The Heart of the City Creating Vibrant Downtowns for a New Century
"Alex Garvin looks at cities with a clearer eye than any other planner in America. He loves cities, but I think he loves empirical observation even more. This book is a paean to downtown, driven not by dogma but by a realistic, practical sensibility and a
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HEA RT CI T Y of the
C R E AT I N G V I B R A N T D O W N TO W N S for a NEW CENTURY
ALEXANDER GARVIN
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The Heart of the City
The Heart of the City Creating Vibrant Downtowns for a New Century
Alexander Garvin
Washington | Covelo | London
Copyright © 2019 Alexander Garvin All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 650, Washington, DC 20036. ISLAND PRESS is a trademark of the Center for Resource Economics. Library of Congress Control Number: 2018959603 All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Keywords: business district, business improvement district (BID), community development corporation (CDC), deindustrialization, entertainment center, historic preservation, immigration, mixed-use development, public realm, public transportation, real estate development, tax increment financing (TIF), tourism, urban parks, urban plazas, walkability
Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Chapter 1: What Is Downtown?
1
Chapter 2: Where Is Downtown?
19
Chapter 3: How and Why Downtown America Is Changing
43
Chapter 4: People Who Are Changing Downtown
75
Chapter 5: Organizations That Are Changing Downtown
95
Chapter 6: Lessons for Any Downtown
131
Chapter 7: Emerging 21st-Century Downtowns
163
Chapter 8: Creating Vibrant Downtowns for a New Generation
199
Afterword 219 Notes 221 Index 241
Preface Fifteen years after I left my position as vice president for planning, design, and development at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, where I was in charge of planning the reconstruction of the World Trade Center (WTC), I decided to evaluate the results of the rebuilding. I was stunned. Lower Manhattan, which for half a century had been a declining agglomeration of single-use office buildings, was becoming a resurgent, mixed-use, 24-hour community. Not because of the rebuilding of the WTC, however. Millions of square feet of office space at the new WTC were either unoccupied or unbuilt, yet there were 9,000 more private sector jobs in lower Manhattan than had been there before the terrorist attack. There also were 38,000 additional residents living in 18,000 apartments and 6,000 more hotel rooms.1 How, I wondered, could lower Manhattan be resurgent when it had been in decline since the end of World War II, when, like other American downtowns, it had lost tens of millions of customers to competing business districts and suburbs that were burgeoning everywhere? I knew that other downtowns were resurgent. W
