Transforming suburbia one parking lot at a time

As the New Urbanism rises to the challenge of creating urban places from a suburban mold, two mall conversions and a development — each in different corners of the US — suggest ways to begin. Parking lots, one-story retail boxes, high-speed arterial roads — the elements of the typical suburban landscape can seem like insurmountable obstacles to creating anything resembling a pedestrian-friendly, urban place. Still, cities and private developers across the country are grappling with this challenge, and pockets of urbanism have emerged where suburban strip retail ruled before. New Urban News looks at three developments that, with varying degrees of success, have escaped the suburban form. The three projects are moving toward the same general goal, i.e., integrating commercial and residential development and building walkable environments that serve people’s need for public gathering places as well as their need for shopping and entertainment. The forces driving the retrofits are very different, however. Winter Park Village in Winter Park, Florida, emerged because the city’s planning director rejected a conventional mall redevelopment proposal, hired a new urbanist firm to lead a charrette, and convinced the developer to take the project in a new direction. The redevelopment of Downtown Brea east of Los Angles was instigated and led by the City Council and the redevelopment agency. Mashpee Commons on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is the brainchild of two private developers. Winter Park Village can best be described as embryonic urbanism. In the first phase, the failing Winter Park Mall has been almost completely demolished and replaced by a two-block main street terminating in a multiplex theater. In what may be a unique retrofit in the US, the remaining big box department store has been converted into 58 loft apartments on two floors above retail. The main street is built on a human-scale, is lined with stores, and cleverly masks the size of the massive cinema. The street is a good beginning, but the master plan by Dover Kohl & Partners has been watered down. The cinema does not have liner buildings as originally envisioned. One small square has been eliminated, and another is not fully enclosed, allowing the public space to bleed into a parking lot. While the project is a clear improvement over the typical strip mall, the architecture retains enough of the mall flavor to detract from the overall impression of Winter Park Village. “We still have a long way to go to fulfill our expectations,” says city planning director Don Martin. “Yet, we set a standard for central Florida in terms of infill development.” Developed by the Don Casto Organization, the project currently has 367,000 square feet of commercial space in addition to the loft apartments. Brea’s “third place” Winter Park Village attempts to reshape a place that has always been suburban, but the redevelopment in the City Brea is an example of reurbanizing a small downtown that had become engulfed by sprawl and ultimately thoroughly suburbanized. In the 1970s, a regional mall shifted the center of retail activity a mile away, and Brea Boulevard, the main street, was widened to a six-lane arterial. The ensuing blight prompted public officials to assemble land for redevelopment, which initially took the form of a conventional strip shopping center fronted by large parking lots, built in the early 1990s. But when the city hired RTKL Associates to master plan the rest of the area in 1996, the firm introduced new urban principles. The result is the Birch Street Promenade, a pedestrian-friendly and thriving main street in that branches off the west side of Brea Boulevard, behind the shopping center. On the east side of the arterial, several blocks feature new street-front commercial and residential development. Since 1999, downtown has gained a total of 200,000 square feet of commercial space, a 22-screen cinema, parking structures for 1720 cars, 62 live/work loft apartments, and 40 townhomes. Also in the redevelopment area are the Ash Street Cottages, 96 single-family detached homes built in the mid-1990s. Achieving urbanism begins with building good streets, and RTKL’s plan transformed Birch Street from a “B” street to an “A” street. On one side of the street, new mixed-use buildings line the backside of the Gateway Center. On the other side, the street is anchored by the 22-screen Edwards Cinemas. Crucial to the success of Birch Street’s urbanism was Edwards willingness to break the originally planned megabox into two and line the buildings with retail spaces. Birch Street has on-street parking and is narrow enough for people to cross without hesitation. According to Nate Cherry of RTKL, the street has also benefited from developer CIM Group’s insistence on variety in the streetwall. Birch Street features a mixture of one, two, and three-story buildings designed by five different architectural firms. The sense of enclosure is enhanced by the terminating vista, a parking garage lined by two stories of retail and fronted by a prominent spire. Engaging the arterial One of the major questions in any suburban retrofit is whether or not it is possible to improve wide arterial roads. In Brea, for instance, the 110 ft. wide Brea Boulevard will never become a pedestrian’s haven, but now that it has buildings lining the sidewalks on both sides, people have a reason brave the barrier. “With the energy created by Birch Street, we now have the ability to carry the improvements over to the new blocks and get people to walk across the boulevard,” says Planning Director David Crabtree. The next round of street improvements will include shade structures at the corners, colored paving in the crosswalks, and barriers along the street edge to prevent pedestrians from crossing anywhere but at the crosswalks. “It’s all about making the space defensible for the pedestrian,” Cherry says. Winter Park Village creates a pedestrian environment on its interior, but does not attempt to substantially change the character of the bordering commercial strip. It’s main street connects to the arterial in a T-intersection. Even around Mashpee Commons in Cape Cod, Massachusetts — a pioneering new urban strip mall conversion under construction for 16 years — the suburban arterials remain virtually unchanged. “We wanted to line the arterial road with buildings and on-street parking, but we kept running into the brick wall called traffic engineering,” says Douglas Storrs, who is developing Mashpee Commons with partner Buff Chace. So far, the state has refused modifications, but the developers have found a useful strategy for cushioning the transition between internal and external streets. “We bring our “A” streets up to the intersection with the arterial and bring the buildings as close as possible to the intersection,” Storrs says. This “neck-down” manages to slow traffic on the arterial near the entrance to Mashpee Commons. The developers have proposed to soften the arterial road with an 18 ft. landscaped median and hope to make that change in 2003. An incremental approach Away from the arterial, however, Mashpee Commons has become a successful, urban environment modeled on a traditional New England town center. Apart from the walkable streets, Mashpee’s strength lies in the vernacular architecture, quality materials such as brick and clapboard, and the variety of building types that can accommodate a chain store like CVS as well as small local businesses. Storrs and Chase have worked slowly, adding one or two new buildings at a time while gradually transforming the original 70,000 sq. ft. strip mall into street-oriented storefronts. The conversion has turned out to be more challenging than creating new streets and buildings, Storrs says. To make the 1960s structures with their cheap architecture and heavy Mansard roofs part of the new fabric, builders have ripped the entire skin off buildings and added entablature and details that reflect vernacular Cape Cod architecture. The developers have worked to convert the buildings to two stories, but when that has proved impossible or prohibitively expensive, then the choice has been to add height to the single-story building with gabled roofs and dormers and by increasing ceiling height inside the stores, Storrs says. Mashpee Commons has more than 80 commercial tenants in 255,000 square feet of retail, office, and entertainment space. On the residential side, the project includes 13 apartments above retail, and 28 more units go into construction in late 2002. Mixing tenants Mashpee Commons has made it a priority to achieve a balance of national, regional, and local tenants, and Storrs maintains that customers respond favorably to the kind of diversity they can’t find anywhere else. Though rents are high, the project has incubator spaces that are small and inexpensive enough for local businesses to gain their footing. With time, Mashpee Commons has also been able to attract service-oriented businesses such as banks, a tailor, a drug store, a photo shop, and an optometrist. In Brea, the mix of tenants is skewed toward national chains and entertainment — local specialty shops are in the minority. “I’d like to be able to say that Birch Street was successful in luring back some of the local tenants traditionally found in a downtown, but the rents have been too high for that,” says Brea planning director Crabtree. For the mix of tenant to change, the projects need more residential units in the near vicinity. Winter Park Village is largely an entertainment venue. Its two anchors are a multiplex cinema and Borders Books, with restaurants, specialty stores, and a handful of apparel stores in between. Connections So far, the lack of a strong connection to a larger context is major drawback for the suburban retrofits. Until that happens, they remain islands. The future of Mashpee Commons has been planned out for a long time — a charrette led by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. in 1989 envisioned six residential neighborhoods radiating from the town center — but Storrs and Chace have faced chronic entitlement and regulatory stumbling blocks. On Cape Cod, new development has to be approved at the state, regional, and town level — a process that slows down any large-scale development, no matter what form it may take. At Winter Park Village, a second phase is scheduled to bring more housing units and structured parking to the site. In the long term, the city is implementing streetscape improvements and regulating new development projects in a way that will provide better pedestrian access to the city’s thriving, historic core about half a mile away. Downtown Brea already benefits from its connection to residential neighborhoods, and the city’s Economic Development Director Eric Nicoll says the energy generated around Birch Street is spurring more mixed-use development north and south on Brea Boulevard. The three projects show that a few walkable streets lined with varied, urban buildings can become public gathering places even when surrounded by suburban trappings.