THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 3, 1996 TAG: 9607030007
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A16 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: By MARK D. PERREAULT
LENGTH: 84 lines
The MacArthur Center, as currently planned, will be a parking-ramp enclosed, internally oriented mall. On three sides, it will front the streets principally with parking garages. The Nordstrom department store will face the highway approaches to the east, with a facade which would be quite at home in any suburban mall.
The mall's center of activity will be an east-west courtyard, running between Monticello Avenue and Nordstrom, isolated from city streets for its entire length by parking decks. Only on Monticello Avenue will the center have any real attachment to downtown.
To be sure, the city has designed attractive facades for the parking decks and will provide a 100-foot setback between Freemason Street and the north parking garage. Nordstrom reportedly intends to include a pub in its highway-facing storefront.
Nonetheless, the center will be an inward-facing, 1980's-style mall. Nothing will drive that image home more than the multilevel parking garage fronting almost the entire north side of City Hall Avenue, directly across from the historic MacArthur Memorial and St. Paul's Church.
Norfolk's large public investment in the center is intended to produce even larger public benefits, including jobs and tax revenues, additional business and new private investment for downtown. Achieving these benefits depends upon both the long-term success of the center itself and the effective spillover of that success into the surrounding downtown.
The design of the center is critical. The center must be a powerful magnet to ``pull'' to downtown Norfolk the large number of suburban customers it needs to sustain itself. To succeed the center must provide, in addition to attractive merchandise, convenient parking and security, an experience that ``feels good,'' that is stimulating, special and fun. A ramp-enclosed mall and department stores with suburban mall-style facades will not provide this quality of experience. Nor will such an economic island, successful in itself or not, produce spillover benefits for the surrounding city.
Around the country, people are becoming tired of malls because of their homogeneity and their lack of connection with the surrounding community. Increasingly, progressive cities and developers are either abandoning the mall and putting retail street side in individual stores or turning the mall ``inside out'' by placing shops and restaurants out on the sidewalk.
This latter approach has the benefit of retaining the internal mall with its corridor, which some retailers continue to prefer, but connects the mall to the community and creates an active street environment. This is not merely a concept but increasingly a reality, in cities like Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Portland, Ore., Charleston, S.C., and Vancouver. An inside-out mall larger than the MacArthur Center, with up to 80 percent of the mall fronting the street, was proposed last month for downtown Silver Spring, Md.
More attention is being paid also to the design of new urban store facades. A notable example is the Saks Fifth Avenue department store now under construction in downtown Charleston, S.C., a street-front store with a classic facade and numerous show windows. It will add to rather than detract from the urban scene around it and skillfully hides the parking in the back.
MacArthur Center has one thing going for it that no competitor has or will have: its location in Hampton Roads' largest and most appealing downtown. It should take advantage of that location by reorienting itself into a street-side mall which fully faces the downtown with urban-style facades and show windows.
It can achieve this without giving up accessible, convenient and secure parking for its customers and without requiring the mall developer to give up internal courtyards. All that is required is to pull the east-west courtyard and Nordstrom south to City Hall Avenue, leaving the parking decks in the back.
Norfolk, as much as any city, should appreciate the relationship between good design and success. The street-friendly design of the Waterside Marriott and Convention Center has made that complex an institution in only a few years, and the warm, traditionally designed Harbor Park has done equally well. Businesses come and go on Ghent's Colley Avenue, but its pleasing on-street environs have also acquired the status of a regional institution.
Before Norfolk irrevocably commits to a major investment in MacArthur Center, it should insist the center's design be modified. A powerfully attractive and popular MacArthur Center would be a major step toward establishing downtown Norfolk as a strong center city for the entire Hampton Roads region, would promote regionalism and provide Hampton Roads greater visibility and a more-positive image nationally.
Building an out-of-date, badly configured center just for the sake of doing something now or to acquire any single retailer is a bad bet and will preclude Norfolk from getting it right for a generation. MEMO: Mark Perreault is a resident of Norfolk who works downtown. by CNB