DATE: Tuesday, May 13, 1997                 TAG: 9705130078

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, CORRESPONDENT 

                                            LENGTH:   82 lines

ARCHITECTURE: URBAN DEVELOPMENT RESULTS IN DOWNTOWN PARKING CRUNCH

THE HOLES ARE filling up. The expanses of asphalt that have constituted too much of downtown Norfolk are disappearing, as hotels, homes, restaurants, shops and a large shopping mall are built.

This is a great thing. It's been a 40-year wait since urban renewal wiped away much of the city in the 1950s. Now the empty places are being filled again. The most recent example is the new Hilton Hotel, announced for the corner lot between Plume Street and City Hall Avenue.

But there's a problem. Where will people park when much of downtown is no longer a giant parking lot?

It's an important question, for the health of downtown rests on its ability to accommodate people traveling there, without sacrificing what makes downtown special. It's the modern dilemma for older center cities: Provide plenty of parking, and you usually destroy the streetscape and pedestrian-oriented urban grid. But leave it out, and people may have no way of getting there.

In all, the city is losing about 4,000 parking spaces with all the recent development. About 3,100 are taken up by the MacArthur Center, and another 800 spaces will be replaced by the townhouses to be built between Duke and Boush streets. The new Hilton will take up about 50 spaces.

In absolute numbers, the parking garages for the mall, with 4,500 spaces, will make up for the lost spaces when it opens. But mall customers will use most of these.

The danger is that as traffic to downtown increases, either the city or private businesses will end up digging new holes in the streetscape to satisfy parking demand.

This is already occurring. Late last year, Life Savings Bank paid $1.8 million for the old Trailways bus station, which sat on less than an acre of land on Main Street. It will become a parking lot for bank customers.

Destruction of the vacant bus station is no great loss. But the hole it created in the fabric of Main Street is a minus. It threatens the vitality of the street, which nowadays is as much a shopping venue as Granby Street.

And what building will next come down for a parking lot?

Downtown Norfolk has no restrictions on tearing down old buildings, even if they are designated historic landmarks. It was only a few years ago that the city tore down a building on the historic registry to create a parking garage for Nauticus. And Epworth Methodist Church created an empty space on Freemason Street when it tore down a few buildings for a parking lot.

Cathy Coleman of the Downtown Norfolk Council says real-estate interests are leery of any government controls to maintain the streetscape. But other cities have restricted the development of parking lots, as well as restricted the destruction of historic buildings.

The ultimate solution may be encouraging and providing other means of getting around. That means bicycles, feet, buses, trains, trolleys and ferries. Older cities are in a way antiques, to paraphrase Joel Garreau of The Washington Post. Preserving these environments as alive places means preserving or recreating some of the older style transportation system that supported them.

The city is also moving in this direction with a system that will allow motorists to park in the MacArthur Center garages, and take a bus or trolley to other destinations downtown.

``People are going to have parking available, but it's not going to be portal to portal,'' said Iris Jessie, assistant city manager. ``It's going to be a cultural change.''

There are other short-term things the city could do to ease the parking crunch downtown. It could increase the number of on-street parking spaces by getting rid of some left-turn lanes and other traffic restrictions. These kind of traffic devices are appropriate to the suburbs. But in a city, they harm the pedestrian-oriented environment. I challenge you to find one left-turn lane in Manhattan.

There's an obvious financial benefit to taxpayers to keeping good downtown land from becoming parking lots. The three-quarters acre the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority is giving the developer of the Hilton, for example, is now a tax-exempt parking lot. Even if it had been privately owned and subject to tax, the revenues pale in comparison to those from a multimillion-dollar hotel. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]

RICHARD L. DUNSTON

The Virginian-Pilot

Parking lot bordered by Duke, Boush, Brooke and College Streets in

downtown Norfolk where a high-end condo complex is planned.

DOWNTOWN NORFOLK

VP Map

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