Main streets are no longer the department-store-oriented retail districts they used to be.  Now they must be entertainment retail districts to survive and thrive, which is consistent with our shift to an experience economy.  Here are the new retail categories as the industry resource Urban Land Institute sees them.

Fun and leisure - interactive sports, sports bar, coffee bar, outdoor cafe, billiards/bowling/games;
Nesting - home entertainment, furnishings, and electronics;
Health and beauty -

read more…

They’re worth at least that much a year in cash to a main street, but that’s just the beginning.  Just ask Sylvia Allen of Allen Consulting, who is a guru at attracting sponsor dollars for main streets and has the following tip:

Simply putting up attractive vertical banners throughout a small downtown will bring in a good share of revenue to market its merchants, not to mention providing a tremendous amount of identity.  People often identify a mall as a single, one-stop destination, but they

read more…

Boulder’s downtown pedestrian street (Pearl Street) is one of only a few in the U.S. that survived the regional enclosed mall phase that began in the 1960s and now ending.  What’s their secret?

Pearl Street’s shops and restaurants account for only 30% of its square footage, all on the ground floor. A whopping 52% is devoted to private offices, mainly on the second and third floors, while the rest (18%) is government offices and other civic uses as churches, the bus depot, and police station. 

read more…

As they say, “If San Francisco had a French quarter, Belden Place would be it.“  It’s an intimate, human-scaled alley lined with cafes, tucked away between Bush and Pine, Kearny and Montgomery streets in the Financial District.  The entire pedestrian-only street (paseo) is one elongated dining room, and a larger version of the ones in Sienna, Spain.

While they do celebrate Bastille Day in the alley, the day-day culinary experience is anything but exclusively French.  On any given day, one can

read more…

In addition to the new and exciting restaurants and shops (eg the CakeLoves) that can spark a downtown revival, you need the neighborhood institutions, the ones that withstood the riots, the mass exodus to the burbs, urban renewal and the relentless unpredictability of keeping a restaurant open.  Why?  Because it not only provides a sense of history and place, but a sense of security that the same people have been in the same place for so long.

Easier said than done, but Ben’s Chili Bowl,

read more…

Is it a place full of cool, or clones?

The people at the New Economics Foundation, an economic think-tank in London, put together a great tool for finding out, and you can get the pdf survey via the link at the bottom right of their website.  It’s more or less giving 5 points for every town center shop/venue, 5 points for every clone (ie chain), 50 points for every independent, then dividing that total by the number of venues.

The five towns we analyzed on our CoolTown tour had a score of

read more…

That’s the advice of downtown consultant Susan Nigra Snyder of CivicVisions, in this so-titled article on the revitalization of a small college town main street.

“It’s how Madonna reinvents herself every few years,“ she says in the article. “You have to transform the way people see it and use it, so it gets connected to the contemporary buzz.“

That means think like an entrepreneur, and entrepreneurs focus on how to use their existing assets to provide something that people want today.  That

read more…

That’s the tagline of this article on why independent businesses rock, and Wal-mart, uh, doesn’t.
It notes that “in Iowa alone Wal-Mart wiped out 555 groceries, 298 hardware stores, 293 building supply stores, 161 variety stores, 158 women’s clothing stores, 153 shoe stores, 116 drug stores, and 111 men’s and boy’s clothing stores in 10 years.“  One of the premier business consultants in the world, C.K. Prahalad, states “The world’s largest company today, Wal-Mart, was created to serve poor

read more…

According to Steven Gartner, president of Metro Commercial Real Estate, the revitalization of urban retail follows four phases.  Gartner played a leading role in Center City Philadelphia’s expanding retail scene and many of its economically-growing neighborhoods.

1. Local restaurants, started by great chefs.  Or visionary entrepreneurs who know great chefs, like a Chris and Finn Berge who nearly single-handedly revitalized commercial districts with destination restaurants.  People will

read more…

What are the most successful trends in retail for the creative class?  One of the best ways to find out is to visit five of the most successful creative class-oriented towns and their neighborhoods and not only study the overall retail mix, but the most popular venues as well.  The cities included Cambridge MA, Madison WI, Athens GA, Burlington VT and Ann Arbor MI.

The study conclusions, an extensive collection of photos, statistics, and focus group results are provided in the exclusive

read more…

For a vibrant, active, economically successful pedestrian street (paseo), it must have the following:

1. Unique, independent restaurants, cafes, coffeehouses, bars (preferably half the number of venues) so the area is worth visiting in the first place.
2. Outdoor seating for all of the above, providing a strong sense of street life.
3. Significant amounts of housing surrounding the district, ideally also above the first or second floors of the pedestrian street.
4. Lots of trees to provide

read more…

Hundreds of pedestrian malls built in downtowns across the country in the 1970s and 80s failed.  However, downtowns overall failed during that time, as regional malls became all the rage in a time before people experienced traffic congestion.

Back to the future:  However, regional malls are failing in the 2000s.  Cities and downtowns are regaining population for the first time in 30 to 50 years in the 2000s.  People are migrating back to city centers because sprawl traffic is relentlessly

read more…

Why do small towns and cities prefer independent merchants?

That’s certainly the case in small towns and cities, but not in the suburbs.  What’s going on?

Suburbs are controlled by a few people.  It was designed and built for the masses.  Homes were built hundreds at a time, by the same firm.  The same firms also built shopping malls and strip malls to accommodate dozens of retailers at a time.  It took a lot of capital to build environments of such large scales, and that capital usually

read more…

A new retail study for a Chicago neighborhood discovered that for every $100 spent on an independent business, $73 went back into the local community.  However, for every $100 spent on chain businesses, only $43 went back into the local economy.

The study, completed by Civic Economics, the leading firm in the country for conducting these kinds of analyses, found that independents had 26% more of their staff locally, bought more than twice as much of their goods and services locally, kept more

read more…

Burlington’s economy-defying pedestrian mall

What’s immediately striking for such a small town of 40,000 people is that there is such a large pedestrian-only zone at its heart.  I mean, how often do you see a Mapquest entry look like this for a small town in the middle of recreational wilderness?  Most cities that are at least ten times larger argue that they don’t have enough pedestrian-mall-supporting people and tenants to have just one block, yet Burlington has three, and just opened the

read more…

It’s true.  There are over a hundred retail venues in downtown Athens, but no fast food chains.  No Gap or Banana Republic.  No TGIF or Ruby Tuesday’s or Baskin Robbins.  The Subway that was here was torn down.  The building owner who leased to the Gap didn’t renew their agreement.

What’s going on?  The most common answer among Athenians was “sense of community”.  It’d be more accurate to say, “extremely strong sense of community“.  But how does this translate quantitatively to no

read more…

The secret to Athens’ vibe?

The people.  Period.  The built environment, music, sense of community and progressiveness are the results.

While in Athens we were extremely fortunate to meet with some of Athens’ creative implementors, the ones a truly cool town can’t do without.  They included:
- Mayor Heidi Davison, as progressive, open-minded and down-to-earth as a mayor can be;
- Art Jackson, Director Athens Downtown Development Authority, helped us understand what makes the downtown

read more…

Just like in Cambridge, Madison’s creative class has left the national chain-infiltrating main town center in search of more affordable housing and unique independent merchants in more creative, entrepreneurial neighborhoods.

Those Madison neighborhoods would be Willy Street, about a mile away, and Atwood, another mile down the road.  While they have less than a tenth of State Street’s retail, they are no chains and the sense of community is extremely high.  Co-ops seemed to be the norm, from

read more…

What are two of the greatest trends in shopping?

From Governing Magazine, “The two greatest trends in shopping, it seems, are thrift and togetherness. As one urban planner put it, ‘These days, you either go [shopping] for the experience… or you go to Wal-Mart for the discount.‘  Enclosed malls occupy a middle ground, being neither cheap nor fun.“  Those malls also require 200 acres, and that’s way too inflexible for our evolving customer-driven economy.

Togetherness refers to retail

read more…

Why are cities infatuated with Starbucks and Cheesecake Factory’s?

The more they are, the less you’ll see one-of-a-kind places like this cafe that tech-star Moby opened in Manhattan.

Why are cities so infatuated with attracting them?  It’s not about job creation or tax revenue, as you can only buy so much coffee and furniture.  It’s about the kind of customers they lure - creative, professional, hip - the kind of people that boost both the city’s economy and its innovative self

read more…

As Few As Possible.  The following evidence is from Kennedy Smith, former director of the National Main Street Center and CoolTown Studios associate partner:

“I’ve been surveying the main street management organizations in hot (or cool) historic commercial districts over the past few days to find out what percentage of retail businesses are national retailers. Here’s what I’ve found:“

Manayunk (Philadelphia): 5%
South Street (Philadelphia): 12%
Chestnut Hill (Philadelphia): 15%
Allston

read more…

Quite a bit according to our CoolTown poll.

The statistics seem to back that up.  Growth figures for US retail sales from 1967-1993 (alas, they don’t have the last ten years):

Restaurant and Entertainment: 102%
Food at home (i.e. groceries): 26%
Furniture: 79%
Building materials: 78%
General merchandise: 46%
Clothing: 31%

(Personal income growth: 83%)

That’s why we could use more places like Brek, a very affordable, fresh hot food, self-serve restaurant with class (see image).  The kind of

read more…

If suburbia and sprawl are about fast food, then what are CoolTowns about?  Slow Food USA, part of a vastly growing international movement, put it best:

“People have responded to the growing movement, because they have become tired of buying the same things, eating the same foods and living the same lives. With these interests in mind, our mission is to create a robust, active movement that protects taste, culture and the environment as universal social values. Slow Food programs are

read more…

One way to realize there’s increasing demand for live-work-play(shop) communities is to see what the country’s largest investors are not investing in.

Simon Properties, America’s largest shopping center developer (in other words, shop-only destinations that resulted from live-only/suburban subdivisions), announced last week, “Simon will not be planning anymore enclosed shopping malls for the near future.“

Instead, Simon is building what they’re calling “alls” - mixed-use retail, residential,

read more…

This is one of my favorite images from Siena, Italy.  Along the street illustrated in yesterday’s blog, this rather striking image is a model for a number of inspiring, yet uncommon storefront principles:

1. As blog regular Silus Grok commented yesterday, pointing light down saves energy…

2. Not only that, by using task lighting (subject specific) instead of general lighting, only the most appealing features are highlighted - in this case the merchandise, the window and the entryway.

3. The

read more…