DATE: Wednesday, March 19, 1997             TAG: 9703190003

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: GLENN ALLEN SCOTT

                                            LENGTH:   89 lines

FROM SLUM HOUSING TO A ``24-HOUR DOWNTOWN'' IN HALF A CENTURY

The just-updated Downtown Norfolk 2000 Plan is a bandwagon, a hymnal and a flag.

So explained design-consultant Ray Gindroz during his presentation of the revised plan to the Downtown Norfolk Council at The National Maritime Center - Nauticus - last Thursday.

Gindroz explained that the update was necessitated by the rapid changes in the downtown in the 1990s.

``The purpose of a plan,'' said Gindroz, who addressed members of the Downtown Norfolk Council at Nauticus last Thursday, ``is to have a vision that all parts of a community understand, are excited about, are willing to invest in and can see themselves moving forward together with.''

Gindroz said the plan has three functions:

``The first is a sort of bandwagon which everybody jumps on, so that the efforts of individual property owners, the city, and individual works in the streets and public spaces of the city, investors, foundations, institutions or the government in general - that for every action of any part of that group of people, the sum of the parts is . . . so much greater than the . . . parts. .

``I hope that at the end of this talk this morning, all of you will rush out, grab your checkbooks and start investing in your properties and businesses in downtown, because that is part of what a plan is meant to do.''

``The second (plan function) is to serve as a hymnal, so that everybody is singing from the same page - particularly important when you are coordinating a bunch of different developments with efforts of the public sector to try to pull downtown into a coherent whole.

``And finally, the printed plan, we think, can serve . . . almost as a flag on the bandwagon and then everybody can march along together singing the same tune from the hymnal.''

Meeting with a wide range of Norfolk interest groups, Pittsburgh-based Urban Design Associates collected much information and opinion before producing the updated plan. The plan's goals:

Create a ``24-hour'' downtown. Said Gindroz: ``Financial institutions nationally are advising their constituents to invest only in those downtowns that are 24-hour downtowns and not bother with stand-alone office buildings in downtowns that don't also have residential, commercial and cultural attractions.''

Use major attractions as anchors for development to establish places for people to come to - something that Norfolk has already done, as Gindroz noted.

Connect the new development with old development to form a seamless whole ``so that (downtown) reads as a whole and unified environment.''

Create high-quality addresses that, Gindroz said, ``people want to come to and that can be marketed; a place that can be advertised; a place that people feel good about and love in their city.''

Develop a strategy to attract development, including residential development as much as possible. Said Gindroz: ``Not only financial institutions are saying (residential development is essential), but people who identified the presence of stable, high-quality residential development as perhaps the single most important quality in creating the image of a stable, safe, secure downtown that will attract people from all over the region.

Use public-private partnerships to spur development.

So much development is now under way that much of the city's downtown resembles London after the Blitz. The 20-acre site of the MacArthur Center superregional shopping mall is a fenced-in desert containing mounds of dirt, rubble and construction equipment. Torn up streets are impassable. Dust is everywhere. Tidewater Community College students negotiate a maze of barriers and mud to reach the Granby Street campus.

Adjacent to the Granby District, construction of the College Place Square development - 200 housing units, 145 of them apartments, the rest town houses - and some shops is scheduled to begin in August on municipal parking lots between Boush and Duke streets.

Gindroz cited Norfolk's heavy investment in major attractions - Waterside festival marketplace and Town Point Park, Harbor Park, The National Maritime Center, the Waterside Convention Center, the Wells Theatre, Scope and Chrysler Hall, the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Harrison Opera House - all of which have kept its downtown from going down the tubes. Now, said Gindroz, is the time for the private sector to step forward to exploit economic opportunities that the city's efforts have created in the Granby District.

That's begun to happen. Some $200 million of the $300 million MacArthur Center will be private investment. The multimillion-dollar College Place Square development is a private-enterprise project, and Norfolk taxpayers may reasonably expect other significant development to be announced soon.

A half century after bulldozers began clearing away some of the worst slums in the United States, the re-creation of a healthy, prosperous downtown nears completion. Come the millennium, Norfolk's 24-hour downtown may well be the envy of scores of less-fortunate midsize central cities from here to Alaska and Hawaii. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The

Virginian-Pilot.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu