New Life For The American City

[Spartan]

I am not even opposed to new construction - I would just like to see it done using the existing street grid more. Nothing makes me cringe more than new urbanist shopping centers on the suburban fringe surrounded by 40 acres of parking lots.

Someone recently identified Easton Town Center in Columbus, OH as neat development. When you are on the main street it looks great. Very walkable, stores with display windows facing the street, people on the sidewalks, light strung across the street to create festive atmosphere, etc... Then you zoom out and you see the thousands of parking spaces. Then you zoom out more and see that it doesn't even interact with the area around it. Then you zoom out more and find that it is miles from most houses. No one is ever going to walk to it.

Why is something that humans have been doing for 10,000 years so damn hard to replicate now? Tuscana was billed as a $600 million to $800 million project. Could you magine what would be possible if someone poured $600 million into the Plaza District, Paseo, and Capitol Hill.

You should check out Crocker Park in Westlake, OH.

[Just the facts]

You should check out Crocker Park in Westlake, OH.

That is exactly what I am talking about Spartan. The development is pretty dense and has multiple parking decks that eliminate the acres of surface parking (although there is some of that to) and they even have a Main St. BUT - and this is a really big BUT, they should have built it along Crocker Road. This whole project should be 500 east of where it is now. Instead of using the existing roads that were already in place, they just built a new urbanism shopping center. It should have been done like Orange, CA (just go to Google Earth and search on Orange, CA and zoom in) or Worth Ave in Palm Beach where not only is it integrated into the community, it IS the community.

When you drive along NW16 and enter the Plaza District, it isn't something that is 30 feet off to one side of the road with all the urbanism off the beaten path. You don't drive by the Plaza District - you drive through it. It is on both sides of the road - you can't miss it. That is what the new urbanist should focus on. Rehabing old shopping centers is great but the transit corridors are where the urbanism should be focused.

[Spartan]

I don't know how much you found doing Internet research, but Crocker Park is amazing, and you don't want to have anything to do with the snarled traffic nightmare at Crocker and Detroit (Which is literally at 30000 W. Detroit, as in 300th Street). I go there frequently just to hang out in the Barnes & Noble, or get food/drinks with friends and take it into the park--which has all these great interactive art pieces, chess boards (and a life-size chess board that little kids fight each other with lol), live music, pretzel/ice cream/etc vendors, and other cool stuff. They also have H&M and just about every retailer you need to remind you just how awful and overpriced UO really is (and OKC is screaming for one?).. right now they're expanding outward with a lot of new townhomes that are almost identical to the Maywood Brownstones we hold so dear.

In a class that I'm a TA for, the students bring up Crocker Park a lot. There's another really big, popular lifestyle center on the other side of town called Legacy Village in Lyndhurst, OH (big Jewish area). The people on the eastside really gravitate to Legacy, which only has surface parking that is separated from the village setting, and you can tell that lay folk clearly understand the difference in quality and function with structured and surface parking. Crocker Park is regarded as one of the best attractions in Northeast Ohio whereas Legacy is really "just another damn shopping center" that people only go to because they don't want to spend an hour getting across town.

I agree that the location for Crocker is less than ideal. However in this case, moving it up against the main arterial would make it worse. It should have been built around a rapid station..the transit authority is trying to get TOD going around all of the commuter rail stations, but most of them have been slow going. Crocker would have been perfect for that, and considering that Cleveland ranks in the top ten nationally for transit use by the non-poor, it would have meant a lot more casual traffic. However the development has been very successful either way.