The Bluegrass and Beyond

It’s astounding when you think about it: Lexington Mall has been dead or dying since before this year’s high school graduates were born.

It’s even more astounding when you realize that the 30-acre site could be one of the hottest pieces of real estate in Lexington if it were redeveloped by someone able to think outside the big box.

Built in the 1970s, when malls were all the rage and suburban sprawl was in full bloom, Lexington Mall began declining in the early 1990s. Tenants moved out, complaining that Maryland-based Saul Centers wasn’t maintaining the place.

The last lonely tenant moved out in 2005, when Dillard’s closed its store. Since then, Lexington Mall’s doors have been boarded up and fenced off and its vast blacktop parking lot has cracked and crumbled.

City officials have been wringing their hands over Lexington Mall for years. Developers have tried unsuccessfully to buy it. Every few years, Saul breaks its silence and says the mall will be redeveloped. Then nothing happens.

Lexington Mall is out of sight and out of mind for its absentee landlord. But it has been much on the minds of local developers and landscape architects. Here’s why: The mall sits on a huge piece of prime land inside New Circle Road, situated between the city’s Idle Hour Park and the reservoir.

“It’s one of the few sites in Lexington with a water view,” said Brian Lee, a University of Kentucky landscape architecture professor whose students have studied the site for academic exercises in urban redevelopment.

The property fronts both New Circle and Richmond roads, and it is just 3 miles from downtown by way of the city’s most beautiful, upscale thoroughfare. There are schools, a fire station and shopping nearby.

Developers I talked with agreed that the site shouldn’t be another mall or Hamburg-style big-box retail center.

With a zoning change, they said, the site would be ideal for a “new urban” mixed-use village of one- to five-story buildings with shops, offices, condos and apartments, all situated on traditional streets and buffered by green space. Businesses on the mall’s edge — Home Depot, Applebee’s and Perkins restaurant, and Central Bank — could easily be worked into a new design plan.

“It seems like the idea of a cluster of smaller retail shops around a common green and serving as a village center with perhaps loft residential or office might have some merit,” said Morgan McIlwain, a landscape architect with M2D Design Group. The group’s recent work includes the site plan for the new Bluegrass Community and Technical College campus on the Eastern State Hospital site.

“It goes nicely with this notion of infill,” McIlwain added. “We could get higher density and not sprawl so much.”

Tom Low, a principal in the Charlotte, N.C., firm DPZ Architects and Town Planners — the firm most famous for designing a similar development in Seaside, Fla. — sent me an interesting diagram of examples for converting a site similar to Lexington Mall into a village-style development.

One developer cited the example also of Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio. I’ve also seen such projects in Charlotte, N.C., and Williamsburg, Va. When the economy and lending environment improves, something like that could make sense.

First, though, executives at Saul Centers need to find a map and remember where Lexington is. Then they need to find a calendar and realize it’s 2009, not 1990.

Then, maybe, they will partner with or sell Lexington Mall to a developer with the vision to turn one of this city’s most prominent examples of urban decay into a vibrant piece of the urban landscape.

Examples of how an old mall can be redeveloped into a mixed-use project with multiple buildings, streets and green space. Image: DPZ

Maybe creating a vibrant downtown isn’t so much about grand plans as small spaces.

One small space with potential is the block of North Mill Street between West Main and Short streets. It retains most of its old buildings, which now house places to eat, drink and work. Developer Nick Ebbitt is converting the upstairs of several buildings into loft condos.

The block is in the middle of downtown’s emerging action: Galleries, restaurants and bars have sprouted along Short and in Victorian Square; Dudley’s is moving there; Cheapside is alive with the farmers market and other events that will only increase in popularity when a market house is built.

But plans for Mill Street are controversial because developers want to close the street to traffic and eliminate a handful of parking spaces.

I don’t see a big problem with that, but several people, whose opinions on these matters I respect, do. They think it’s important to keep that block as a regular street, at least during the day. Pedestrian malls have been successful in some cities, including Charlottesville, Va., but they have failed in others.

The key seems to be striking a balance between cars and people to create flexible, inviting spaces where people want to spend time and businesses can succeed.

A grass-roots plan by property owners along Esplanade between East Main and Short streets has the potential to do just that. It seems like a good, reasonably priced idea that could be adapted for Mill Street and other places in Lexington, too.

The plan is the work of Gene Williams and Art Shechet, two of the partners in Natasha’s restaurant. Natasha’s developed a loyal following with its high-quality ethnic food, and the business has expanded by adding a music stage with nightly performances by local bands, emerging artists and occasional big-name acts.

Esplanade, which is fortunate to have wide sidewalks, will host a street fair during next fall’s Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games. And that got the partners to thinking about the possibilities of a more flexibly designed Esplanade that could take advantage of an adjacent, little-used park on the Chase Bank tower property.

They figure the project could be done for less than $500,000 without closing Esplanade — and adding daytime parking spaces to the west side of the street, where there are none now. They also would plant shade trees that would be lighted at night.

In the evenings, resurfaced parking spaces in front of Natasha’s and the Lexington Club could be converted into outdoor dining areas. With some remodeling to open up the Chase park, there could be room for a temporary stage and booths during community events and festivals.

The result would be a small, flexible public square similar to those that help make European cities fun places to spend time.

Architect Farzin Sadr, who owns Natasha’s building and has his offices upstairs, drew up some initial plans. Natasha’s partners have enlisted support from other nearby property owners, including Chase tower and Central Christian Church.

Williams and Shechet unveiled their plan at an Aug. 18 breakfast for Mayor Jim Newberry and Urban County Council members. They soon will ask that the project be added to the city’s downtown streetscape work — ideally before the Equestrian Games.

“We’re latecomers to the table, but we think this plan makes sense and would be a lot of bang for the buck,” Williams said.

“We also think it would move the center of gravity back a bit to the east end,” he said. “We want an anchor here that is social and speaks to an older crowd and more family groups.”

Natasha’s partners think this could be an easy, highly visible downtown success story that would have relatively little cost or controversy. I suspect they’re right.

In case you missed them, the Herald-Leader carried two excellent op-ed columns Sunday and Monday from two of Lexington’s most knowledgeable and passionate advocates for smart growth and preservation of what’s special in the Bluegrass.

Here’s the Sunday piece by Knox van Nagell, executive director of The Fayette Alliance.

Here’s the Monday piece by Hayward Wilkirson, who was a founding board member of Preserve Lexington, which last year opposed destruction of a historic block that’s now a downtown meadow.

I returned to Lexington this week after a long vacation to find that CentrePit had been transformed into a grassy meadow, and workers were installing a classic horse-farm fence around the perimeter.

The past half-century of Lexington’s growth has been defined by grassy meadows and horse-farm fences giving way to homes, office buildings and shopping centers.

Dudley Webb may go down in history as the only Lexington developer to do just the opposite. And he did it in the center of town, on a block that has been developed urban space since the 1700s.

Seriously, though, I have to give Webb credit. I’ve always thought his CentrePointe development was poorly conceived and not in the community’s best interests. The fact that he can’t seem to find financing for the $250 million project speaks to some of its issues.

But in this instance, Webb is doing the right thing: Making his demolition site look attractive until he and landowner Joe Rosenberg decide the block’s ultimate fate.

Other local developers of stalled projects, such as at the corner of Richmond Road and Man O’ War Boulevard, and abandoned eyesores, such as Lexington Mall, should follow his lead.

Thank you, Dudley Webb.

Fencing is installed around the CentrePointe block. Photo by David Perry

What went wrong with American downtowns during the last half of the 20th century?

A lot, actually. But one big thing was that they were redesigned to work better for cars than for people. It’s no wonder people abandoned them.

Lexington escaped the worst of it. Unlike many cities, Lexington didn’t have an expressway routed through the middle of it. Interstate highways made America’s small towns and rural areas more accessible, but they devastated many cities — cutting up neighborhoods and making downtowns less walkable, welcoming and safe.

Downtown Lexington’s legacy from 20th century traffic engineering efficiency is its one-way street pairs — primarily the east-west corridors of Short and Second, High and Maxwell, Main and Vine and the north-south corridor of Limestone and Upper.

It was all done in the early 1970s with the best of intentions: Make it easier for shoppers to get to and from downtown so the stores won’t move to the suburbs.

It didn’t work. Worse yet, those one-way streets have hampered public and private efforts to reinvent and revitalize downtown Lexington ever since.

Here’s the problem: Cars go faster on one-way streets, especially when lanes are wide. That makes traffic more dangerous, especially for pedestrians, and more noisy. One-way streets hurt business and confuse tourists.

Fortunately, after years of struggle, efforts to revive downtown Lexington are taking hold, thanks to some good planning and more than $300 million in private investment. Mayor Jim Newberry unveiled a new “streetscape” plan Thursday that could make downtown even better.

The plan, developed by Covington-based KKG Studios, would make downtown a more people-friendly place to live, work and play. It would add bicycle lanes and 170 additional street parking spaces during non-peak hours. Wider sidewalks would allow for easier walking and more outdoor dining.

A water feature would be built along Vine Street, following the path of Town Branch Creek, which was buried beneath the street generations ago. A European-style glass pavilion would be built on Cheapside, Lexington’s historic marketplace, as a home for the Lexington Farmers Market and community events.

It’s a terrific plan that could help downtown achieve its potential for contributing to Lexington’s economy and quality of life. It also assumes the conversion of most, if not all, of the one-way streets back to two-way traffic. That follows the recommendation of Lexington’s 2006 downtown master plan.

Plans call for Short and Second streets to return to two-way traffic within 12 months, said Harold Tate, president of the Downtown Development Authority. Limestone and Upper Streets would be made two-way within two or three years. But Tate said further studies are needed before setting a timetable for returning two-way traffic to High, Maxwell, Main and Vine streets.

At Thursday’s news conference, Newberry was pessimistic about returning two-way traffic to downtown’s biggest drag strips — Main and Vine streets. “It’s very complicated,” he said, citing likely pushback from state traffic engineers and others. Newberry said he didn’t expect to see it happen “in my lifetime.”

That makes no sense.

After all, Main Street is two-way in each direction until it reaches downtown. That means traffic speeds up just when it should be slowing down.

“We’ve had a failed 40-year experiment with one-way streets downtown,” said Phil Holoubek, a downtown developer whose projects include Main & Rose and the Nunn Building Lofts.

Once other one-way streets are converted and the Newtown Pike extension is completed in 2014 to route through-traffic around downtown, there’s no reason not to return Main and Vine to two-way, he said.

Van Meter Pettit, a downtown resident who is developing the Town Branch Trail, agrees. “Otherwise, we’re saying that commuter traffic is a higher priority than urban redevelopment, when our master planning is telling us just the opposite,” he said.

Successful cities across America are converting their one-way streets back to two-way and looking for other ways to make their downtowns work better for people than cars. In perhaps the boldest move yet, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans Friday to convert Times Square into a pedestrian mall by May.

Lexington’s city officials and their consultants have invested a lot of time, effort and money in solid plans for revitalizing downtown. They shouldn’t let nay-saying by state traffic engineers or others jeopardize those efforts.

If downtown Lexington is to achieve its potential, it must become a place people want to drive to — not drive through.

Here’s a question: What development over the next year or two will have the biggest impact on Lexington’s future?

The 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games? The Newtown Pike corridor? Redevelopment around the University of Kentucky campus? Whatever does — or doesn’t — rise out of the CentrePointe crater?

Any of those projects would be a good guess. But a decade or two from now, I think they will pale in comparison to the redevelopment of the Eastern State Hospital property into a new campus for Bluegrass Community and Technical College.

In a brilliant land swap announced a year ago, BCTC will move to the 65-acre Eastern State property north of downtown. Eastern State will get a badly needed new hospital on UK’s Coldstream property, and UK will get BCTC’s current Cooper Drive campus for future expansion.

Why is a new BCTC campus such a big deal? Two reasons. The first is what it will do for the college, and what it will allow the college to do for Kentucky.

“It’s almost unheard of today for a community and technical college to have the opportunity to build a brand new urban campus,” said BCTC President Augusta Julian.

The college is making long-range plans to determine how its program offerings should change to support the 21st-century economy. Julian thinks it is possible that the college, which has 12,000 students at several campuses, could double enrollment within 10 years.

BCTC has 800 nursing students, so health-related fields are a natural growth area. Julian expects a large need for lab technicians. Other opportunities could include training people for Kentucky’s hospitality and tourism industries, and teaching BCTC trade school graduates the business skills they need to start their own companies. Julian thinks the need for retraining older workers of all kinds will be huge.

The second reason this is such a big deal is what redevelopment of those 65 acres of prime real estate could do for Lexington — if it is done right.

How could it be done wrong? Easy: Throw up a poorly planned, automobile-centric campus of nondescript, suburban-style buildings and lots of surface parking. In other words, build the higher education equivalent of Hamburg Pavilion. And then give little thought to how it affects the surrounding neighborhoods or the city as a whole.

Or, officials could take this unique opportunity to use good design, architecture and urban planning to create a world-class campus that will spark quality redevelopment throughout Lexington’s north side.

The initial signs are encouraging. BCTC has assembled a talented team of architects and planners who combine deep local knowledge with international vision and experience.

EOP Architects is overseeing the campus master plan along with M2D Design Group, a landscape architecture firm. Ross-Tarrant Architects is designing the first major building, for which $22 million was set aside long ago. The three Lexington-based firms are working with Perkins + Will, an international company based in Minneapolis that has extensive campus-planning experience.

In an especially smart move, Urban Collage, an acclaimed urban design firm, has been hired to look at how the campus can be used to create good mixed-use redevelopment around it — housing, shopping and restaurants.

“It will be a tremendous economic anchor,” said Stan Harvey, a partner in Atlanta-based Urban Collage who lives in Lexington. “We just need to work through all the puzzle pieces.”

Construction of the new campus could take two decades, Julian said. Even when it is finished, BCTC will probably still have several locations in Lexington, in addition to its satellite campuses in surrounding towns.

The planning schedule is aggressive: Officials hope to finish a campus master plan late this year. Within a few months, there will be opportunities for surrounding neighborhoods and citizens to review and comment on those plans, Julian promised.

“We have to fit into the neighborhood,” she said. “We really want to do it right in terms of being visible, transparent, getting a lot of people involved.”

Julian said her vision is for an urban-style campus of multi-story buildings. The campus’ style and look could depend on whether consultants think any of Eastern State’s old buildings are worth reusing. The Kentucky Heritage Commission The Kentucky Archaeological Survey — a partnership between the Kentucky Heritage Council and the UK Department of Anthropology — is looking at that, along with investigating burial sites known to be on the property, which has been a mental hospital since 1816.

Julian is especially interested in looking at mass transit possibilities. That’s because BCTC students will still need to go back and forth between there and the UK campus, and because she doesn’t want to have thousands of cars passing through the surrounding area each day. The Newtown Pike extension could offer some creative opportunities for that kind of mass transit.

This project has the potential to transform Lexington. The first steps look promising, but the devil is always in the details. It should be everyone’s responsibility to make sure it’s done right.

Lexington, like most American cities, created a complex system of zoning regulations a generation or two ago to make its bustling downtown more neat and orderly.

In recent years, like most American cities, Lexington has been trying to figure out how to make its dull and dying downtown bustle again.

That’s because people are attracted to vibrant downtowns — especially the young, creative people who are the engines of the 21st-century economy.

The issues are complex, but one thing many planners, developers and citizens have come to agree upon is that those strict rules — and the bureaucratic systems and adversarial cultures that have grown up around them — can be a big part of the problem.

It’s a Catch 22: The rules, regulations and government processes designed to improve a city as it grows can sometimes have the opposite effect. That’s because developers and regulators sometimes don’t have enough flexibility to use common sense or foster excellence.

“There’s certainly a feeling that we can do better,” said Chris King, Lexington’s chief planner.

Lexington simplified downtown zoning three decades ago, and that has helped. The city’s Infill and Redevelopment Task Force and several public and private organizations continue to study the issues, look at what other cities are doing and recommend changes.

Last week, the Downtown Lexington Corp. hosted a delegation from Columbus, Ohio, whose members talked about what happened when that city tore up the downtown rule book and took a different approach. The result, they said, has been a more vibrant, attractive downtown with more than $1 billion in new private investment and a steady increase in residents.

It all began in 1996, when Columbus formed a 22-member committee to study downtown development issues. The group, which represented the various stakeholders and interest groups, wrote an ordinance that scrapped many of the city center’s old zoning rules.

The ordinance set out a vision for downtown as “every one’s neighborhood” — a mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly place where people would want to live, work and play. And it created the Downtown Commission, a nine-member board appointed by the mayor with enormous power and flexibility.

By law, the commission must be made up of people who live or work downtown and include a variety of interests — a developer or Realtor, an architect, a landscape architect or urban planner, a historic-preservation professional and a land-use lawyer.

The commission was charged with finding ways to make new development work — and to make it well-designed and compatible with its surroundings. “It’s totally subjective,” said Harrison Smith, an 80-something real estate lawyer who has headed the commission since its creation.

Developers like the system because they can go one place for approval — rather than a host of city agencies with narrow interests — and get decisions quickly. Rather than rejecting developers’ plans, the commission and its staff work with them to improve plans and make them acceptable. It shifts the conversation from, “You can’t do this, because … ” to, “You can do this, if … ”

Commission meetings are open to the public, and anyone can speak — no time limits. Decisions can be appealed to the City Council. But in more than 10 years, only two developers’ applications have been rejected and none has been appealed, Smith said.

“We do in 60 days what it would typically take a year to do,” said Kenneth Cookson, a Columbus attorney and downtown activist. “And, boy, have we spawned competition in the design community. They have had to take it up a notch or two.”

Want to tear down an old building to make a parking lot? It won’t be approved. Want to do a big, creative sign on your building that some people might consider public art? It will be approved — if the commission thinks it makes downtown look better and not worse.

“The key — and it’s a risk — are the people (on the commission),” Smith said. “It doesn’t work unless you get pros.”

King, the Lexington planner, was intrigued by Columbus’ approach and thought some elements of it might work in Lexington. “It would take a lot of vetting,” he said.

Vice Mayor Jim Gray was impressed and said he might appoint a task force to “examine it and see what makes sense here.” But he echoed Smith’s caution that such a powerful, flexible commission is only as good as its members and their mandate.

“They seem to have created a framework that encourages good, sympathetic and compatible development, and it’s market-driven,” Gray said. “It’s good for the developers and good for the city.”