Patrick Venne
157 Wolcott St.
Portland, Maine 04102
18 January 2010
Congress Square Plaza
Redesign Initiative Taskforce
City of Portland, Maine 04101
Re: Options for Congress Square Plaza Redesign
Dear Members of the Redesign Initiative Taskforce:
My name is Patrick Venne. I am a land use attorney, student of urban planning, and most importantly a concerned citizen/resident of Portland interested in the proper redevelopment of Congress Square Plaza (and the City in general, but for purposes of this letter, I?ll narrowly focus my points). It is this concern that has prompted me to write you today.
Although I have been unable to attend any of the public forums on this issue due to a busy schedule, as I understand it the consensus appears to be that Congress Square Plaza should remain park space. The meeting minutes for October 25th?s forum are unavailable, but given the tone of the first three forums I assume this general trend didn?t change much on that date. If this is true, I would like you to please reconsider this issue when responses to the RFQ are returned, and to do so for the following reasons.
Congress Square Plaza, as you know, was formerly home to structures adding to rather than detracting from the built environment. In the 1970s, an idea to turn this space into a park was developed and finally implemented in 1982 (after a few construction blunders which required serious re-dos). The original idea encompassed an area grander than the plaza itself, and was aimed at invigorating the entirety of Congress Square in general, including the stretch leading up to and including the PMA.
According to period newspaper articles, the Eastland was to have opened a new entrance onto the Plaza. As we all know, this never happened. For this reason and others, the Plaza has been deemed a failure, thus prompting the current effort to re-imagine its future. I would like to highlight some points as this reexamination takes place, in hopes of providing a viewpoint which seemed underrepresented at the public forums, according to the meeting minutes, but which anecdotally seems to pervade the viewpoints of many others in the City.
This viewpoint is that cities are for buildings, not parks. That is not to say parks are not welcome in cities, but rather that the place, role, and use of parks in cities is secondary and incidental to the primary structures which surround them. This is not a value judgment, merely an observation. People do not visit cities to rest or congregate in parks; rather, they come for necessity or pleasure as based on the services or amenities offered by surrounding buildings and land uses, and stop only for convenience?s sake to utilize parks. I highlight this for several reasons. One is that the park itself is not a failure, the urban landscape which surrounds it is. The Eastland never constructed an entrance opening onto the park and should not now be heard to complain about the park?s failure when its inaction is perhaps the greatest contribution to this failure. Moreover, as was noted in the meeting minutes, the traffic on High St. makes this place unsuitable for the sort of leisurely use it sounds like we would all like to see in a park like this (Tommy?s park is different due to different transportation patterns in the surrounding area). Thirdly, it is strange that one of the most commonly cited problems with the Plaza is that it attracts transients. The irony is that a park has been deemed a failure for attracting people--the very purpose parks typically are intended to serve. The real but unspoken issue, it would seem, is that this park doesn?t attract the ?type? of people desired. It is a failure at attracting professionals, tourists, shoppers, and other ?desirable? people. Those people are several blocks east, in monument square and, to a greater extent, the Old Port. The difference is explained by the orientation of surrounding buildings to the parks in those places, not the design of the parks or plazas themselves.
The truth is that, although the problem has to this point been framed as one of design, it is really one of context. The issues Congress Square suffers from will remain the same regardless of the park?s redesign. Traffic won?t change (barring some external transportation investments); the Eastland is unlikely to open on to the park; and this area of the city will not magically become free of transient panhandlers. The key to a successful park, then, is to place it in an appropriate area. History tells us that Congress Square is not such an area. Redesigning this space will be a waste of time unless its use is simultaneously re-imagined. And such a re-imagination should go beyond merely placing caf? tables on the park or a skating rink. Those changes, like the park itself, fail to recognize and appreciate the context within which the Plaza must function.
A better alternative would be, in my opinion, a restoration of the street wall to enclose pedestrians walking along Congress Street as they are for the remainder of that street until City Hall. Currently, Congress Square Plaza functions like a parking lot--an urban dead zone which is unattractive. Its not the cars that make parking lots so anti-urban, it?s the utter lack of integration with surrounding areas. Absent major external investments, Congress Square Plaza is unlikely to find the appropriate level of integration to allow it to serve the purpose originally intended by the City. Because of its ideal location along the Downtown district?s major business corridor, this should hardly be cause for concern. Instead, it should be cause for celebration. A real estate development opportunity awaits Congress Square Plaza which could make this site an unparalleled ?Gateway? to the Arts District indeed (as apparently desired by the public as based on my reading of the forum meeting minutes).
The term ?Gateway? is thrown around far too often in Portland. Bayside is supposed to be a gateway to Downtown, yet the new building at 84 Marginal Way turns its back on approaching visitors. The Veteran?s Memorial Bridge is supposed to be a western gateway to Downtown, but it brings visitors to a long and unattractive industrial stretch of Commercial St. Like messy mudrooms, those areas are unappealing and uninviting. Let us not label Congress Square Plaza an intended ?gateway? site in the same failed manner as these sites. If the site is desired as a gateway, it should be just that. 477 Congress St. and the Fidelity Trust building form a gateway to Congress Street at Preble. The Hay building presents a gateway to Downtown at High. Gateways are formed by buildings and the public spaces they form in their interrelations. For Congress Square Plaza to function in this manner, its best bet is to develop a landmark structure.
Fortunately, current zoning should facilitate this goal quite well. The Downtown Portland height overlay map indicates the Plaza is situated in the second most permissive zone allowed in Portland. That zone allows structures of up to 150? tall, with an additional 40? building cap. This amounts to a building 12 or so stories tall--similar to other major downtown landmark buildings. What better way to say to traffic coming off of the Casco Bay Bridge ?turn right, downtown awaits you? as opposed to allowing them to quickly pass through the peninsula en route to suburban Portland?
Although a potential structure on the Plaza site wouldn?t have to completely fill the available height standard, the regulations in place certainly would be useful in marketing the site. With the high traffic volume of High St., direct frontage on Congress St., and an abundance of coffee houses and restaurants nearby, I can think of few sites more ideally situated for a commercial office or similar structure. The influx of professionals such a structure would create would immediately either (a) displace the undesirable transients, or (b) cause them to blend in with the masses as they do in the Old Port and Monument Square.
I appreciate the time it has taken you to read this letter, and thank you for your consideration of the points raised in it. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Patrick Venne, Esq.
(207) 899-0265
land.planning.law@gmail.com
