It is interesting, Sean, that you refer to Manchester's attitude as a property rights place, because it, along with a few others, is one of the most planned cities in New England. As a mill city, it was a city laid out, on a grid, built for the workers, and has evolved since. Boston, on the other hand, evolved from a series of cow paths around the oldest protected public space in America. I think it would be great to have a destination built in Manchester. Imagine bringing the mall downtown....Burlington has done it, with another suburban mall, and even more suburban shopping two towns away. Manchester, with three times as many people, might be able to pull it off with the right mix of ingredients.
This is a great point. Manchester was planned in a way that even other mill cities like Lowell weren't at all. A single entity owned the land and nearly the entire manufacturing complex, and laid out the entire city center except for a few existing roads that remained. It's slightly less obvious since urban renewal, but still fairly clear, too, that the Amoskeag Corporation maintained strict design guidelines for all the mill buildings, rowhouses and so on. In fact, the uniquely uniform landscape was called the most harmonious urban space in America by Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic for the New York Times, in a plea to spare the Millyard before demolition and canal infill took place.
Even with much of the Millyard gone, that uniqueness, harmony and stern beauty is something Manchester has only recently begun to notice and I think is still waiting to be harnessed fully. The good thing there is how much embodied potential the city has. Similarly, I think Manchester can make much more of its physical surroundings--the river right in town, the mountains and lakes just outside the city, not to mention better transit connections to Boston, Concord and Nashua.
I also think the property rights segment, while real, is simply a vocal minority of residents, and probably more so residents of neighboring towns or elsewhere in the state. In cities, far more than in the suburbs or country, the use and quality of properties around yours has a huge impact on your quality-of-life and property value. I believe that most residents of Manchester would probably favor form-based design like Patrick mentioned. In a sense, prescribing certain physical and formal design guidelines while allowing greater freedom of use is much more libertarian and certainly draws more on historical precedence than the current mess. The popular support for neighborhood center zoning, recent civic and infrastructure improvements in the city, and the praise of the downtown rehabilitation all indicate that local residents understand the importance of strong architecture and good urban design.
Finally, to sort of bring in the conversation about the separation of the river, Millyard and Elm Street from the Portsmouth Photos thread, I think the downtown mall idea could be great in Manchester, especially in a particular spot. The Hampshire Plaza (it might be called something like Brady-Sullivan Plaza now, but I don't know of anyone who calls it that) mall is the single-story base to the 20-story, black-and-glass tower on Elm Street. The mall replaced an old Victorian building that would have been a much better counterpoint to the tower, but either way the mall failed and is now used largely as student housing for NHIA. Because of the slope toward the river, the rear of the mall is above two levels of parking but at street level along Elm.
Whether the eventual train station ends up at Granite Street or in the Bedford Street parking lot, Spring Street runs along the side of the mall between Elm and Commercial and basically to Arms Park and the river. It's the only cross-street along Elm with a view through the Millyard to the river. If the train station is built in the Bedford St lot, Spring Street will become a major gateway. Either way, it has huge potential as a connector between Millyard, river and Elm, but right now it's basically loading docks, parking garages and surface parking.
The Hampshire Plaza mall could be demolished (or significantly renovated and built-up) so that there are multiple stories along Elm and storefronts along Spring with parking concealed in the interior. The superblock there, especially if additional stories are built, is plenty big for an anchor store or two along with traditional mall stores in an urban setting.
I'm really glad to hear from Sean that the city is trying to make itself a destination--it needs to attract more visitors and not just on event/game nights, as well as recent graduates, young families and professionals to live downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods. To do this, Manchester needs to stop competing so much with its suburbs--Bedford, Hooksett and Londonderry will always have more and cheaper open land for strip malls--and promote itself and act like the urban city it is.
