Downtown Crossing/Financial District | Discussion

I still think the best solution for Washington St. is to raise the street section to the same level as the sidewalk and carve out a narrower auto path using planters, benches, light poles and other street furniture. Open this to traffic at night. People can then take their cars to restaurant*with*valets and cabs can bring residents and visitors to the area. This would bring a lot more security to the area.
 
It already hardly feels like a ped zone with all the delivery trucks and emergency vehicles lingering around. I would say open it, but make it extremely inconvenient and not at all obvious that cars are allowed.
 
Why have to click?

Would car traffic bring back the crowds?
By Michael Levenson

Downtown Crossing's problems have been well-documented: Crime has spawned fear, heightened by a stabbing and shooting in the midst of a bustling afternoon. Shops that once thrived next to Jordan Marsh and Filene's have shuttered, leaving empty storefronts cheek-by-jowl with pushcarts, discount jewelry stalls, and gaping construction sites. Sidewalks that teem with rowdy teenagers and office workers by day lie empty and forbidding at night.

For years, city planners have been promising to restore the area to its former grandeur and make it a major urban destination. But as they have attempted solution after solution without success, they have never tried one idea: reopening the streets to traffic.

Indeed, Downtown Crossing remains one of the last vestiges of a largely discredited idea, the Ameri can pedestrian mall, which municipal planners once believed would help cities compete with proliferating suburban malls. In the 1970s, at least 220 cities closed downtown thoroughfares, paved them with bricks or cobbles and waited for them to take hold as urban destinations. Since then, all but about two dozen have reopened the malls to traffic, as planners, developers, and municipal officials came to believe that the lack of cars had an effect opposite of what they had intended, driving away shoppers, stifling businesses, and making streets at night seem barren and forlorn.

"Pedestrian malls never delivered the type of foot traffic and vitality they had expected," said Doug Loescher, director of The Main Street Center at The National Trust for Historic Preservation.

"The sense of movement that a combination of transit modes provides - whether on foot or in car - really does make a difference," he said. "People feel safer, because there's some kind of movement through the district, other than a lone pedestrian at night. It just creates a sense of energy that makes people feel more comfortable and makes the district more appealing."

Boston planners are against opening up Downtown Crossing, but as the district suffers the exodus of anchor businesses and a deepening malaise has settled in, some shop owners long for the energy, ease, and excitement they remember before Downtown Crossing closed to most traffic in 1978.

"There was a constant flow of cars, stopping and going; it was very active, very busy, like a typical city street," said Steve Centamore, co-owner since 1965 of Bromfield Camera Co., on Bromfield Street, part of which is open only to commercial traffic. "There were people coming and going. It didn't seem to impede any pedestrians. It was a lot busier. People could just pull up and get what they needed. Now, it takes an act of Congress to even get through here."

Pellegrino Bondanza, 72, who has sold vegetables in Downtown Crossing since he was a boy, said the pedestrian mall "didn't work out well." He hopes the city will reopen it to traffic.

"Maybe it would bring some of the action back in town," he said. "I remember as a kid, I tried to squeeze in with a pushcart and, if I could locate at a corner, I could sell what I had in an hour and make a good living there. You had to be a little careful crossing the streets and everything, but don't forget the cars went slow when they were going up them streets there. There was no fast driving."

Boston officials say they considered reopening Downtown Crossing to traffic and, in 2006, hired a team of consultants from London, Toronto, Berkeley, Calif., and Boston to study the idea. The consultants concluded that the mall should stay because the estimated 230,000 people who walk through Downtown Crossing every day should be enough to keep the place lively and economically vital.

"What we heard from them pretty loudly was, 'Not just yet. Make it work. Give it your best effort,' " said Andrew Grace, senior planner and urban designer at the Boston Redevelopment Authority. "Lots of cities throughout the world make these districts work. The historic centers in most European cities function, and they thrive."

Kristen Keefe, retail sector manager of the BRA, warned that bringing back traffic could squeeze out pedestrians who, she said, already contend with crowded sidewalks. "We just think these two things are in conflict," she said.

Boston built its pedestrian mall after a study showed that six times more pedestrians than cars traveled down Washington Street - in front of what was then Filene's and Jordan Marsh - "so the impetus was to reassert the balance for pedestrians a little bit and improve the safety and amenities for pedestrians," said Jane Howard, who helped design the mall for the BRA and is now a planner in a private firm.

It was a time when malls were being built across the country. Some are still considered successful - in Burlington, Vt., and Charlottesville, Va., for example. And New York City is experimenting with blocking traffic on Broadway through Times and Herald squares to create pedestrian-only zones. But those are the exceptions.

Chicago, which turned downtown State Street into a pedestrian mall in 1979, reopened it to traffic in 1996, convinced that the mall had worsened the area's economic slump and left the street deserted and dangerous. Eugene, Ore., scrapped its mall in 1997, frustrated that "people went around downtown instead of through it," said Mayor Kitty Piercy. Tampa got rid of its mall in 2001 because it "didn't bring back any retail," as the city had hoped, said Christine M. Burdick president of Tampa Downtown Partnership.

Buffalo, which has trolley service on its mall on Main Street, is currently reintroducing cars after finding that shoppers avoided stores that were cut off from traffic.

"It takes a leap of faith to go somewhere nearby, pay to park, and then walk to someplace you haven't been yet," said Deborah Chernoff, Buffalo's planning director. "All the cities are dealing with the reality of how people actually behave."

Downtown Crossing is not even a full pedestrian mall. Because Washington Street, its main thoroughfare, is open to commercial traffic, pedestrians mostly stick to the sidewalks, avoiding the cabs and police cruisers that often ply the route.

After dark on a recent weeknight, just after 8:30 p.m., Downtown Crossing resembled a film noir scene, its deserted rain-slick streets glistening with the reflections of neon signs from a shuttered liquor store and a discount jewelry shop. The few pedestrians who hurried by were mostly teenagers and office workers descending into the subway or headed to the bustle on Tremont Street. They walked purposefully, scurrying past darkened store after darkened store with metal gates pulled shut. The only cars were a police cruiser that rumbled past, an idling garbage truck, and the occassional taxi.

Yet some say the mall should stay.

The developer Ronald M. Druker, who owns buildings on Washington Street, said he has "vivid memories of the conflict between cars and pedestrians," before the mall was built. "If you insinuated cars and trucks on a normal basis into that area, it would not enliven it," he said. "It would create the same problems that it created 30 years ago when we got rid of them."

But others, particularly the shop owners struggling to survive the recession say they are eager to try just about anything that would bring back business.

"Downtown Crossing definitely needs something - that's for sure," said Harry Gigian owner since 1970 of Harry Gigian Co. jewelers on Washington Street, which has seen a sharp dropoff in sales. "Nobody comes downtown anymore."
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headed to the bustle on Tremont Street
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When in god's name has there ever been more of a bustle on Tremont St., with the sole exception of the block right in front of the Boston Common cinema?
 
Foolish article, inapposite old photo. Probably could find a photo of crowded sidewalks with horses and buggies filling in the street. Yeah, let's bring them back too. That will solve everything.
Its not the cars, its the stores. You want people, get greedy landlords to cut their rents. Hey you, the guy who owns the "Barnes and Noble" building, I'm talkin bout you. Bet that "short term" deal with Filene's Basement you rejected isn't looking too bad about now, is it, asshat?
 
Most of the time, it seems like old photos of city street life have way more people around than modern ones.
 
Not so long ago, when Jordan's and Raymond's and Gilchrist's and Kennedy's joined with Filene's and five-and-tens like Grant's, Woolworth and McCrory's to comprise Washington Street's department store lineup, mounted police had to use their steeds to keep people on the overflowing sidewalks during the Christmas rush. Traffic was heavy, but because it moved so slowly it was never oppressive.

All those first-run Sack Theaters also helped; when weary of shopping, folks would go to a matinee.
 
^ At various times they also called themselves Kresge's and/or Newberry's. I think they were on the Common side of Washington towards Border's, but I'm not dead sure.
 
Kresge's Korner on corner of Temple Place and Washington.
 
There was a five-and-dime store on Washington Street near Bromfield called, "Niesner's". It was L-shaped, and there was an entrance on Bromfield as well.
 
You want the future of Downtown Crossing as a shopping district? Visit Hancock Street in Quincy. The old timers navigate by the stores that aren't there: "Turn right by the Sears, right at Woolworths, circle around by Remicks, and then if you are by Raymond's, no you went too far, so turn around by Robert Hall, get back on Hancock, then don't go past Colman's..."
Get over it, landlords. It's dead as a major shopping destination. So cut your rents and make it interesting. How about more students and move Chinatown up a bit?
 
tobyjug said:
You want the future of Downtown Crossing as a shopping district? Visit Hancock Street in Quincy. The old timers navigate by the stores that aren't there: "Turn right by the Sears, right at Woolworths, circle around by Remicks, and then if you are by Raymond's, no you went too far, so turn around by Robert Hall, get back on Hancock, then don't go past Colman's..."
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Hehehe. So true.

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Oakland. Last week. Zipping by on the bike. This is the block beyond the renovated and recently re-opened Fox Theater. ('It's still 1954... right?')

tobyjug said:
Get over it, landlords. It's dead as a major shopping destination. So cut your rents and make it interesting. How about more students and move Chinatown up a bit?
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Chinatown had/has its chance to expand--over the Pike and into the Herald's area, as well as over the X-way/Artery into that cloverleaf development (South Bay was it called?), and that's going nowhere fast.

Also, what happened with the Hudson Street development? Stalled (again), too?
 
tobyjug said:
Get over it, landlords. It's dead as a major shopping destination. So cut your rents and make it interesting. How about more students and move Chinatown up a bit?
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I walked through DTX the other weekend (no snow, sunny day, late morning). Hadn't been through since mid-September. I was stunned at how dead it was. And September was when the Filene's hole still had a chance ...

I'm maybe the biggest grump on this forum, because I imagine what could be and am disappointed at the lack of imagination by our civic leaders and developers. In Downtown Crossing, I can't be grumpy because I can't imagine a turnaround without major concessions by landlords.

The newest development is interesting. Short-term leases of 5 year/2 years free so landlords can show future potential tenants that the building leases at "market rates." I don't see prices being returned to post-depression pricing within 5 years (because I don't predict a recovered economy in 5 years). I imagine that short-term instability of a cheaper lease but potential huge rate increase really doesn't work for a retail outfit though.
 
bbfen said:
I'm maybe the biggest grump on this forum, because I imagine what could be and am disappointed at the lack of imagination by our civic leaders and developers.
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Pffff. Hardly! Get to the back of the line. :)


bbfen said:
In Downtown Crossing, I can't be grumpy because I can't imagine a turnaround without major concessions by landlords. The newest development is interesting. Short-term leases of 5 year/2 years free so landlords can show future potential tenants that the building leases at "market rates." I don't see prices being returned to post-depression pricing within 5 years (because I don't predict a recovered economy in 5 years). I imagine that short-term instability of a cheaper lease but potential huge rate increase really doesn't work for a retail outfit though.
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Sometimes, when I read stuff here, I have to assume many of you live in some protective bubble, surrounded by books, and don't get out much.

It sucks everywhere, and is much worse in so many places than how much it sucks there. The empty storefronts, including in the preciousness that is San Francisco, is staggering. All your surveys and research and manipulation of data means nothing. You can say all you want about whatever market forces you think can be manipulated to get things started again (or to 'fool' prospective tenants into renting) and, you know what, all that doesn't matter. The kinds of people presenting all that blather will never have any imagination. That's not what they were trained, educated for and designed to do. Shit will just happen when it's ready, sometimes well outside our attempts to control it all.

Understand, I am not here to attack you personally bbfen; just a cumulative expression bottled up over weeks of reading posts from others, and where your observation(s) pushed me over the edge.

End rant. Ahhhhhh.... Must find pics of puppies and kittens now.
 
garbribre said:
Understand, I am not here to attack you personally bbfen; just a cumulative expression bottled up over weeks of reading posts from others, and where your observation(s) pushed me over the edge.

End rant. Ahhhhhh.... Must find pics of puppies and kittens now.
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No, I'm totally with you. I can't even get excited about things anymore (the cognac I've started drinking for breakfast helps?), so I just cruise icanhazcheezburger all day and make photocopies of my butt.

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2009/03/02/funny-pictures-copyin-mah-butt
 
this is from today's downtown crossing email:
You are invited on Wednesday March 4th at 11:00 AM for an opening for a new business : BOLOCO , at 27 School Street.

Also following there will be a ribbon cutting at Marliave at 10 Bosworth Street, and Watch Hospital, 40 Bromfield Street, & Pizzeria Rico, 32 Bromfield Street for their new signage.

Mayor Thomas Menino will be there at these opening
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New signs! Can you feel the excitement? Truly this is the dawn of a new era.
 
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