THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 6, 1996 TAG: 9610060054
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 138 lines
It will only be a short, one-block walk from the MacArthur Center Mall to Granby Street.
But it will be a long walk through time. You'll walk from a spanking new shopping center, reflecting the latest in marketing and management, to a historic shopping street, its buildings and merchants reflecting different times and different ways of doing business.
To a large extent, whether the mall revives Granby Street and the rest of downtown depends on whether mall customers take this walk.
This short block of Market Street will be either a bridge or a chasm.
To help them along, the city is ripping out sidewalks and putting in new streetscapes on Market, Granby and other streets around the mall site. The idea is to tie these areas visually into the mall, so customers will feel comfortable walking out of the mall into downtown.
The new streetscapes are part of a series of coordinated projects and plans to help the mall make the entire downtown a more vital area - full of people and life. The hope is to knit together the loose collection of city-funded or city-backed projects - the mall, Nauticus, the Marriott hotel and adjoining conference center, the new branch of Tidewater Community College, Chrysler Hall, Scope arena and others - so new private investment awakens long-darkened buildings along Granby and other streets.
What's at stake is the health not only of Norfolk but also of Hampton Roads, urban analysts say. With a renewed, livelier downtown Norfolk, all Hampton Roads cities should find it easier to attract new businesses and residents because living in the region will be more attractive. But if Norfolk's downtown declines, the region will suffer as well.
The experience of other cities that have built enclosed shopping malls downtown suggests Norfolk's task of connecting the mall with the rest of the city will not be easy. The hurdle is that customers arriving by automobile will not actually have to go outdoors to enter or leave the mall.
In Columbus, Ohio, where The Taubman Co., the developer of MacArthur Center, opened a similar mall in 1989, the stores and streets nearby remained dormant. A front-page story last month in the Columbus Dispatch said that the City Center mall was one of the few areas downtown that contained life, but that ``little of it spills outside.''
In Milwaukee, the three-story, Grand Avenue mall opened downtown in 1982 and was phenomenally successful, although sales have flattened out in recent years. But even in the growth years, stores and streets around the mall saw little spinoff. On average, property values around the mall have declined, according to a story this year in Milwaukee Magazine.
But Norfolk has several advantages over these and other cities. Its downtown, with harbor water on two sides, is compact - with Main and Granby streets, the mall, Nauticus and Chrysler Hall all grouped within a few blocks. Downtown has already begun to revive. Granby and side streets have new restaurants, art galleries and small boutiques, although there are still plenty of vacant storefronts.
A big part of the planning effort is tying the mall visibly into the rest of the city. The new brick sidewalks, trees and lighting will replicate those on Main Street, which is now arguably downtown's most successful street. This pattern will be seen around the mall on Monticello and City Hall avenues and Freemason and Cumberland streets. The city is doing the same on Granby between Market and Freemason and on the side streets Market and College Place.
Part of the money for these efforts is coming from the $13 million the city agreed to pay for street improvements around the mall. In the areas around Tidewater Community College, these improvements will be paid for out of city money dedicated to the college.
The city hopes eventually to refurbish the entire streetscape along Granby, and along Bank and Atlantic, which lead to the business district. It's an effort comparable to the multimillion-dollar renovation of the resort strip in Virginia Beach, which has helped the city stabilize and restore its tourism base.
Norfolk officials hope people downtown will wander from the mall over to Granby, or from Main Street to the mall, or from the mall to Chrysler Hall, or any number of other trips.
When restaurants in the mall are full, says Dennis Richardson of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, ``people in the mall are going to walk to La Galleria or Freemason Abbey to avoid the lines. People are going to scatter around downtown, once they get to the mall.''
Despite linking the mall and its surrounding area visually, however, MacArthur Center will be a very different place from the rest of downtown. One will reflect modern marketing and management, the other an older, less centralized way of doing business.
Granby Street, for example, is made up of scores of different proprietors, each with different leases and their own store management policies. The restaurant La Galleria, for example, can open and close when the owner chooses.
The 100-plus planned stores in MacArthur Center, in contrast, will open and close, market and advertise in a unified, coordinated plan designed and approved by their common landlord, The Taubman Co.
An ace in the city's effort to re-knit downtown is probably the new campus of Tidewater Community College. Housed in part in the former Smith & Welton Department Store building fronting Granby Street, the campus will put thousands of students right outside the mall's front door. Many should be visible lounging in the new park that will run between the mall and Granby.
The city also would like to encourage more people to live downtown. Councilman Mason C. Andrews says developers are expressing renewed interest in building townhouses between Duke and Boush streets. The city is also encouraging that the upper floors in buildings along Granby Street be converted into loft apartments.
More people living downtown would help stabilize the area and build a market for delis, grocery stores and other accoutrements of urban living.
Another project in the works is the Cannonball Trail, a tour of historic buildings in downtown - such as St. Paul's Church, which has a Revolutionary War cannonball imbedded in one of its walls. Visitors also might see plaques marking the sites of structures - such as the City Market or the Monticello Hotel - lost to urban renewal, disinvestment and other forces in the past century. The city has discussed, but not approved, a trolley that would run up the center of Granby Street.
John Simon, project manager of the mall for The Taubman Co. believes the city's big problem, once the mall opens, will not be inactivity but handling the enormous onslaught of new stores, restaurants, offices and homes that will spring forth. He believes tying in the streetscape and instituting development guidelines will be necessary to handle the development coherently.
For now, the city proceeds with plans to clear the site to make way for Taubman to drive pilings for the mall's foundation around the first of the year.
In mid-1998, the mall is scheduled to open. Thousands of visitors will no doubt flood the mall on opening day, eager to see Nordstrom, Dillard's and the other high-class stores within. But the city will watch to see how many also walk out the mall's front door, across Market Street, onto Granby Street and into the rest of downtown. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
MACARTHUR CENTER
[Landmarks near MacArthur Center]
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm] by CNB