THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 12, 1996 TAG: 9608100040
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Comment
SOURCE: BY ANNETTE FINLEY-CROSWHITE, SPECIAL TO THE DAILY BREAK
LENGTH: 130 lines
DOWNTOWN NORFOLK once a slum-ridden, but living, city center - is now desolate, waiting to be re-created as a shopping mall.
Such a metamorphosis is far from unique. It reflects the experience of many mid-sized American cities that have gone through ``urban renewal.''
Beginning in the 1940s, the federal government poured millions of dollars into cities like Norfolk. The money allowed agencies like the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority to bulldoze old downtowns and attempt to rebuild planned, modern cities.
Here, in the course of two decades, the NRHA bulldozed more than 1,000 acres in and around the downtown area. Whole neighborhoods were taken down, and a new street plan was devised. Even the historical memory of the old city was virtually erased. To visualize ``historic'' Norfolk, we must use our imagination.
To help reconstruct Norfolk's past, I offered a graduate course this summer called ``Cities and Social Change'' at Old Dominion University. My students interviewed men and women with vivid memories of a bustling, lively Norfolk full of people who wanted to be downtown.
Much of what follows is based on their research. I also used 58 hitherto unused boxes of papers from the university archives that belonged to the former executive director of Norfolk's Redevelopment and Housing Authority, Lawrence Cox.
One day we took a walking tour of downtown. There are still lovely things to see: the Smith and Welton building now in the process of restoration, the Wells Theatre, the Monticello Arcade and St. Paul's Church, to name just a few.
But as the class marched up to the vast expanse of empty parking lots that has lain barren for so long and will soon become the much hailed MacArthur Center mall, I couldn't help but think that, in all their enthusiasm to create what Lawrence Cox called ``a gleaming modern city of new homes and apartment houses, handsome public buildings, attractive shops and broad new streets and thoroughfares,'' somehow the NRHA had thrown the baby out with the bath.
There is no doubting the fact that the Norfolk housing crisis of the 1940s was very real. Substandard dwellings had to be replaced to prevent fire and control the spread of disease, particularly tuberculosis. Cox described ``tumble-down, rat-infested houses, many without heat or sanitary provisions.''
And very little opposition to the bulldozing of downtown can be found in the Norfolk papers. Much of the area consisted of wooden tenement houses in an extreme state of disrepair. Outdoor toilets were the norm, and absentee slum lords rarely emptied them, so that the stench was both unpleasant and unhealthy.
As the 1950s and '60s progressed, Norfolk practiced ``creative destruction'' with a bold pace, bulldozing more acres than any American city of comparable size. The city seemed strangely transfixed on parking lots, as if to say ``build the lots and they will come.''
Complex webs of interconnected families and friends were torn asunder for both whites and African-Americans in Ghent and Atlantic City. Freeman Thompson, a former downtown resident, told one of my students, ``They moved the blacks out of Ghent and told them they could come back, but it was now too expensive.''
And city officials had little regard for historic preservation. No comprehensive study was made of historic buildings in Norfolk before 1958, when a small study of 32 structures was undertaken - by Old Dominion College students! By 1965, 11 of those 32 buildings had been demolished, and two more on the list have since come down.
Lawrence Cox observed in a 1960 speech, ``We have tried to preserve those buildings that have genuine historical or community significance. But at the same time we didn't want to distort our planning with overemotionalism.''
So the First Methodist Church and the Jewish Synagogue on Cumberland Street went the way of St. Mary's Academy on Holt Street and the Old Theatre Building on Bank Street.
Proud edifices like Union Station with its Terrazzo Tile floor and the Monticello Hotel with its Starlight Ballroom disappeared from Norfolk's urban landscape.
Sit in a dark microfilm-room and look through issues of the ``Journal and Guide'' from the 1950s and you'll occasionally find pictures of stately buildings and quaint townhouses in Norfolk before they were destroyed. Keep those images in the mind and walk through Old Towne Portsmouth, and then you'll be able to imagine the old Norfolk that was lost.
But the NRHA and Norfolk's former city planners aren't the only ones to blame for a lack of historical appreciation. On some level all Norfolk citizens were responsible.
While other cities like Charleston, S.C., formed strong historical preservation clubs and lobbied to save historic sites, Norfolk seems to have stood by and quietly watched the old city come down.
Perhaps the desire to replace ``Sin City'' with a business center like Manhattan - as was promised by the urban design consultant, Charles Agle, in his 1956 ``master plan'' for Norfolk - was just too tempting.
What we have in Norfolk today is a spread-out downtown that lacks intimacy. The hotels at the waterfront are a great distance from key attractions like the Chrysler Museum or the Harrison Opera House. Few tourists would hike from the Marriott to the museum.
And if they did, they'd probably pass the former ``Golden Triangle Hotel,'' now the Howard Johnson at Monticello and Brambleton.
Opened in 1961 as ``a $17 million invitation to the nation to visit Norfolk,'' it has since become an eyesore. Norfolk's midcentury re-creation gave rise to a ``city of order and surveillance,'' but along the way much of the beauty and sheer pleasure of the city disappeared.
People became blinded by Norfolk's ugliness, and in rebuilding they overlooked its midcentury vitality.
I don't mean to seem too critical of past mistakes. Hindsight offers a marvelous vision, and I'm well aware of the fact that I never walked down a dank and smelly 1940s street.
But I do believe there are lessons to be learned from the past, and I have high hopes for Norfolk's future. No one wants MacArthur Center to thrive more than I.
But take a good look at Monticello Avenue between Market and Charlotte Streets, and you will see Norfolk's re-creation as a thriving downtown still has a way to go. And even if the MacArthur Center is a big hit, how many citizens will be able to afford to shop there? We still need more places downtownwhere people of all socio-economic backgrounds can live and mingle at times not specially created by Festevents.
The bottom line is that downtown Norfolk still lacks an identity, and if Norfolk's citizens want to have a thriving downtown, they have to be willing to make it happen. We can't expect the planners to do it for us.
We have to want to go downtown, to shop, eat, study, play and to make face-to-face contact with people from all walks of life. We have to want to encounter the different and the absurd, the old and the new, the sophisticated and the silly.
We can't turn back the pages, nor would we want to return to a segregated and disease-ridden downtown. But we can imagine the Norfolk of the future as something more than parking lots. We can imagine Norfolk with a rich urban culture offering tantalizing experiences in a downtown that celebrates diversity.
Just as Norfolk decided to abandon downtown in the past, we must decide to return to its heart in the future. MEMO: Annette Finley-Croswhite is an assistant professor in the history
department at Old Dominion University.
KEYWORDS: DOWNTOWN NORFOLK REDEVELOPMENT by CNB