THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, December 2, 1995 TAG: 9512020029
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 43 lines
In population, Virginia Beach is the state's largest city. But it's a city without a center, a series of developments without a downtown. City Council has now taken the first step toward creating some focus amid diffuse growth.
By a unanimous vote, zoning changes have been approved that would make a pedestrian-friendly Central Business District possible. An 87-acre tract surrounding Pembroke Mall would become home to high-rise office towers and apartment complexes.
That's the dream, anyway. But if the city changes the zoning, will a downtown come to be built? Hard to say. There's little precedent for constructing a sprawling city first and then trying to plop a downtown in the center. It has generally worked the other way around.
Virginia Beach already has a number of centers, of course, or nodes in a network of roads - the resort strip along the ocean, a medical village along First Colonial, a municipal-government complex.
But there's no place that combines office buildings and shopping, urban living spaces and nightlife, a place for strolling, browsing and congregating. An old-fashioned downtown clearly isn't what's envisioned.
What's likely to develop instead is one of those steel-and glass centers familiar from the new edge cites that have grown up in places like Los Angeles, Houston and Tysons Corners as an alternative to downtowns.
So far, all City Council has done is make it possible for such a complex to develop. It will require people with vision, money and a belief in an idea to plant something taller than Mount Trashmore and more extensive than the Cavalier Hotel at a crossroads and call it a Central Business Disctrict. But it's interesting to imagine the gleaming towers and pedestrian colonnades of a 21st-century downtown Virginia Beach where today there are mainly strip malls, auto dealers, drive-ins and traffic. It could happen.
Urban field of dreams
KEYWORDS: VIRGINIA BEACH CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT by CNB