For a final farewell before I leave you all for a week, here’s the Windsor Star’s Anne Jarvis’ take on what this city needs to revitalize its downtown.  Have a great week, all!

Fixing downtown, one detail at a time

Anne Jarvis

Special to The Windsor Star

Saturday, July 05, 2008

Caesars Windsor wowed everyone, the Red Bull Air Races were spectacular and the summer festivals are on. Now, as the city continues revitalizing downtown, the question is, how does it draw the gamblers, convention-goers and concert and festival audiences to the rest of the core? And how does it lure them back again?

Not with more megaprojects, like an aquarium, says the founder of Scaledown Windsor, an urban activist website. The answer, says Chris Holt, an unemployed autoworker who studied urban design at Fanshawe College, is to make downtown a place where people want to be.

We have lots of assets. We walk, run and bike at our beautiful riverfront. People flocked to the art gallery when it hosted impressionist paintings. They packed the community museum when it opened its basement collection, including War of 1812 cannonballs.

The elegant Capitol Theatre is a treasure, and so is the stately former armouries. Families skate at Charles Clark Square every weekend in the winter. There’s a thriving arts community. You can choose from Thai, Indian and Middle Eastern food. And it’s all in a cohesive core.

The problem is the details. When delegates at the new convention centre walk along Chatham Street to Ouellette Avenue, they’ll pass the derelict former bus station and a parking garage with the lights out, said Mark Boscariol, a downtown restaurateur and Scaledown Windsor blogger. The city needs to clean up that corridor and finish streetscaping Ouellette Avenue, he says.

Streetscaping is a ubiquitous idea, but don’t underestimate it. “If you make a place attractive,” noted Vancouver architect James Cheng told the city of London, which is also revitalizing its downtown, “people will want to be there.”

The city should also zone massage parlours out of downtown and restrict panhandling more, Boscariol said. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani went after the car window washers and sex shops, points out Downtown Windsor Business Improvement Association president Larry Horwitz. The city should also forge ahead with its mandatory 4 a.m. closing time for bars.

“Managing the downtown is about managing the details,” said Boscariol. Heck, he said, the International Downtown Association even has seminars on cleaning dead flies out of store windows.

That’s a start. To diversify, the downtown needs more residents, said Holt, people who will attract the “butchers, bakers and candlestick makers” that the core sorely needs. It’s a hard sell, he admits.

People don’t want to come without the shops, and shops don’t want to come without the people. Our arts community could be the answer, he says. Artists, often young, hip urban pioneers, moved to New York’s Soho district when it was rundown and cheap and ended up gentrifying it.

Windsor’s arts community could do the same.

He proposes creating an affordable place for artists to live and work in the old Salvation Army building at Victoria and University (council had the sense to reject a past proposal for another strip club there).

An attractive, interesting and viable downtown can become a meeting place, a place to be. Read the letters to the editor in The Star.

That’s what people want. Horwitz sees city squares, like European piazzas, where people chat, read, surf the Net and sip coffee.

“The vision I have is of a downtown with an intricate weave of experiences,” said Holt. “Downtowns offer something you don’t get any other place.

“You go to experience so much in a small area. Nobody flocks to the suburbs to experience raised ranches.”

We’re bumbling in the right direction. Capitol Theatre bankruptcy trustee Stephen Funtig temporarily reopened the theatre.

The Windsor Symphony Orchestra and dynamic conductor John Morris Russell (talk about assets) have issued a call for proposals to study converting the armouries into a concert hall. St. Clair College has proposed a second downtown campus. Rumour has it TD Canada Trust is planning a new office downtown.

The city and DWBIA have spruced up the core with streetscaping, flowers and lights. Closing streets on weekends has drawn families, students and seniors to the core. There are incentives for businesses to move downtown and fix up their facades. The DWBIA is adding free wireless Internet.

Mostly, we need to stick to a plan (we have them, gathering dust). Council meetings on downtown always end with plans for more meetings.

“It was a meeting about a meeting,” a frustrated stakeholder said after the latest. “It’s like a Seinfeld episode.”

We need better marketing, too. Scaledown Windsor and the DWBIA have it right. Scaledown Windsor is creating an interactive map. Click on the different categories, like restaurants, galleries and theatres, and it will show what the city has and how to get there. The DWBIA has distributed 50,000 copies of a magazine on the core.

Downtown is crucial for many reasons — to attract business, tourists, much-needed doctors and employers looking for quality of life, because it’s a gateway to our city, province and country.

Most of all, it’s crucial because it’s the heart of our city.

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© The Windsor Star 2008

Tags: Downtown, local writer, revitalization