Walk in the sky or on the street? St. Paul ponders

Anumber of northern cities are known for weather-enclosed pedestrian bridges that allow people to circulate through downtown without venturing into the bitter cold. But after three decades of developing an extensive downtown “skyway” system, St. Paul, Minnesota, is finding that many new downtown residents are content to live along traditional streets and use sidewalks unsheltered from the weather. Some planners and designers in St. Paul are resisting expansion of the already extensive skyway system. “Skyways challenge our desire to create a vibrant street level,” explains Tim Griffin of the St. Paul Riverfront Corporation, a private nonprofit organization working on revitalization of the downtown riverfront. “Two levels of retail cannot be sustained with our current resident, employee, and visitor population,” Griffin says. “The street level suffers most.” There just isn’t enough foot traffic to support stores, cafes, and other retail on two levels. In 1997, Toronto urban design Ken Greenberg recommended that St. Paul remove enclosed bridges when opportunities arise. No dismantling has occurred. On the contrary, many defend the existing investment in the skyway system. Nor has much progress been made on Greenberg’s idea of establishing clear, inviting connections from the upper-level concourses to the sidewalks. (Because they run through the centers of blocks and periodically change direction, skyway corridors confuse many visitors, Greenberg noted. He has suggested that when possible, skyways should run along the perimeters of buildings and come down to street corners, providing a better sense of orientation, greater activity at ground level, and more “eyes on the street.”) Lucy Thompson, a St. Paul city planner, says one sign of a shift in the perspective of the 287,000-population city has been a decision not to extend the skyway to a state office building recently erected in the downtown’s northwest quadrant. She says a lively concentration of new housing and retail has cropped up in the northwest quadrant, in part because the northwest has blocks that are independent of the skyway system. “What we believe is important is choice,” Thompson says. In other words, she explains, people who want to live in the city’s center should have the option of living in buildings (typically about 14 stories high) that are part of the skyway system or of living in lower buildings (often four to eight stories high) that have no skyways but that have outdoor areas for residents. Developers such as the Lander Group of Minneapolis have recently produced a lot of non-skyway housing in the downtown area, she says, and the density has been substantial — about 100 units per acre. Meanwhile, Hartford has abandoned the “Second-Level Walkway Plan” that the Connecticut capital initiated in 1980s. A “skywalk” serving the Hartford Civic Center was demolished as part of residential redevelopment last year, and a second downtown passage is now being dismantled. Says Toni Gold of Project for Public Spaces: “Two cheers for city sidewalks.” u