THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 24, 1996 TAG: 9607240001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Glenn Allen Scott
LENGTH: 96 lines
About 30 architects and designers gathered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in downtown Norfolk last Saturday to propose ways to boost the odds of having a lively street scene around the perimeter of the soon-to-rise MacArthur Center and to strengthen links between the mall and nearby structures and streets.
The group has no guarantee that any of its concepts will be incorporated into the center. But Mayor Paul D. Fraim says the city will study the sketches and suggestions produced by the participants in the exercise.
Credit the architects and designers with sincere, thoughtful and informed concern about how MacArthur Center, which will be a magnet to consumers throughout Hampton Roads (1.5 million population) and beyond, will fit into downtown.
Credit, too, Norfolk's City Council, City Hall and Redevelopment and Housing Authority with equally sincere, thoughtful and informed concern about how MacArthur Center will take its place downtown while also prospering.
Don't forget, either, the citizen volunteers who have expended time, expertise and energy to further the old port city's well-being as members of the municipal Design Review Committee and Planning Commission, as have representatives of business, professional, nonprofit and historic-preservation entities that have been involved in the MacArthur Center planning process for a couple of years.
No elected or appointed member of city government seeks for Norfolk an upscale retailing oasis generating profits for developer, investors and tenants, along with revenue for the municipal treasury, in downtown wasteland.
Such an oasis could easily result from an inwardly focused shopping complex, which is what MacArthur Center will be.
The inward focus is inescapable because at least 90 percent of visitors to MacArthur Center will arrive by motor vehicle. The center's basic plan, just approved by the Planning Commission, encompasses 4,530 parking spaces. Shoppers arriving by motor vehicle will be close to MacArthur Center stores and feel and be secure. The center's interior will bustle with activity.
As a retail complex serving Norfolk residents only, MacArthur Center would not be financially feasible. It will flourish by drawing trade from a far-broader constituency. It will be a destination for shoppers attracted by Nordstrom and Dillard's department stores and scores of specialty retailers not now present in Northeastern North Carolina, Southeastern Virginia, Southside Virginia, or, in many instances, Central Virginia.
But a MacArthur Center also inviting to pedestrians and appropriate in scale and appearance to nearby buildings and existing architectural themes has been an essential objective of grass-roots and special interests that have been in touch with city agencies for months.
Unlike suburban shopping centers erected in empty fields, MacArthur Center will occupy 22 downtown acres in an established but improving downtown. The center will be near the emerging Norfolk Campus of Tidewater Community College and lower Granby Street, the historic Moses Myers and Willoughby-Baylor houses, St. Paul's and Freemason Street Baptist churches, the MacArthur Memorial and Monticello Arcade, the recladded Federal Building, the financial district, the Marriott Hotel and Waterside festival marketplace, the National Maritime Museum - Nauticus and Freemason Harbor and Harborplace.
MacArthur Center's architects and engineers have already done much to make the admittedly gigantic mall compatible with downtown. The exterior design provides variety, strong horizontal and vertical lines, some show windows and shallow shops (along Monticello Avenue), a baker's dozen of street-level pedesentrances, extensive landscaping (trees and and a Heritage Trail that may include a bicycle path). Additional enticements to pedestrians are likely.
The MacArthur Center site will soon be fenced in. Construction is scheduled to start in October.
The center has spirited critics, but so has everything else Norfolk City Hall has attempted over five decades - successfully, mainly - thus preventing the city from become an economic basket case like so many U.S. urban centers.
Constructive criticism is ever welcome, and even naysayers are not always wrong. But if the naysayers had prevailed, Norfolk would not have amassed the cultural and economic assets it has - in and around Old Dominion and Norfolk State universities, at the Norfolk Area Medical Complex, in Ghent. And there would be no MacArthur Memorial, no Chrysler Museum, no Harrison Opera House, no renovated Wells Theatre housing the Virginia Stage Company, no Scope cultural and convention center, no Harbor Park, no Omni and Marriott Hotels (with attendant Waterside Convention Center), no Waterside festival marketplace and Town Point Park, no middle- and upper-middle-income housing in the Harborplace-Freemason Harbor area, no Lafayette Shores redevelopment, no Ocean View Conservation District and no unfolding renewal of East Ocean View. There would be no financial district, either, with handsome office buildings.
And there would be no Nauticus, which is a sore point only because City Hall promised it would be entirely self-supporting, which it isn't - not yet. But neither is Nauticus a disaster, as its critics depict it. Almost surely, Nauticus' value to the city will grow.
Meanwhile, note that Norfolk's multiple delights and location at a nexus of major highways explain why Nordstrom, Dillard's and first-rank shopping-center developer Taubman Company are committed to MacArthur Center.
While it is possible that the center will thrive in isolation from the rest of downtown, it more likely will trigger more development, including a flowering of small retail stores in the lower Granby Street. And more development means more jobs and more tax revenue for city coffers - and more reason for tourists to come to town. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot. by CNB