Duke Reiter leaves a mixed legacy at ASU

Leave it to the Arizona Republic to give nothing but glowing reviews to ASU's Wellington "Duke" Reiter, the former dean of ASU's college of design, who is headed to Chicago to take the top job at one of that city's universities.

However, I'm sure there are a lot of downtown Phoenix activists who are happy to see him leave.

Reiter did spearhead the development of ASU's downtown Phoenix campus, and he did prod the city of Phoenix to re-examine itself. He made a powerful comment a couple years back, stating-- and I paraphrase-- that it was an open question as to whether Phoenix would ever become a real city and not just an overgrown suburb.

But on the other hand, Reiter was 100% behind the decision to wipe out nearly all of the buildings on the site of what is now the Civic Space park. Only a public outcry spared the A.E. England building from the wrecking ball, and supposedly Reiter pulled some strings inside the City of Phoenix to pull the building off historic registers so that it could be demolished. (Of course, Reiter later took credit for preserving the building in a laughable bit of revisionist history). ASU downtown Phoenix also wiped out the Taylor Street bungalows.

And what did we get in return from the design dean? Some good and some bad, and a lot of question marks. The good: the ASU journalism building is a true city building that will feature a news zipper and a restaurant and enhance the streetscape. The bad, or at least the mediocre: the new Taylor Place dorms are pretty institutional-looking, and the nursing building was going to turn more blank walls to the downtown streets until another public outcry caused ASU to back off its variance requests. And the civic space park is a question mark (and the public art was installed by the city with the backing of the artist community-- and that almost bit the dust so that the park could open at the same time students return to ASU in fall 2008).

So Reiter's legacy includes helping get the ASU downtown campus off the ground, but also includes a lot of clear-cutting the little shreds of history Phoenix still has in favor of some mostly underwhelming university buildings. On balance, I can't say I'll miss the guy.