North Clinton Avenue|Rochester development|
North Clinton rising
A stalled ethnic market gains momentum
Albert Algarin is talking about a marriage. We are walking
along North Clinton Avenue,
as we do almost every Friday. Algarin, who’s due for knee surgery the next week,
uses a crutch to support his weight. The pale sun hangs overhead. Somewhere
nearby, a radio plays a Latin pop song. A woman dances on her stoop — a sexy,
soulful dance.
North Clinton Avenue,
says Algarin, is like a bride, “a bride waiting for her groom.” The groom, he
says, is La Marqueta. It’s a colloquial word: marqueta. Spanish street
talk, says Algarin, for marketplace. It’s more than that, though. It’s a hybrid
word, a reflection, perhaps, of the immigrant experience. Or maybe that’s a
stretch.
But so, then, is Marqueta: a proposed Hispanic marketplace
in the heart of Rochester’s inner
city. The land for the project is a barren field. A plastic bag bobs in the
wind and catches in the weeds. Nearby, along one of North Clinton’s
many side streets, glass shards and drug needles lie in the grass. Someone’s
ripped the siding off a house, now boarded up and marked for demolition.
But for Algarin, president of the North Clinton Avenue
Business Association and former Northeast Rochester
resident, there’s gold beneath this dirt. It glistens. See, he says. He’s
pointing to a clothing store painted orange, yellow, and purple. Across the
street, an Asian woman cranks an old lever to open the gate to her restaurant.
Toddlers from North Clinton’s BethesdaChildDevelopmentCenter walk hand-in-hand toward
Borinquen Bakery.
This, says Algarin, is what North Clinton
is all about: color, festivity, passion.
What it is not about is implied. It is not about the decay.
It is not about the crime, the arson, the gunshots in the night. Wipe North
Clinton clean, says Algarin, and you have not just a Latino hub,
but an international one. Look at the Yemenese clothing-store owner, the
Eastern European butcher on the corner, the new soul-food restaurant chef
serving up plates of chitlins and collard greens. Look at these merchants, he
says, and you begin to see what the area can be.
Remove the roof at
Marketplace Mallin Henrietta,add a few street vendors, novelty
shops, grass, flowers, benches, an open-air café, and maybe a church, and you
can envision something close to a placita.
These Latino marketplaces often serve not just as shopping areas but also as
town centers. They are places where people congregate to eat, shop, or just
pass the time.
Rethinking retail, however, is a difficult task — especially
in a climate as frigid and fickle as Rochester’s.
But if recreating the placita in its
entirety would be difficult in the northeastern United
States, creating a hybrid of sorts may be
possible. At least that’s what city officials hope.
The city addressed ways to clean up North
Clinton Avenue between Upper
Falls Boulevard and Avenue D — often referred to
as La Avenida — in its 2000 revitalization plan. Among the ideas was La
Marqueta, a retail complex on a vacant city-owned parcel in the 800 block of North
Clinton Avenue.
Using DeWolff Partnership Architects as their project
consultant, city officials envisioned a glass-encased building fronted by an
outdoor plaza with tiled walkways, gardens, and a fountain. Five years later,
those renderings have been scrapped, but plans for La Marqueta are moving
forward.
Larry Glazer of Buckingham Properties has agreed to buy and
develop the land. His was the only firm willing to take the risk. Among the
biggest developers in the city, Glazer’s projects include successful mixed-use
buildings on University Avenue
and a conversion of the Artcraft Optical building downtown. He also recently
bought the former GeneseeHospital
on Alexander Street.
Glazer describes Marqueta as a strip mall with a Hispanic
touch. It will be colorful, he says, and certain façade elements will reflect
Latino architecture. If his description sounds vague, it is. “I don’t want to
promise something that I can’t deliver,” says Glazer, who submitted preliminary
design plans to the city earlier this month. What he does say, though, is that
he would like to build a two-story complex, with 20,000 square feet of retail
on the first floor and 10,000 square feet of office space on the second.
Plans for the second floor, though, are tentative. Glazer
says there’s a need for basic services in the area, such as doctor’s offices
and counseling centers, but he’s not sure he can attract tenants. “We can’t
build it and hope they will come,” he says.
A controversial
part of Glazer plan is a parking lot in front of the site, which eliminates
the outdoor plaza. “It has been proven over and over and over again that when
you have retail, you must have parking in the front, because you can’t have two
entrances in the store,” says Glazer. “They can’t guard two storefronts. This
is the reality of what the market will accept.”
The city’s deputy commissioner of economic development, Phil
Banks, says he was disappointed to see the plans putting a parking lot in front
of the building. But he says it’s also important not to create a building that
limits retail potential, especially in such a high-risk area. “Even though I
didn’t like it, I had to understand where he was coming from,” says Banks.
“He’s the developer, and there are other designs aspects that I found very
attractive.”
Banks says Glazer will have to justify his proposal to a
project-review committee composed of city officials and private architects.
That committee will also determine what elements of the plan run counter to
zoning requirements and what variances Glazer would need.
Banks stresses that the city remains committed to creating a
noticeably ethnic marketplace. “It’s got to be something different for it to
work,” he says.
Stalling progress
currently, though, are not Glazer’s design plans for Marqueta, but neighboringbuildings that he believes will discourage people from shopping there. Of
particular concern, he says, is a needle exchange site.
“How am I possibly going to bring good tenants in when I
have a needle exchange there?” Glazer asks. The needle exchange will move to
another location in the area, and the city, says Banks, is working through the
condemnation process needed to demolish the building. But that takes time.
Glazer also wants to demolish a neighboring building housing
a Chinese restaurant and a couple of houses behind Marqueta. It’s impossible,
he says, to break ground on the project until those demolitions are completed.
Glazer says he doubts work will begin until at least the spring of next year.
He hopes, he says, to hold public forums for people to view and discuss his
design plans sometime this fall.
Glazer’s hesitation underscores perhaps the project’s
biggest challenge: its surroundings. The risks associated with Marqueta, Glazer
and other proponents acknowledge, are impossible to ignore. “Impediments to North
Clinton Avenue’s commercial success include high
vacancies, deteriorated buildings, sporadic retail blocks, and serious criminal
activity, including drugs,” city analysts wrote in their 2000 study.
Those problems are particularly prevalent in the
neighborhoods bordering North Clinton Avenue.
Many houses here are boarded up and covered in graffiti. Looters have broken
windows and stolen vinyl siding. Police Captain Mark Case, who often joins
Algarin’s Friday walks, advises people to wear thick-soled shoes to avoid
getting stuck by heroin needles. A huge challenge, says Algarin, will be to
convince people to shop in an area showing such decay.
For all the neighborhood’s difficulties, though, city
analysts found that several factors make Marqueta economically feasible. Rochester,
like many areas around the country, has seen a surge in its Latino population.
According to the 2000 Census, Rochester
was 13 percent Latino, and many of them are concentrated in the city’s
northeast quadrant. More than 40 percent of the people living around the
Marqueta site are Latino, according to the city’s 2000 economic analysis of North
Clinton.
The same analysis also determined that approximately half of
the occupied storefronts in the area had recognizable Latino names or carried
many Latino-specific products. But North Clinton
Avenue has more than just a Latino draw,
researchers found. With between 12,000 and almost 20,000 cars driving through
the area every day, North Clinton remains one of Rochester’s
most heavily traveled arteries.
“Only major roads such as Ridge
Road, Lake Avenue,
and the expressways have higher traffic counts,” researchers wrote. Moreover,
only about half of the residents in the area own a car, compared to more than
75 percent citywide. “Local residents will walk up to half a mile for weekly
shopping needs,” researchers wrote.
Finally, the researchers quoted a 1999 study by Hunter
Interests, Inc., which determined that northeast Rochester
can support up to 80,000 square feet of additional retail space.
Look at those
numbers! exclaims Gladys Santiago, vice president of City Council and
Council’s only Hispanic member. We’re
sitting in a diner on Culver Road.
There’s a bite to Santiago’s
voice. Marqueta is the primary reason she ran for office 12 years ago, she says.
Northeast Rochester is also the area Santiago
calls home. “Latinos, a lot of them ended up on Clinton
Avenue,” she says. “We were one of those families.
So my dad put a store up, a grocery store, sold all those products that he used
to get from New York.”
Various groups, says Santiago,
have been trying to revitalize North Clinton Avenue
for a quarter century. Originally, Latino leaders hoped simply to clean up the
street — which has been accomplished to some extent through small-business
improvement grants. Many stores have received coats of fresh paint, and
Algarin’s business association recently secured enough funds to place more than
25 planters along North Clinton.
But Marqueta has stalled. North Clinton’s
residents, says Santiago, not only
deserve Marqueta, they need it. Just look at the Tops at the Upper Falls
Boulevard-North Clinton intersection, she says: “It’s packed. It’s packed, for
God’s sake. If it was bigger, you know the business it would be making!”
Many, like Santiago
and Algarin, point to an East Coast Hispanic marketplace as indicative of
Marqueta’s commercial potential. Hartford, Connecticut,
first opened El Mercado 17 years ago. Since then, says Hartford Mayor Eddie
Perez, one of the project’s earliest proponents and New England’s
first Latino mayor, the strip has become the city’s ethnic hub.
Like North Clinton Avenue,
says Perez, Mercado’s commercial strip was riddled with crime. It had drugs. It
had gangs. It had murders. Now, he says, crime in the area has declined. And
Latinos from across the region visit Mercado to shop and eat both inside and
outside the complex. Mercado and its surroundings, says Perez, do better
business than Hartford’s center
city.
Much of the area’s success, he says, can be attributed to Hartford’s
Spanish American Merchants Association. Similar to Algarin and his efforts with
the North Clinton Avenue Business Association, SAMA leaders worked tirelessly
to clean up their commercial district. They too walked the street, got rid of loiterers,
and gained the trust of area business owners. Now, says Algarin, businesses pay
up to $30,000 to put the SAMA logo on their advertisements — money that goes
into growing Mercado.
Hartford city
officials are looking to build a high-end retail and housing complex next to
Mercado, says Perez. The area surrounding Mercado is still poor, he says, and his
hope is that a mixed-income project of this nature will elevate the area
economically as well as draw non-Latinos into Hartford’s
inner city.
Mercado, however,has one distinct advantage over
Marqueta: the Mercado area is more than 90 percent Latino. The North
Clinton area is less than half that.
But that alone, say Marqueta’s proponents, doesn’t erase the
similarities. Moreover, says Daisy Rivera Algarin, a bilingual marketing
specialist for the city and Albert Algarin’s wife, businesses on North
Clinton have a history of evolving to suit their clientele —
which includes Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Asians, and Eastern Europeans. “It’s
interesting to watch the menus,” she says, noting for example: “If you go to
Wang’s Chinese, you can get Chinese food and Puerto Rican tostones.”
Instead of referring to Marqueta as a Latino marketplace,
says Albert Algarin, it might be better to think of it as an international market
with a Latino feel. Non-Latino merchants in the area say they appreciate that
Marqueta might have room for them, as well. “We need a store for us,” says Fahd
Abdulsalam, a Yemenese immigrant and manager at His & Hers Apparel on North
Clinton. Given the opportunity, Abdulsalam would like to open a boutique
inside the Marqueta complex.
And Glazer says he would like to see a mix of small
mom-and-pop stores and larger franchises. “Just because it’s a Latino or black
neighborhood doesn’t mean that they don’t need basic services that everybody
uses everywhere,” he says.
The city’s economic development officials originally thought
that “people would come from Pittsford and all over to shop there,” says
Glazer. “I said, ‘I don’t think so.'” Marqueta may eventually have a regional
draw, he says, but the immediate goal should be to create a self-sustaining
marketplace.
Most hope, however, that Marqueta will eventuallyattract a wider audience. Marqueta,
says City Councilmember Ben Douglas, cannot exist in isolation. Not only should
it reduce blight and crime in the immediate area, but it should spread growth
outward, south toward downtown and north toward Irondequoit.
Whereas Algarin sees Avenida as the bride and Marqueta as the groom, Douglas
says: “If La Avenida is the bride, the groom is the entire community that
surrounds that area. Because the bride cannot make that marriage all by
herself.”
Marqueta can
replicate Mercado’s success, Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez says, if the city
and the North Clinton Avenue Business Association remain committed to the
project. “It has to be an investment that continues to get leveraged,” he says.
“You can’t just do one move and hope that that will finish it.”
Time, says Angelo Caraballo, the North Clinton Avenue
Business Association’s community liaison, is one thing he and Algarin
understand. Caraballo calls his commitment to the North Clinton
area his “15-year plan.”
Changes are already happening, says Algarin. When he began
walking North Clinton Avenue’s
business strip once a week in 2002, the situation there was “rough,” he says.
“I saw a lot of debris. I saw boarded-up houses in the business strip. I saw a
lot of hangouts,” he says.
Now, says Algarin, there appears to be a small resurgence in
commercial activity, and storefront loiterers have become less visible.
Caraballo points to the third story of a building. That, he says, is where
merchants asked police to hide out and watch for drug exchanges. The targeted
business has since closed shop.
Algarin recognizes, though, that there are a lot of
different voices and visions surrounding La Marqueta. But he says deep down
just about everybody involved in the project wants the same basic things. They
want, he says, to build a marketplace for those already living in the North
Clinton area, and they want to create a marketplace that people
— both inside and outside the city — look to as the ethnic center of Rochester.
“We’re here because we’re seriously committed to building
this neighborhood,” he says.
He’s cleaning up North Clinton
Avenue, Algarin says, for tomorrow’s generation:
“Those kids are living in the neighborhood that I lived in. If I can leave a
better neighborhood for them, then they’ll leave a better neighborhood for the
next generation and the next generation.”
This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 4, 2006.
