Visitors to historic districts in older cities around the world will often come across majestic public spaces, but it’s rarer in the U.S. because it’s such a relatively young country. One of the few examples of such places, one may be surprised to know, is in Cleveland, Ohio, known as the Old Arcade and is even said to be modeled after the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, Italy.
The first arcades were built in Paris in the early 1800s as reflection of the industrial age, offering a
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On the one hand you have authentic cultural destinations grown naturally, referred to as natural cultural districts (NCD)(image on the left), which attract creatives. On the other hand, you have developments that attempt to become such cultural destinations in one fell swoop, referred to on this site as corporate cultural districts (CCD)(image on the right). However, they tend to attract tourists and corporate employees with higher salaries than creatives. Here are the objective differences
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Presently, few visitors venture north of Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Station into what is known as Charles North, a 100-acre arts and entertainment district characterized by boarded up buildings. On October 30, 2008, Mayor Sheila Dixon (pictured) unveiled the Charles North Vision Plan to transform the area into more of a knowledge economy oriented natural cultural district (local businesses, human-scaled buildings, multiple developers) rather than the typical industrial economy corporate
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While farmers and public markets are experiencing a renaissance across the U.S., the Viktualienmarkt (Victuals Market) in Munich, Germany provides a model of what a city should do if it wants to take the next step in establishing a regional destination for culture and commerce. Originating from a farmers market itself in 1807, the 5-acre market features 140 stalls, shops and cafes offering your usual market fare times ten, but in a much more elegant setting.
Here’s what makes it Germany’s
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Ok, so those who’ve been down Silver Spring’s Ellsworth Drive in Downtown Silver Spring feel like they’re in Downtown Disney, but the takeaway here is that this is Maryland’s first successful pedestrian-only district (on weekends) in decades.
Ellsworth is the lone pedestrian-only street in the 22-acre mixed-use Downtown Silver Spring redevelopment, including 440,000 s.f. of retail. It’s more of a suburban shopping mall with its large-scale national retailers, but it does have a triangular
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If you live anywhere near Notting Hill in London you may never have to shop anywhere outside of Portobello Road, where the Portobello Road Market comes to life each day. Over a half mile long and closed to cars, it features three distinct public markets:
Monday-Friday, 9am-6:30pm with half-day closing on Thursday, 1pm: Fruit and vegetable market, with flowers and food vendors, primarily serving the locals.
Friday, Saturday, 9am-6:30 pm: Flea market, with a strong emphasis on fashion new
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What does $200 million have to do with cars? Absolutely nothing if you were in London’s famous West End shopping district on Saturday, December 1st, known as Shop West End VIP (Very Important Pedestrians).
That’s because 600 retailers on Bond Street, Oxford Street and Regent Street were open only for pedestrians, billed as the world’s largest area ever to be dedicated to shopping for the day. Not surprisingly, many retailers reported the best sales day of the year.
That’s just the
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The name ‘Delaware’ doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue when naming places to be, so the folks in Wilmington had their work cut out for them. The transition of a neglected area into what is now being billed as the LOMA Design District is a good example of economic revitalization and destination building, but not a great model if you’re sensitive to gentrification or a typical creative because most of you probably won’t be able to afford living or leasing there. Think ‘Meatpacking District’ in
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Managing a town center/main street of local, independent businesses can sometimes be comparable to herding cats, so cities are grateful that organizations like the National Main Street Center provide experience in helping them prosper. Their plan for recruiting new businesses follows a four-part plan, presented here with a cooltown edge:
Assess: What have you got?
- Take a two-hour tour of the retail district as if you’re seeing it for the first time and identify the good, the bad and the
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When people talk about a retail entertainment district they either have in their neighborhood, or visited elsewhere and want in their neighborhood, it helps to be able to classify the scale. Thanks to New Urban News and retail consultant Robert Gibbs, here’s a little retail primer (with a cooltown perspective):
Corner stores
Location: Within residential neighborhoods
Size: 1500-3000 s.f.
Offerings: Beverages, grocery items, sandwiches.
Minimum required population: 1000 households within
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It’s a familiar refrain from urban creatives, such as the following one from a progressive developer, “How can you legally do this? Keep out the chains and corporate company’s like Starbucks, the Gap, TGI Friday’s, McDonalds, HARD ROCK CAFE’S! They are all part of the whole “Generica” movement, you could be anywhere in the country and not no where you are based on your surroundings. I want [our neighborhood] to be something you can’t just get anywhere. How did other places keep out the
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Why is that Seattle’s grungy Pike Place Market is celebrating its 100 year anniversary as the longest running public market in the U.S., while the beautiful new Portland Public Market couldn’t stay open for ten years even as public markets are flourishing?
Simple. Pike Place had a public partner in the city and is run as a nonprofit, while the Portland Public Market was completely private sector. Pike Place Market was founded by the city in 1907 after citizens who were tired of being taken
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We all know Amazon.com serves the world’s goods, but how about if you just wanted to buy online from local neighborhood shops? Not only that, but what if delivery was free?! Well Pop to the Shops is another one of those ‘it was a matter of time’ services, though only in the UK.
What are the benefits to the consumer?
- Most local shops are open fewer hours and days, so this expands their hours to 24/7.
- Buy from all the stores in the neighborhood and pay once.
- Indie stores offer many
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Don’t shoot the messenger because I can’t disagree more, but this is one chain-oriented retail consultant’s take on why real estate developers choose chains over independent businesses: small retailers are lazy, will not work evenings and weekends, do not pay their rent on time, whine all the time, blame others for their failures, offer poor service, have low sales, do not update, clean or maintain their store interiors, and thus cannot pay market rate rent, but the exceptions are
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A local institution on Congress Avenue in Austin, Texas, Las Manitas, a Mexican restaurant and crowd favorites, must say goodbye after 25 years. It’s lease was up, and the building owner already signed a new one with Marriott. However, Austin’s city government isn’t your typical city government, and its leaders proposed to do something about it.
They’re proposing the Congress Avenue Retail Retention and Enhancement Fund to invest in the kinds of businesses they feel reflect the local culture
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Retail seen as ‘the Achilles’ heel’ of some TODs (transit-oriented development), reads a recent New Urban News headline, spotlighting the Latino Fruitvale Village retail center in Oakland, CA.
We highlighted its difficulties with attracting patrons at the beginning of this year. The key is to establish the retail center as a community center - the equivalent of the town square where ‘everything happens’. In other words, the place needs events, events and more events, and collective ones at
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Creatives, urbanites want local, indie businesses. Developers know about investing in real estate, not small businesses, and not only do national/regional chains make it easier for them, they can pay 3-5 times more rent. That’s a crippling dilemma.
Enter the VIBE beta community, where VIBE (introduced in the previous entry) stands for variegated independent business entrepreneur and the beta community is a future group of tenants organized as a community with a progressive vision tied to a
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A neglected series of buildings is expanding by an additional one million s.f. of retail, entertainment and university, yet there’s no additional parking being added? Yes, the $460M San Francisco Centre is indeed in a city like no other, but it just goes to show you that living-without-a-car is one of the hottest trends going.
Granted, by its sheer size and location it is a regional shopping destination, so that means predominantly chains, but take a look at the number of amenities it
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That’s the question answered by the Urban Land Institute, and the answer is that at least for the newly built town-center-style shopping centers, they’re trying.
All five examples provided in the report are unaffordable for most as far as residences and offices are concerned, and largely consisting of chains, but what’s noteworthy is that the developers are providing public spaces for everyone that have the potential for being third places.
In addition to thousands of square feet of window
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Most of the 22,000 residents of Hudson, OH (30 minutes from Cleveland) were no longer shopping downtown, but going elsewhere - a familiar story. Not so common however, is the level of vision and investment to reverse that trend.
The City and Hudson Village Development; a development company formed by Tom Murdough, a 31-year old entrepreneur who wanted better for his town, formed a public-private partnership to expand its historic 200-year-old downtown and village green. They sought
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Of the accepted applicants to the University of Connecticut each year, about two-thirds decide to go elsewhere. The #1 reason, based on annual surveys? Lack of a college town.
So, the Town of Mansfield CT, the University, and a visionary real estate developer, Leyland Alliance, partnered to establish the Mansfield Downtown Partnership to build… a college town center. And a pretty cool one at that.
Next year, the $165 million Storrs Center will commence, with 200,000 s.f. of retail and
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How does one turn a boarded up main street into the iconic historical, cultural and musical destination that is Beale Street today? It took an immensely forward-thinking young developer, John Elkington, that understood the history well enough to invest in its future. The following is based on his interview with Smart City Radio.
Brief history. In the 1920s and 30s Beale Street was an entertainment mecca for African-Americans and one of the few main streets in the country where they were
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For the last few decades, we were pretty much forced to drive to malls to shop at chains. It seems like the tide is turning, as one retail consultant puts it, “The behemoth mall is clearly giving way to more manageable, accessible and open-air centers.“ In other words, downtown main streets are ‘in’ again.
In this Wall Street Journal article, the company that owns all those ‘Mills’ malls, Mills Corp., is being sold on account of disappointing performances over its 42 malls. The tipping
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So how does one develop a new independent-business retail center as an economic success without going upscale? In continuation of yesterday’s entry, here’s Kennedy Smith:
“To make it work in everyday neighborhoods, or even in ‘slightly more affluent than everyday’ neighborhoods, the costs of that sort of intensive support system for independent businesses must be shared by the public sector (small business development centers, economic development agencies, etc.) and other private sector
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