By Alex Marshall
For The Virginian-Pilot

SUFFOLK — This handsome new courthouse of brick and stone that sits on Main Street is one answer to the question: how do we revive this city’s downtown?

Is it the right answer? This city’s center, with two-hundred years of history, was once a bustling place. Now, like Norfolk’s Granby Street and Portsmouth’s High Street, it has declined. All of these city’s main streets are shadows of their former selves, even though there are signs of life on all of them in the form of new businesses amid the vacant storefronts.

Built at a cost of $14 million, the new courthouse works with a new omprehensive plan meant to bring back downtown and manage growth in the suburbs. The courthouse adds 150 or so new bodies to Main Street, while a downtown plan is talking of doing things like carving in new streets, and turning an old high school into a civic center.

Will it work? To make a good prediction, we need to understand where the growth that fuels Suffolk’s booming suburbs comes from, and how it fits into the growth of the region. For it is finally only by understanding the region’s growth, and working with it, that Suffolk can hope to reshape its downtown into the vital, active community it once was.

Suffolk has lessons everyone can learn from. Its struggle to revive downtown is Norfolk’s and Portsmouth’s, while it’s struggle to manage growth is Virginia Beach’s and Chesapeake’s. In understanding how both are interrelated, the region can better understand how to shape itself.

THE CITY’S PLAN What does a courthouse have to do with downtown’s health? The idea is that the 150 to 175 workers in the courthouse will shop on Main Street, and buy lunch there, as will the defendants, lawyers, plaintiffs, reporters and everyone else that makes their way to a courthouse, whether by choice or command. At the same time, new sidewalks, new street lamps and benches make Main Street a more inviting place to be.

Does this work? Sure it does, and you can already see downtown changing. Several new stores have opened on Main Street, including a bookstore, a restaurant, a newsstand and a cappuccino bar.

The city has also followed this up with changes of which the other cities might take heed. Over the initial squeamishness of VDOT, it restored parallel parking on Main Street. This converts a semi-highway back into a public street. VDOT’s only requirement was that they continue to allow southbound traffic after 4.30 p.m. during rush hour, to which the city agreed.

This is something that other cities can look at. Many have still not realized that there is a conflict between moving cars quickly and creating an environment where storefronts can prosper. In most streets downtown, the priority should be on the latter.

Norfolk in particular could do a lot more in this direction. It’s downtown is littered with unnecessary left-turn lanes and other devises that take up parking lanes. On Main, Plume and City Hall avenues, the city could substantially expand on-street parking without seriously damaging traffic flow. It should be a top priority for the widened Church Street. This would give on-street businesses more parking spaces, and would alert passerby’s that these streets really are meant for shopping and strolling.

What else would Suffolk do? The downtown plan calls for carving in some new streets so that dead-end streets will now go through, and the street grid will be more complete. Because of railroad lines and topography, Suffolk has a fractured street system. It’s to the credit of the downtown plan, developed by UDA of Pittsburgh and its leader Ray Gindroz, that it focuses on this often-overlooked aspect of a center city’s health. By cutting through some new streets, and connecting unconnected ones, the city could bring new life to otherwise becalmed areas.

In addition, the downtown plans for turning the city’s old high school into a civic center, and renovating the old train station. Both of these are good ideas, but they will not provide a foundation for a revitalized downtown. Other means are necessary for that.

Rather than convert the high school, a wonderful old building, into a civic center, why not convert it back into a school? Suffolk schools are straining to find space for their students. Norfolk has shown with both Maury High School and Granby High School, now under renovation, that old schools can be rehabilitated and fully meet city and state codes, including the Americans with Disability Acts. Other localities around the country have made great strides in this regard. Maryland in particular has led the way in this regard. It makes no sense for Suffolk to build new schools out in the country, when a fine one in the city sits vacant.

How does the new Courthouse’s design rate? It’s an imposing building, as a courthouse should be, with sharp corners and trim that echoes older, more formal civic buildings. Its most admirable feature is that its designers had the guts to build it directly on the sidewalk, in line with the other buildings on Main Street. This completes the walls that form the living room of downtown. If the building had been set back, even by a few feet, the vibrancy and intimate feel of downtown would have been diminished. With luck, it could become a building that is still cherished and loved 100 years from now. That’s the kind of buildings we need more of.

But a new courthouse, new sidewalks, lights and benches, and even new streets and a civic center can only do so much. For downtown to fully revive, the growth patterns of the entire region have to be understood, and then the city’s policies changed so that some of this growth goes into Suffolk’s downtown and center city neighborhoods.

SUFFOLK AND THE REGION Suffolk now is a satellite city of Hampton Roads. Although it has some industry, most notably Planters Peanuts, Suffolk is not self-sufficient in jobs and industry but depends on the more industrial cities of Newport News, Portsmouth and Norfolk to give its residents jobs. Or perhaps another way to say it is that job creators in these cities give Suffolk new residents.

We can see this trend in the data on employment and residential growth in Suffolk and the region. From 1980 to 1993, Suffolk actually lost jobs on a net basis, according to city planning statistics. But it’s total population actually grew steadily over this time period.

Where should the new residents go? In answering that question, Suffolk decides the fate of its downtown. If Suffolk puts all the new residents in new suburban housing miles outside downtown, then downtown will remain a tired place. If on, the otherhand, Suffolk limits development opportunities in the suburbs, forcing both residents and developers to look to the inner-city, then its downtown neighborhoods and eventually businesses should re-emerge as well. New houses would be built on vacant lots, new businesses on parking lots and old houses fixed up.

To reinvigorate downtown, Suffolk needs to start pushing some of its housing demand back to the center. It can do this not only by limiting rezonings in farm land, but by also ignoring calls for new roads or improved roads outside town. Every new road built or expanded leads to more suburban housing outside town.

All this points to the inter-connectedness of the region. If the Navy cuts personnel drastically from Norfolk, for example, you can bet that new housing starts in Suffolk will decline as well. It also points the need for regional growth planning and management. It makes no sense for new jobs in Virginia Beach or Norfolk to boost housing starts in Suffolk and Chesapeake, with no city having complete say over where the jobs go or where the houses go.

POLICY STEPS If Suffolk wants to accompany its new courthouse with more complete steps to revive downtown, it can consider some of the following steps. Some of these actions the city has already considered.

*Sharply limit suburban development on the fringes of the developed area, particularly in the high growth areas in the Northeast and Northwest. The city has taken some steps to do this in the new Comprehensive Plan, which calls for stopping development in the South, and limiting it in the North.

But it needs to do more. Taming development in the rural south is a paper lion, because there isn’t much growth pressure there anyway. Why? Because it’s too far away from the jobs in Norfolk and Portsmouth. The North is booming because that’s where the easy commutes are. That’s also where Suffolk has to act if it wants to retain some form for its city.

A consultant’s report, used to prepare the Comprehensive Plan, recognized this dynamic. The report said bluntly that new residential and commercial development, whose nature and location compete with downtown, will continue to sap its strength.

Steve Herbert, the assistant city manager for development, agreed that the city’s downtown health was dependent on curtailing development elsewhere. Herbert said ultimately the city might have to look at some form of downzoning, in order to scale back some of the 24,000 houses that have already been zoned.

These are some of the hard questions the councils has to deal with, Herbert said. Downzoning is a possibility, but it’s a very difficult issue. We’ll probably have to have other ways to deal with it.

Although Virginia courts have traditionally frowned on downzoning, they have not prohibited it entirely. Rather, they have insisted that it be applied uniformly and in accordance with broad public goals. That might fit in Suffolk.

Suffolk could also consider clustering development around existing village centers in Chuckatuck, Whaleyville and Driver. That way, these village centers could be improved, the rural areas kept rural, and the historical character of these places respected.

*Kill the Southwest bypass. This planned VDOT project, if built, will trap downtown between two major highways, and will encourage new suburban growth off its exits.

The amazing thing is that some people still see a bypass as a way to improve a downtown. It’s like cutting off an artery to improve circulation. One need only to look at downtown Emporia, dead since the route 58 bypass was completed around it, to see what happens to towns with bypasses. You can find hundreds of towns in North Carolina and Virginia that have been improved out of existence with bypasses. You will often find signs saying Business Route, which will take you to a downtown devoid of businesses.

Along with killing the Southwest bypass, Suffolk should examine trimming back some of the other road improvements planned in and around Suffolk. Building big highways is the quickest way to facilitate suburban growth. Suffolk should examine every road and ask whether it needs it, and for what purpose.

Herbert acknowledged that the city was risking its downtown’s health with the proposed bypass. Herbert said that people need to understand that traffic and congestion are part of a downtown’s health.

When people complain about a lack of parking and too much traffic, I tell them that there are people in downtown Portsmouth who would die for that kind of problem, said Herbert, who left Portsmouth City Hall last year.

*Make it easy to develop in the center city. Downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods are full of vacant lots that could hold new homes and businesses. Clear away the red tape for these, and consider low-interest loans for home renovations. Make it easy to develop in town, harder to develop in the country. The century-old homes that scatter downtown, many of them quite affordable, are a precious resource that should be used more fully.

If Suffolk can manage to restrain growth its countryside, it might manage to have the best of both worlds: a stable suburban community, and a healthy downtown with businesses, residents — and a fine new courthouse.

JON: THIS IS A SIDEBAR. THE COURTHOUSE MAKES HISTORY The site of the new courthouse used to be the home of Suffolk’s City Hall and City Market. Inaa putting a new courthouse there, the city is returning to its roots.

For close to a century, the twin turreted City Hall and City Market served as the site for not only the town officials and police force, but for vendors selling live chickens and fresh produce, as well as dances, theater concerts and high school graduations, said Sue Woodward, a member of the Suffolk-Nansemond County Historical Society. (JON: THERE ARE PICTURES OF THIS IN THE PICTORIAL HISTORY OF SUFFOLK THAT PERHAPS WE SHOULD RUN.)

Like Norfolk’s old city market, which actually also had turrets, the Suffolk city market was the center of town in numerous ways. But in the early 1960s, the city, like Norfolk, sold its building and allowed it to be torn down. In retrospect, it was a horribly short-sighted decision. Both cities lost huge pieces of their history as well as buildings that could have been home for other uses.

At the same time Suffolk was tearing down its courthouse, it was also developing a new courthouse complex outside the center of downtown. In this it was also following Norfolk’s lead. It had moved its City Hall and Courts out of what is now the MacArthur Memorial, its old city market known as the Armory, and other buildings, and into the City Hall complex. In retrospect, these decisions were also mistakes. Moving the courts and municipal offices onto plazas outside downtown helped to isolate downtown and take away its customer base.

The magnitude of what Suffolk is doing can be seen by imagining if Norfolk decided to close its courts building on the windswept municipal plaza and move it back to City Hall avenue, where it used to be.

The decision to put the courts back in a more prominent position on Main Street fits with the role the courts have historically played — as centers of a town, both physically and symbolically. Courts can be thought of as anchors and rudders of society, and because of this, it fits that they should be placed in the center of town.

Before the car led to the fragmentation of cities, it was natural to build a courthouse at the center of town where everyone could travel easily to it. Bankruptcy laws still call for delinquent property to be auctioned off on the steps of the courthouse, probably because legislators could not imagine a more public place for a sale to occur. This accounts for the now comical sight of, in Virginia Beach, property being auctioned off on a courthouse that sits on the edge of woods and farms, miles away from the developed city’s bulk.