Rethinking Midtown (Comments: 1)

Since I wrote the short piece below this post, questions have surfaced about the difficulty and expense of taking Midtown Plaza down. Who knew? It turns out that demolishing a major complex within an active business district (ca. 50,000 workers Monday through Friday, plus nighttime entertainment seekers and a growing permanent population) is more complicated than, say, smart-bombing an apartment house in Baghdad, where Amerika has been honing its urban policies.

But as the new chapter of Farewell to Midtown is being written – by committee, and with little democratic discussion – there is one word that hasn’t been put on paper: bicycle. Odd, isn’t it? The players, from the too-oft-quoted head of the RDDC to City Hall’s Tom Richards to the new mandarins of Paetec, talk about more than 1,000 new downtown workers, new office towers and even new side streets, and maybe a touch of greenspace, yet nobody has talked about biking as part of the solution. What do they want, a form of transportation that dare not speak its name?

Every city I’m familiar with that has maintained or restored vitality and humanity to its core has been serious about accommodations for cycling – recreational, commuting, and business (restaurant delivery, messenger service, etc.). Some cities in our greater bioregion, like Chicago and Montreal, have worked for years on bike plans and have invested big bucks in implementation. What has Rochester done?

Well, I’m as happy as the next gearhead about the bike racks on RTS buses and the few locking posts installed on some commercial blocks in the ring of so-called urban villages. And as I’ve said many times, this area has a world-class multi-use trail system. But look at downtown: all the millions of dollars that years ago went into new sidewalks and lampposts and benches, and there’s nary a bike facility or amenity in sight. And the planners, movers, shakers, and imploders still won’t say what they’ll do to encourage bicycling.

Bike advocates, though, have plenty of ideas to offer. Here’s a short list: Put post-and-loop locking facilities up and down Main St.; make sure secure bike racks are in place outside every public building, and put them outside major private buildings within the public right-of-way, too, with or without the consent of owners or merchants; try some marked bike lanes on suitable side streets and arterials; plow and sand the Genesee River Trail and maybe other multi-use trails so they, like New York City’s Hudson River Greenway, can be used year-round; restore two-way traffic to downtown streets, with as much curbside parking as necessary; bring back, and expand, the downtown fare-free bus zone to promote intermodal commuting. And when those 8.6 acres that Midtown Plaza now occupies are cleared or reconfigured, make sure you create a biking-and-walking refuge of some kind.

There are bigger ideas that should get attention, too, like the creation of a light-rail system through downtown that would give intermodality a boost. (“People Movers” and other commuter trains, which move on dedicated rights-of-way, beat buses all hollow, especially at rush hour – and you can walk your bike right on board, too.) But many of us would be happy to see some baby steps. The main thing is to get moving without delay. Otherwise we’ll plunge into the era of Peak Oil as just another washed-up Motor City.

[From jackbradiganspula.net] So Midtown Plaza soon will bite the dust. Actually, it will be Rochesterians who’ll bite any dust raised in the process: the inevitable though unseen air pollution from dismantling and imploding older buildings laden with asbestos, gypsum, silica, and other things inimical to human lungs. But that’s progress, right?

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Midtown for years. When I was an Eastman student, and later when I worked there in the Sibley Music Library, Midtown offered me a respite from the unfortunately small world of the arts. Never mind the kitschy Clock of the Nations; the plaza floor itself measured, step by human step, the depth and range of city life. You could see anybody at all walking through, waiting for a slice of pizza, pausing over a cup of coffee, focusing on urgent or imaginary business, trying to find a seat among the “No Sitting” signs on what looked like natural benches – you were part of Midtown, whether you looked eminently respectable or like any other form of lost soul.

The hate part of my feelings was architectural. Even when it was a newborn, as the gleaming progeny of once-revered Victor Gruen, the plaza always looked cheap, and the 1960s-style updating of several older buildings that staked out the site like pylons depressed the aesthetic value even more.

Yet Midtown at its best fulfilled the promise of good urban design. It brought people together – as close to “everybody” as you can get, and as you do get on Saturdays at the Public Market, to cite Rochester’s greatest success. And as you won’t get with whatever succeeds the plaza – whether it’s a stuffy office tower for Paetec, as now promised, or the plans change again and we get a stuffy collection of boutiques and upper middle class retreats and redoubts.

At the very least, some effort should go to saving the more valuable older buildings that the plaza swallowed whole, or nearly whole. Why demolish everything on the 8.6-acre site? There’s got to be space that’s retrievable.

But most of what needs retrieval is the life of the street. When Rochesterians reminisce about Downtown in the old days, they mostly talk about the crowds, the packed department stores at holiday time, the annual monorail in Midtown loaded with kids. It’s that critical mass of humanity that we need to worry about most. And as we assess the Paetec plan, we should be asking what life it will bring to East Main, Clinton, East Avenue, and Chestnut And forgotten streets like Euclid, Lawn, and Atlas. Where are those, you ask? Exactly my point.

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