At least they tried

At various times friends and family who are not downtown residents have asked why Phoenix doesn't do more in the way of Christmas decorations.  The city probably doesn't do much due to a lack of funding, preferring to leave the decorations to businesses like the downtown Hyatt and its huge Christmas light display or neighborhood organizations like Willo and Roosevelt and their Christmas Eve luminarias.  But it was nice to see the downtown core try to get in on the act.  This year the Downtown Phoenix Partnership set out luminarias along Adams Street between Second Street and First Avenue.  I happened to cruise along the street around 7:30 p.m. and didn't see anybody walking around checking out the luminarias, but it was a good try by the DPP to get something started.  Perhaps with more residents in the downtown core at the Cityscape apartments and with more publicity, downtown Phoenix's luminarias can become a little Christmas tradition.

Circle K outcome is evidence of downtown’s progress

Circle K yesterday retracted its application for a liquor license at its proposed site on the southeast corner of Seventh and Roosevelt streets, just hours before the Phoenix City Council was to consider the matter. Without a liquor license, the company’s plan to knock down a couple historic buildings on a prime downtown corner in order to build a suburban-style 16-stall gas station won’t happen. While this result seems like a no-brainer, this is the kind of fight that would have gone the other way even a decade ago. That’s because up until the turn of the century, there weren’t enough residents downtown to create a critical mass to fight a project like the Circle K development. But in 2012, a groundswell of residential opposition cropped up to defeat the suburban-style gas station, including the Garfield Organization, Evans Churchill Community Association, Downtown Voices Coalition, Thunderdome Neighborhood Association (sidenote, and with apologies, but what is that?), Roosevelt Row CDC, Concord Eastridge (developers of Roosevelt Point), Artisan Village Board of Directors and St. Croix Homeowners Association. At least half of those organizations didn’t exist in 2003. While downtown Phoenix residents still lose their share of battles in the struggle to create a vibrant downtown— see Robert Sarver’s decision to tear down the historic properties adjacent to US Airways Center— the Circle K outcome shows that the tables are beginning to turn.

Big win for downtown Phoenix

For all the bandwidth I’ve devoted to pummeling the Cityscape project, it’s good to finally have something positive to say. Construction started this week on a 12-story apartment tower that will sit atop the existing Palomar Hotel at Jefferson Street and First Street. This is great news as it further expands downtown Phoenix’s full-time residential population, putting additional foot traffic on the sidewalks, providing customers for local businesses, and even improving safety by adding what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street” watching out for trouble. Hopefully the apartment building is attractive and provides some definition in the form of balconies (which would be a nice counter to the heinous Palomar, which reminds me of the 1970s-era office buildings that were gutted or imploded in D.C. during that city’s recent building boom).  Whatever the outcome of the apartment building, it is probably safe to say that at the very least Cityscape is an improvement over the Arizona Center.