, it's just sent there). I've seen it sitting around at Portland's and in the Roosevelt Square leasing office, and you can always try their e-mail, info@rooseveltneighborhood.org.
Walt- on San Diego- the city considered razing a huge part of its downtown in the 1970's, but decided against it...that area is now the Gaslamp District. Meanwhile, in Phoenix, even with three decades of hindsight to help us, we keep plowing down our last few historic structures. The little bungalows on Taylor Street are the next to fall.
It's true Phoenix has squandered a virtual ransom in fine historic buildings. On the other hand, our downtown was so small that when post-war, autocentric growth came, there were really no other options: tear the buildings down or simply abandon the idea of a downtown core. In sad fact, Phoenix did both! There were many tear-downs that were completely unjustified: the Fox Theater, e.g. Others, like the Luhrs Hotel or the Fleming Building were a bit more problematic. San Diego, by contrast, had a large enough downtown footprint that when the sterile construction of the 1960s devastated one downtown after another, SD concentrated the vandalism north of Broadway. Gaslamp was preserved for sailors on shore leave.
Sometimes I think we're trying to alchemize a city out of inorganic elements: the whole superblock mega-project disaster. Since this experiment has failed in virtually every city, it almost seems like our learning curve is a flat line. But Phoenix has few real choices left. It may be the biggest obstacle is our impatience with the idea of nurturing. We want a world-class downtown and we want it now! But it's the nooks and crannies where urban life is created, not the wholesale makeovers.
This is why losing the modest Taylor St buildings is just one more sign how little we understand our predicament. We want a city with density and vertical thrust, but people on the street want an intimate, pedestrian-friendly scale. For whatever reason, modern architecture has been hostile to this need for intimacy. So the loss of any old building is really another lost opportunity to "find" the city we're all craving.
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