New Life For Downtown Roberta Brandes Gratz with Norman Mintz

There are two ways to try to revive an old downtown, says Roberta Brandes Gratz. Only one of them works.

The first way is to spend a lot of money, taxpayer money, on stadiums, aquariums, science centers and mammoth public-private partnerships like enclosed shopping malls. (Sound familiar?)

The other way is to look carefully at what is already there, and to nurture its revitalization. Avoid big projects. Find ways to plant small businesses and new residents into old buildings and streets as if you were injecting favorable spores into a vat of cheese.

Guess which method Gratz likes best?

You got it. The second way. She calls it “urban husbandry,” which gets at the organic, fertile nature of the process.

The first method Gratz contemptuously labels “Project Planning.” She says it results in awkward cities that are never weaned off the public teat and lack grass roots stability.

Gratz has been writing about cities for more than 30 years, starting with 15 years as a reporter in the 1960s and 1970s for The New York Post. She is the author of the groundbreaking book, The Living City, (Simon and Schuster 1989), which first detailed her theory of “thinking small in a big way.” Her new book elaborates on that thesis.

In its 350 or so pages, Gratz shows the excesses and failures of Project Planning, and the successes of Urban Husbandry. She says again and again, as if trying to teach a dense student through repetition, that there is no formula for urban revival and that cities fail when they start looking for one. Instead, cities need to look carefully at their individual strengths, weaknesses and personalities.

She spends time in her long-time home, New York, reviewing old acknowledged failures, like the Cross-Bronx Expressway, as well as newer ones like the aborted attempt to revive Times Square with mega skyscrapers. She has a chapter on “The SoHo syndrome,” detailing how the district in lower Manhattan revived itself not only without city help, but expressly against city plans for a 10-lane freeway through the area.

But the best part of the book is where Gratz spotlights cities that have received less attention. She visits Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, and shows how they revived an old movie theater. She spends a lot time in Mansfield, Ohio. She goes into most of the decision points on downtowns — courthouses, libraries and farmers markets — and shows how they can help or hurt a downtown. She does a very good job talking of the transportation decisions that either rebuild, or pull apart, an older city.

If there is a flaw in her book, it’s that she does not show as clearly how a downtown’s growth, or lack of it, fits into the overall growth of a region. Although Gratz has a chapter on “Undoing Sprawl,” she may not quite see how limiting new residential and business growth in the outer suburbs leads to an eventual re-emergence of the same in the center city.

She speaks of Hampton Roads several times. She says Virginia Beach is an example of a city damaged by traffic engineers, and quotes from a 1991 Virginian-Pilot story by “Alex Marshall, a perceptive urban issues reporter” about the difficulty in crossing Lynnhaven Parkway on foot. But she pays more attention to Norfolk.

Gratz has watched Norfolk’s strategy of rebuilding downtown through the Waterside festival marketplace, the Marriott Hotel and convention center, the Tides ballpark, Nauticus and most recently, the MacArthur Center shopping mall. It’s obvious that Norfolk falls into her category of a “project planner” city, with the big mall being a prime example.

“Too many [cities] are still going the anti-urban, anti-place route of the enclosed shopping mall,” Gratz says. “In Norfolk, Virginia, a SoHo-like district was showing signs of renewed life and slowly but naturally attracting new business and people. Instead of nurturing this revival, building on and adding to its momentum, the city followed the conventional Project Planning route of the enclosed mall.”

Actually, you can debate whether Norfolk has a SoHo-like district, and whether it was reviving. The old warehouses along the waterfront that might have become a SoHo were torn down long ago. And business revitalization along Granby Street was not going very far on its own. But Gratz is correct in that the city has pinned its hopes on the mall and other big projects, with what she says are bad results.

Is she right about Norfolk and its mall? Yes and no. Norfolk has a horrible track record of destroying old buildings and streets. It has not put enough energy into the small-scale rebuilding Gratz highlights. In a perfect world, Norfolk’s downtown would be rebuilt with smaller streets and stores that rely on a renewed, regional mass transit system.

But in our imperfect world, the giant MacArthur Center, even with its fortress-like design, is better than a blank, 20-acre parking lot. The mall, if successful, will provide downtown with a retail base and help the city as a whole. It would be nice, however, if city officials would do more to nurture the more authentic type of downtown Gratz and so many others love.

*Cities Back From The Edge: New Life For Downtown Roberta Brandes Gratz with Norman Mint Preservation Press. John Wiley & Sons. New York 1998