It
was an odd question, and I took a long moment to react.
There I was at the corner of Main and Gibbs,
right under the Eastman Theatre marquee. A young woman came up and pointed to
the Central YMCA across the street. How do you get into that building? she asked. Where’s the entrance?
Huh?
Is this for real? I thought. Then I saw the problem. You enter the Y from a
platform, not straight in from the sidewalk. In certain light conditions, the
entrance looks darkened, even obscure. The building also fools you with a kind
of false entrance at the corner. Actually a multi-story set of windows, this
“entrance” allows light but not people into the building.
Don’t get me wrong: The Y is a solid
and useful facility. And it’s a lot more accessible than many old buildings.
It’s just that it represents a modern dilemma or duality. Today we have many
public or semi-public buildings that are very open (for example, to people in wheelchairs) but still uninviting.
This duality was what brought me to Main and Gibbs in
the first place.
Specifically, I was checking out Main Street’s 21st
century character, its pluses and minuses, its past
and future. That was a bit of an overload, so I also took refuge in simple
pleasures: The street’s impressive visuals. The cohorts of tall buildings, with their angular relationships
with the side streets. The feel of something not unlike the clichéd
“mountain ranges” of Manhattan — let’s
say, some decent “foothills” of brick, stone, and concrete.
The four compass points at Main and Gibbs
encapsulate a special history, one that still informs Main Street as a whole.
The Theatre, on the southeast corner, is a cultural, historic, and
architectural anchor. The new Y, on the northeast corner, is a replacement for
long-gone storefronts. (The original Y, located on Gibbs just behind those Main Street storefronts,
was torn down years ago.) On the southwest corner, there’s a pocket park right
out of modern manuals about public space; and on the remaining corner, there’s
a large parking lot without a map to the future.
What
will become of Main Street? In the Age of Wal-Mart, that’s a general question that dogs
American communities of all sizes.
These days in Rochester, however,
anxieties about older commercial areas revolve around a single question,
admittedly a big one: the Renaissance Square project, a complex that would put
a bus terminal, performing-arts center, and office tower into one complex on East Main immediately
west of Clinton. But what
about the rest of Main within the central business district
— loosely the section within the Inner Loop, with some spillover on each end?
This length of street certainly has
caught the attention of local architects and planners. And what’s most
attention-grabbing is the way Main Street’s details
work together as almost a unit.
Everyone knows, or should know, that
Main Street has its share
of great buildings: the old Sibley’s department store (now housing college
classrooms, etc., but no longer a DMV branch), the historic GraniteBuilding, the
fireproof-pioneering PowersBuilding, and others.
But how it all hangs together makes the differences.
Overall, Main Street “ranks
high because it’s reasonably intact,” says Rochester architect
Roger Brown. “It’s long, straight, and linear” with “really wonderful
space.” Too many main thoroughfares in the country, says Brown, have had
their street walls broken up with inappropriate development, most notoriously
parking lots.
What we have today, says Brown —
whose firm, Barkstrom and LaCroix,
has offices on Chestnut Street — are two
very different conceptions of “public realms.” In suburban areas, he
says, “buildings are just sort of scattered around,” with “no
sense of cohesiveness.” In urban areas, relationships are what matter
above all else. “It’s so important how buildings relate to the street… how
villages and cities create their identities, their life.”
“In New York
City,” says Brown, “you walk down the streets; the
first floors are loaded with activity, and the second floors have these
wonderful windows.” The combination, he says, just invites you in. He
contrasts this very urban atmosphere with what Rochesterians
see along South Avenue near Main, for example:
a long bare wall of the RiversideConvention
Center, and further down, the fortress-like
first story of the Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield
headquarters.
“Whatever
you do with buildings in the public realm, they have to be set up for
pedestrian-related [uses],” says Brown. Such configurations, he says, draw
people to older cities like Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South
Carolina.
So what do we do about our own Main Street? How do we
make it better?
Brown has some suggestions for
upgrading parts of the street. He addresses, for example, the intact row of
historic structures on West Main in the
Cascade District. “I see those potentially as more residential in
nature,” he says. Residential construction might work nearby, as well, for
example where the old Hotel Rochester stood until recently. The new
development, he says, wouldn’t have to be as tall as the old hotel or some
surrounding structures. “Three or four stories could do the job,” he
says. He adds that “the incorporation of green space is very
important” in making such new buildings and streetscapes attractive and
livable.
He’d also like to see new means of
travel. Chattanooga, he says, is
just one city that’s put in small electric buses to serve its main drag.
“They ply up and down,” he says — something like Rochester’s
now-abandoned EZ Rider, but without the noise and exhaust.
Brown looks eastward from the
Central Business District, as well. “Downtown,” he says, is
“where you concentrate more on office use and some residential,” he
says. Then “you cross the Inner Loop and concentrate on lower-scale
commercial with residential.” Planners could carry this down to the
neighborhood around the Main Street Armory and the now-abandoned Eastman Dental
Dispensary, says Brown. He views the Dental Dispensary as a prime candidate for
residential redevelopment.
The behemoth down the street is
another story. “I think it’s hard when you have an armory that’s so
huge,” says Brown. “It’s glorious, but it’s tough.” But if
residential construction were put around it, he says, the Armory might make a
great indoor market, as in some other cities. (Compare Toronto’s St.
Lawrence Market, an enormous vertical and horizontal space containing a myriad
of small semi-open shops.)
Brown says “a vision plan”
must be drawn up for Main Street between the
Inner Loop and the bridge near Goodman
Street. The vision might start with bringing
the Inner Loop up to grade, all the better to create “a residential
gateway” to downtown. “You can’t string it out; it’s the concentrated areas that are the most
successful ones,” he says. “You need to always think about the
building in relationship to the next building.”
Jim Doukas — who with his wife, Shelley, owns and operates the
Penguin Restaurant on East Main near
Alexander — has his own thoughts about what the street could be.
He starts with the inevitable
comparison: “It’s a lot tougher than it used to be, even five or six years
ago.” He notes that the Dental Dispensary, just across from the Penguin,
has been vacant for more than two decades. But other outfits have moved out
more recently, he says, including a Blue Cross office quite near the
restaurant.
Doukas and
his wife live on GardinerPark, off
Alexander and Union, an easy walk from the restaurant. He
says his father, now retired, bought the Penguin in 1972 from the original
owner, who’d opened it in the 1930s. The building, says Doukas,
was built in 1908 or 1909; renovations came later.
What possibilities does a small
independent businessperson see for this end of Main, now sprinkled with things
like a busy car wash, a Wendy’s, and closer to downtown, a KFC? (On the other
hand, there’s also an old home that long has housed WDKX radio.)
First, Doukas
says he’s not getting enough attention from City Hall. “It kind of
sucks,” he says. “All the money is going to Brown’s Race and East Avenue. They paved [East Main] two years
ago, but they kept it the same way.”
This section of East Main suffers from
a common bias, says Doukas: People say, “You go
a block over and you’re in the ghetto.” Moreover, the street risked taking
a hit from bad publicity after a tragic fatal late-night shooting a short time
ago. But that well-publicized story didn’t damage the street’s reputation, says
Doukas. In fact, he says, things are looking up in
some ways. After a nearby gay-oriented restaurant stopped serving fish fries,
he says, the Penguin took up the slack. “Our Friday nights, we have a big
gay clientele,” he says. The restaurant is generally busy on weekends, he
says. Some of this is spillover from matinees at the Auditorium.
And there’s diversity of all kinds.
“We have a total mix, from one end to the other,” says Doukas. “It’s fun.”
Over at City
Hall,
some Main Street projects —
on the conceptual level, at least — are getting in gear.
For example, planners and
stakeholders put together a Center City
Master Plan last spring. The plan, part of the implementation phase of Rochester 2010: the Renaissance, lays
down guidelines for downtown projects. It includes a strong statement that
could apply to Main, especially: “Great cities are
made from great streets.”
One chapter, the “Center City
Concept Plan,” mentions or alludes to Main Street in several
connections. It urges the “elimination of ‘barriers’ created by the Inner
Loop Expressway” on the east side. It calls for development of a transit
center along Main. (It doesn’t specify a Renaissance
Square-style combo, however. Note that alternative proposals exist; the most
competitive one is a plan to put amenities for bus riders in the old Sibley’s
— and keep the buses on the street.)
Significantly, the Concept Plan
emphasizes “an enhanced pedestrian circulation system with new linkages
[and] connections to the GeneseeRiver and to Main Street.”
Larry Stid,
the city’s director of community development, says anything done along Main Street should fit
with the character of Sibley’s, the GraniteBuilding, and other
major structures. He acknowledges that most existing projects within the Inner
Loop are happening off, not on Main Street as such. But
things are cooking very close by. Stid cites the
residential conversion of the historic TempleBuilding near the
Liberty Pole, as well as the renovation of the Stern building just north of Main Street. This kind of
redevelopment could pay off in the Auditorium neighborhood, as well, he says.
Stid also
points to near-Main residential developments such as the Gary Stern’s
conversion near Chevy Place and Christa
Development’s Sagamore, high-end condominiums nearing
groundbreaking on East Avenue.
Stid hopes
that a new federal transportation bill will provide money for transportation
enhancements. He says other possibilities exist, too: heightened legal
protection for significant buildings that don’t yet have landmark status, for
example. (Such protection could cover buildings like the DentalCenter, which as Stid says has faced the threat of demolition more than
once.)
“Not having certainty has had
somewhat of a dampening effect,” Stid says.
Enter the new RochesterRegionalCommunityDesignCenter, which helps
planners, architects, neighbors and other stakeholders preserve and rethink
urban space, by hosting “design charrettes”
on request.
Timothy Raymond, RRCDC board
president, agrees that Main Street is “very
urban” and “very intact,” despite some breaks in the street
wall. (One break he mentions is at the very center of things: the southwest
corner of Main and Clinton, where the Chase Square building is
set behind a plaza of sorts.)
“It’s a classic Main Street,” says
Raymond. “You can’t say anything’s wrong with it,” he says, apart
from the problem of vacancies. “Some places are crying for development,
like Main and Plymouth, where all
four corners are vacant now.” He says the RRCDC and others have
recommended that Stone Street be extended
north across Main. (That’s right through the site of the
proposed Renaissance Square; if the controversial project goes ahead, the
extension could run through a covered arcade.)
The important point here, says
Raymond, is to create more “access points” to Main Street while also
developing greater densities.
Raymond believes the transit
discussion should focus on improving service. He notes that County Executive
Maggie Brooks recently mentioned a combination bus terminal and performing-arts
center that’s succeeded in downtown Dayton, Ohio. Indeed, as
the Democrat and Chronicle reported
last month, Brooks said the Dayton facility
“spurred housing development” there.
But as Raymond says, the Dayton facility
keeps its performing arts indoors, while leaving the buses on the street. That,
he says, seems more like an alternative proposal for a bus station, which has
been dismissed by the transit authority. That proposal would bring the bus
riders into the old Sibley’s, while keeping the vehicles outside.
This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2004.
