Manchester Infill & Small Developments

pel_north said:
On a different subject, does anyone know if there are any renderings of this proposed Market Basket? I am not happy at all that they are building this as it will only reinforce that the city of Manchester wants to keep the lower income folks in the city center and keep everyone else on the outskirts.
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From what I gathered when it was announced, it sounded like the existing structure is just going to be converted into the grocery store. So I imagine that when it is completed it will look almost identical to its current form except it will have some new paint and a Market Basket sign.
 
Manchester to move forward with $43.5m complex


By BETH LAMONTAGNE HALL
New Hampshire Union Leader

MANCHESTER ? The Board of Mayor and Aldermen agreed to move forward on a $43.5 million plan to build a new municipal complex on Valley Street that will house the police, public works and highway departments.

Link

I have to say Gatsas has been pretty active so far.


Site Overview

More Info

I'm curious as to whats going to happen to the old police station.
 
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This is my first post, but I spent a good deal of time today and yesterday reading posts on this thread going several years back. I'll try to be brief in this, and address the most recent development proposals, but just for some background: I grew up in Bedford near South River Road, and spent most of my time in high school living at my mother's house a few blocks north of Webster Street in Manchester. I left in 2003 to go to school in Boston, and have lived there since, but I still consider Manchester home and I think the city has enormous potential to be a premiere New England city. I'm already getting into this a bit more than I had intended, but I think the next several decades will see a resurgence of regional midsize cities like Manchester, Portland and so on, as more people move back to cities from the suburbs. If it can build on its gains since the mid-1990s, Manchester will probably be able to attract more young people back and away from larger cities (like the one I've left it for).

That said, the recent Market Basket announcement is a huge disappointment. The city does need an urban grocery store, but not necessarily this one and not on this site. The proposed Manchester Food Coop would be the best option in my view, as it would be locally owned, and be a destination food store. There's something to be said for locating a Market Basket, which sells affordable groceries and is relatively locally owned, downtown, and it would in many ways replace the two Vistas that used to exist in the area. Still (and this is harder without a car), there's a large grocery store just up the road from this site on Valley Street. There is no good reason to devote such a large and strategically important site to a full-size grocery store.

This brings me to much next point, which is that a grocery store downtown should not only serve downtown residents (though it must do this, too), but also be a destination grocery store. A Market Basket will not do this. A Whole Foods would, though I think that would price out a good segment of the local population, and better options might include a Trader Joe's or the proposed Coop. The latter two, and even Whole Foods to a certain extent, require less space than a full-size grocery store and less parking as many people would stop in for speciality items while downtown.

The biggest problem with this though is how much of a step back it is for Manchester, and how much of a missed opportunity this represents. For at least a decade now, the area has been a proposed Gaslight District, which the city should really move to develop. Small shops, restaurants, bars and apartments would fit wonderfully into the dense building stock between Granite Street and this site, and larger scale stores can create an urban counterpoint to the mall across Elm Street in the numerous old warehouses. The Market Basket site is the best site in the city for an eventual (and hopefully not far off) commuter rail/intermodal transit center along the railroad lines with tons of prime mixed-use development space leftover along Elm Street. There could be an urban grocery store on this site, and even a Market Basket, but it needs to be part of this larger project.
 
Portland has a new whole foods next to a public housing project. A trader Joes is going in down the street from this, too, so I think Manchester could do the same. good points.
 
Welcome to the forum, FrankLloydMike. That was an excellent and interesting post.
 
Thanks--there have been some really great ideas raised in this forum, and there have been some really interesting proposals for the city from the general public as well as city planners over the past several years. Most of them require a good degree of coordination among several different ideas and the agencies, developers and public required to implement them, not to mention the vision and willingness to invest in something that may not see pay offs in the immediate future.

One proposal I just saw is that the MTA will have a free "downtown circulator" bus (during weekdays only I presume) beginning service sometime soon. Improving the city's public transit system would be a huge boost--I really think a city's public transit system is reflective of its livability, and a commitment to good public transit not only breeds increased usage and reduced auto traffic, but improves the neighborhoods and destinations it serves. If Manchester and the surrounding communities were willing to support a much improved transit system, whether it involved just buses, streetcars or bus rapid transit that not only served the city, but also commuter lots along the edge, you'd need much less parking downtown and the adjacent neighborhoods. That of course would free up all the open lots now used for parking for development, which would of course mean more people coming to and living downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods who in turn would support the public transit.

Obviously making a huge investment in public transit like this would require the assistance and cooperation of several towns and cities, as well as the private sector, and it certainly wouldn't be cheap. If, however, it is well coordinated regionally and with developers, it would be a boon for the city as well as surrounding communities, all of which would benefit from public transit service to, from and within the city.

A lot of comments here have commended the city for its skyline, which is especially attractive from across the river with the mills blanketing the water and climbing up the hill to downtown, which is still fairly horizontal pierced with just a few towers. I actually like this a lot--it's not so different from the cities of the past, which were low and pierced with a few bell towers and steeples. What Manchester could really use, before more high-rises in my opinion, is filling in all the gaps at street level. This includes many single-story buildings downtown as well as parking lots, which could be replaced with multi-story buildings and public open spaces if we were less reliant on single-occupancy automobiles to get into and around the city.

Sorry for how long-winded this has become--I was actually visiting Portland, Oregon while the Market Basket plan was announced, and really fell in love with the transit system there. That Portland is obviously much bigger than Manchester, but still a midsize city by most measures, and I was pleasantly surprised when I got back and looked into it a bit to see that several city-sanctioned studies have recommended improving public transit (including light rail in one case) with transit-oriented development. While the Market Basket proposal may be a step in the wrong direction, the new MTA "downtown circulator" is a step in the right direction.
 
Just noticed this article from the April 2010 issue of Architect profiling the architectural/development market in Manchester. There's a (too) brief slideshow of current projects, including the Superior Court renovations, which I hadn't seen and look nice. I'd like to see a multimodal transit center on there, too, but hopefully soon--seems like everyone in the state, city and neighboring communities is up for rail.

Also, they mention "Manch Vegas", which is funny sometimes, but I miss knowing it as the Queen City sometimes, too. Interesting to see that 73,000 people work in the city, which has about 69,000 residents between the age 18-65. I don't know much about this sort of demographics, but I thought it was odd given the number of people from neighboring communities who work in the city that the number of workers was so close to the number of working-age residents. Obviously, some Mancunians work outside the city, some of the 10,000 residents between 18-24 are college students, and there is 6% unemployment, but I was curious if anyone knows how this might compare to other, similarly sized cities. Either way, getting more employees to move into the city, and more workers to live there would be a great development trend.
 
Hey Mike -

The working population of Manchester is 69,000, and 73,000 people work in the city, for a net gain of 4,000 in-commuters. This sounds odd. I am willing to bet it is because of the factors you mentioned (college students and high unemployment), but even more than that it is because of Manchester's proximity to other places of employment (from Concord to Nashua/Northern Massachusetts). In other cities, which are more central, like Burlington, VT, the proportion of in-commuters is probably a lot more (although in absolute terms it is less than Mancehster's) because there just simply aren't any alternative work places.

Burlington, VT, by the way, has a free 'downtown circulator' bus as well, and it is great. It's called the college street shuttle and does a central loop.

Nice posts.
 
FrankLloydMike said:
Just noticed this article from the April 2010 issue of Architect profiling the architectural/development market in Manchester. There's a (too) brief slideshow of current projects, including the Superior Court renovations, which I hadn't seen and look nice. I'd like to see a multimodal transit center on there, too, but hopefully soon--seems like everyone in the state, city and neighboring communities is up for rail.

Also, they mention "Manch Vegas", which is funny sometimes, but I miss knowing it as the Queen City sometimes, too. Interesting to see that 73,000 people work in the city, which has about 69,000 residents between the age 18-65. I don't know much about this sort of demographics, but I thought it was odd given the number of people from neighboring communities who work in the city that the number of workers was so close to the number of working-age residents. Obviously, some Mancunians work outside the city, some of the 10,000 residents between 18-24 are college students, and there is 6% unemployment, but I was curious if anyone knows how this might compare to other, similarly sized cities. Either way, getting more employees to move into the city, and more workers to live there would be a great development trend.
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I had no idea they were doing that for the superior court. Looks great.
 
Patrick said:
Hey Mike -

The working population of Manchester is 69,000, and 73,000 people work in the city, for a net gain of 4,000 in-commuters. This sounds odd. I am willing to bet it is because of the factors you mentioned (college students and high unemployment), but even more than that it is because of Manchester's proximity to other places of employment (from Concord to Nashua/Northern Massachusetts). In other cities, which are more central, like Burlington, VT, the proportion of in-commuters is probably a lot more (although in absolute terms it is less than Mancehster's) because there just simply aren't any alternative work places.

Burlington, VT, by the way, has a free 'downtown circulator' bus as well, and it is great. It's called the college street shuttle and does a central loop.
Click to expand...

I think you're right about this, and I also think Manchester might focus a bit too heavily on being "tax-friendly" in an attempt to draw businesses in. Being tax-friendly is fine, but in order to draw people into the city, it needs to do more than this and promote a vibrant, livable, diverse city center. I think the form-based zoning you've mentioned elsewhere would be great, but the city also needs to step up infrastructure. More people want to live in a walkable downtowns and surrounding neighborhoods where they can walk or take public transit to work and other destinations. Obviously, you can't promote this without good transit when more land is given over to streets and parking.

I just read an article in the Atlantic about public-private partnerships in building streetcars, and I'm not sure how I feel about the model, but I thought it might be attractive to a place like Manchester. With Kenosha, Wisconsin, a city smaller than Manchester, celebrating ten years of restored streetcar service--not to mention the heritage streetcar in Lowell, and restored service being proposed in Stamford and New Haven--I think Manchester should really consider drastically improving the transit system (maybe something like this) as well as modifying zoning to promote density and development in the downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. When I had some spare time a few weeks ago, I drew up a quick layout of what a streetcar system could look like, and I think it could really do an amazing job of connecting neighborhoods, promoting development and reducing auto-centric eyesores in the city.

There have been so many great plans in the past decade to improve the downtown and encourage development, not least of it the Gaslight/Warehouse/Commons district ideas and encouraging mixed uses in the Millyard. Still, not much has come of these, and a big part of that of course is due to the recession, but another problem is that the city seems to reliant on having people come downtown for dinner, not move there. With improved transit and form-based zoning to reduce gas stations, single-story development and the like downtown, I think the city would be on track to do implement some of the great planning ideas.

Speaking of which, whatever happened to the 379 Elm Street proposal from 2008?
 
Mike,

Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the 379 Elm Street proposal. What was it supposed to be? My suspicion is that it is another project delayed or abandoned because of the recession.

Thanks for sharing those links. I would like to look into them when I have a moment. As far as your ideas for Manchester, I think they are great. Transportation is a key factor in land use and is directly linked to development patterns. You know what else Manchester might try to do? -- get more students intown. I know it has UNH Manchester, and some sort of an art institute, but I'm not familiar with where the institutions are relative to the core of the city. I know that Burlington, VT is lively because of its college population, which has a magnetic effect on other groups of people who are into the same things (nightlife and art and restaurants etc.). Portland, Maine revitalized a stretch of Congress street (to an extent anyway) by doing the same thing when they brought in the Maine College of Art directly to the center of a hard hit economically bust section of our main street. Many people complain about the hippies wandering about during the day, and to tell you the truth I would rather see business people myself, but hippies have a key role to play in cities. They are the so called "creative class" (usually) and they bring diversity, eclecticism and an artsy vibe to places, which, in turn, draws in others who aren't so obnoxious to look at but who may share similar interests. Planning for these types of environments is truly tricky and sometimes it is just luck. I think one of the biggest problems Manchester has is its layout, with easy egress from the city. Sorry to use Portland and Burlington as examples again, but to get from the cores of those cities outward, there is no direct route. In Burlington you have to hop over to Main Street a few blocks, and in Portland you have to wind around congress street or get to forest ave, and even if you go straight all the way on congress street, you come to a do not enter section, where you have to be rerouted a few blocks. State street is the only street in Portland that goes directly through town without requiring any real travel into neighborhoods, and I think this is to the city' detriment. On the other hand, it seems like Elm in NH will bring you in and out of the city mighty quickly. The same for bridge street. Of course, I'm no expert on manchester, but this is the impression I got. Its like you drive down elm and if you don't find parking soon enough you have already left the city, whether or not intentionally. You need to design streets to trap people there, they might like it. ;)
 
I completely agree about the layout--Manchester was designed by a 19-year-old engineer, and I think it shows. I like to think someone a bit wiser might have realized that the main street should not dead end at both ends. Obviously, the grid was designed at a different time when more people would live their entire lives in the city, and less people would come and go, so the grid didn't need to trap anyone really. Now, however, the grid and the built environment do just sort of bleed out of the city. The West Side, which is improving to some degree too, is more naturally hemmed in by the two rivers and several ridges. It's fortunate that because of the slight bend in the Merrimack, Elm Street bends at Bridge Street creating some degree of visual interest, and Canal and Commercial meander much more dramatically but both need more redevelopment work. It would be much nicer if there were squares at Bridge and Granite streets where they intersect with Elm, but I think the best solution now is creating better cross-connections with the Millyard and extending development beyond that stretch of Elm Street to reduce the strip effect.

I also think you're right on about getting students downtown. The New Hampshire Institute of Art (NHIA) has grown quite rapidly over the past ten years, and is the best thing to happen to downtown as far as I'm concerned. Unlike the arena and ballpark, NHIA is not on the fringes of downtown, it brings people downtown everyday, and they live downtown. It's more a collection of buildings than a campus as it has been acquiring and renovating older buildings as necessary, but it's loosely centered around Victory Park, which is the intended "cultural district" downtown. Their website has some info on where the buildings are, but I think that not having a defined campus has made it much more a part of the city. I'd love to see the UNH campus expand a bit, in addition to making Arms Park more of a park/campus and less of a parking lot. Originally, I believe, UNH-Manchester was up on Hackett Hill, but they intelligently abandoned that site as the city should--stop trying to sell it as a business park and just let it be woods on the edge of town. They just expanded the community college out on the edge of town, so they probably wouldn't move downtown, which would have been nice.

379 Elm is a bit perplexing, because it was proposed in June 2008, when the downtown had already begun. I guess people didn't know the extent of it at the time, but I wonder if something else happened there--it was a nice mixed use proposal with a mid-rise apartment building toward the back of the block with retail and offices along Elm Street in the "Warehouse District".
 
Although I have been to or through Manchester about a dozen times, I am not completely familiar with the locations of everything...so I think I may know which development you are referring to as 379 Elm, but could you let me know if I am right? The ballpark, which is relatively new, envisioned plans for one or two mid rise (6 stories I think) in a future phase of nearby development. Is this anywhere near where you are talking about (I have only seen the ballpark in photos, so I don't know where it is, other than near the river).

Also, the NHIA building looks VERY nice. A nice addition to the city, for sure. I didn't know that about the 19 year old engineer. My understanding is that Manchester was built as a company town, for the mill workers to live in and work in and not much else, but over time it (obviously) grew into so much more and took on a new role in the region. Is that about right? Again, I'm not a Manchester expert, I'm going off of some public television show I saw 5 years ago. I think places like Burlington and Portland are really helped by their geographic boundaries, because Portland is on a peninsula, and Burlington is on a lake. You can only go so many directions in each city before you have to turn around. I think step number one for Manchester would be to make some public space squares like you said, improve transit, and redesign the central grid a bit. That, of course, would be a lot of time and money, and those politically accountable might risk their jobs if the changes were immediately unpopular (even if they would be in the long term interests of the city). Very tricky stuff, but you have some great ideas for sure.
 
379 Elm was actually a different proposal--not far from the Verizon on the forlorn stretch of Elm Street south of the arena and backing onto Valley Cemetery, which is slowly being restored as a very attractive garden cemetery. I did see, however, that the city's economic development report of last year recommended finishing the Riverwalk and the mid-rise condos by the ballpark.

I'm not positive about the early aspirations of Manchester, but I think they were pretty lofty from the start. I could be wrong about this, but I think that like Lowell, the idea was to create an industrial utopia while making a handsome profit--obviously things didn't work out quite that way, but the city took the name Manchester when it was still a small village based on the goal of surpassing its namesake. It was certainly more insular and less regionally focused, but it did draw workers from quite a few places, so I'm not sure. Unlike Portland, however, its growth was not organic, which led to some beautifully harmonious spaces and buildings (much since lost), but also a lack of responsiveness to changes and later development.

If you're interested in a brief, and rather sad historical analysis, there's this essay and photos from a 1968 Harvard magazine. The writer speaks to the responsiveness of the Millyard to human scale and activity and the unprecedented harmony among American cities on the eve of its destruction.

In addition to about half the buildings, the Millyard also lost its canals, which had defined at least that part of the city geographically, more like Portland Burlington. Even with that loss and the ability of Manchester to sprawl out more, I'd especially like to see more done to focus development on the Millyard and the neighborhood between it and Elm Street. The Millyard is definitely Manchester's greatest asset, and it took the city some time to realize it. I think it would be too hard and result in even more loss if Manchester tried to build new squares and re-do the grid, but making greater destinations at either end of Elm Street in the city center and making greater connection to the Millyard and the riverfront could help refocus activity and stop the sense of the city bleeding out into sprawl in all directions. These are all things that planning studies for the city have shown and recommended, so I'd really love to see some implementation as the economy picks up a bit.

One thing that I love about both Portland and Manchester, and unlike Cambridge/Boston where I know live and love, is that there is so much potential for growth, development and improvement. Portland is much further along and still a nicer place to be, I think, but Manchester is fast improving, and both cities are small enough that it would be easy for a few smaller projects and policy changes to build momentum for larger development, as it seems is happening a bit in Portland already.
 
The potential for Manchester and Portland is huge...agreed. I think that often times, people get afraid of trying to be like Boston, and give in to NIMBYism. Truthfully, the charachters of Manchester and Portland both are vastly different and would never emulate Boston, but could certainly become just as economically and culturally significant years down the line, should development continue to build on the momentum you mentioned.
 
Agreed... Manchester and Portland don't need to compete very much, but as the two premier larger northern New England cities there seems to be a natural competitiveness as they both try to draw visitors, residents and businesses. And they don't need to and shouldn't emulate Boston, I agree, but with Boston there's just less to develop--it's very built up and the ability of one or two projects to transform an area of the city and spur greater development is pretty small. There's also a much greater obstacle to development in the size of the city, the NIMBYism and the degree to which the city and its infrastructure has already been built up (if not always maintained). Boston is a great place and I really enjoy living here, but it's harder to get excited about proposals, projects and the idea of civic improvement when the beast is as big and as hard to move (and with less movement needed) than smaller cities.
 
I agree....I am much more interested in development in Northern New England. It carries so much more for the residents. In Boston, it hardly changes a thing.
 
Interesting. I have often thought the same thing. Boston is obviously way more city than Portland, which is great about Boston, but at the same time its difficult to get excited about projects there the same way I do in Portland or Burlington or Manchester or even Nashua unless they are as big and capable of influencing change as the menino tower a few years back. I know urban planning isn't all about skyscrapers (and many people think it shouldn'd focus on them at all), but I really would have liked to see the mumbles tower.

In manchester even small little improvements can vastly improve the place, so the potential exists to, for very little money, dramatically improve a place, and as has already been said, that is very exciting and motivating. It is inspiring. Manchester has already come a LONG way from the early 1990s. I think regional planning would be very important to Manchester's success, too, moreso than in other cities, because of its situation and proximity to Boston. The key is to prevent people from working in the myriad other job centers of the region. Become a net and catch workers and residents who might otherwise live elsewhere. The key to this, I think, is transportation planning. some BRT and/or commuter rail directly into manchester from its surrounding communities would be a great idea. Again, the feasibility is another story. I don't know, but I know manchester has a lot of potential just waiting to be tapped by someone with the right amount of foresight (as some already have in recent years). The airport would make the city a great place to have a convention center.
 
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