Meet Me Downtown

A largely-dead block on the north side of Congress Street continues to show signs of new life with the imminent opening of A Steak in the Neighborhood.   The new restaurant is to open this Friday, and preparations for the opening moved forward on Tuesday with the installation of signage over the tile facade. 

Owner Luke Cusack opened the Zen Rock nightclub earlier this year, three doors west of the new steak restaurant, which is his first Downtown restaurant venture.  Just west of A Steak in the Neighborhood, The Screening Room renovated its facade and installed a marquee, which was lit on October 30. 

The space at 135 E. Congress now occupied by the restaurant has been a gallery, salad bar restaurant, and a playhouse over the last ten years.

Cusack is opening another bar, Sapphire, one block west of Steak, at 61 E. Congress Street, in the former Heart Five space.  Sapphire may open in December.

With the polls closing less than 48 hours from now, here are seventeen suggestions—in no particular order—I have for the Tucson City Council, with respect to Downtown Tucson:

1. Do an audit of Rio Nuevo.  Don’t wait for the State to do it.  Get all the skeletons out of the closet. 

2. Stop tolerating the insider favoritism that’s run rampant.

3. Put more funding into the Façade Program.  A relatively small investment in fixing up old buildings makes a big difference in downtown’s image and in facilitating vibrant downtown activity.  Façade improvements provide a big bang for the buck.  Allocate some TIF funding to the Façade Program.  The lawyers have said it’s okay, I know they have!

4. Support the existing businesses that have toughed it out through the hard times.  A well-known community leader said to me, when the Downtown Tucson Partnership was forming in 2007, that he didn’t want anyone involved in Downtown up until that time, including businesses, to be part of the new regime.  That is so wrong-headed on so many levels.  Existing businesses should not be displaced to make room for new businesses if at all possible (especially not seven of them at a time!).

5. Get out of the entertainment business.  Stop messing with the Rialto Theatre and running the Fox Theatre.  The Rialto is doing just fine, and stop pretending that everything is headed in the right direction at the Fox.  Renegotiate the Fox’s loan and insist the Fox Theatre Foundation board add some new members dedicated to fundraising, and encourage the board to operate independently.  Let the Foundation hire its own director and other staff.

6. Discourage the further demolition of historically significant buildings and older buildings with character.  Encourage new construction on empty lots and surface parking.

7. Focus energy and resources on saving the Gem Shows.  Suck up to the Gem organizations as much as needed, although the time for sucking up without action has passed. Which leads right into . . .

8. Build a more affordable, more realistically-scaled convention hotel that won’t put the City’s finances at risk. 

9. Hit the reset button on a master plan.  What can still be done with the remaining 15 years of TIF? What projects do Tucson citizens consider important? What projects from the original master plan are critical and must be given top priority, and which ones should only be done if there is an unexpected windfall?  Communicate this plan to the public.  Don’t spend additional money on the planning process, just engage the public, use the available information, and show leadership.  Tell us why you’ve decided to establish the priorities you have.

10. Support the development of some student housing—especially along Broadway (on empty lots!).  This will create demand for downtown businesses.  Perhaps the UA will elect to locate some academic programs downtown as well, once the Streetcar is operational.  Everyone says they are in favor of more downtown housing, and this is the most ready source of demand for residential space—college students.  This would also take pressure off the neighborhoods experiencing mini-dorm development.

11. Keep pushing forward on the Modern Streetcar.

12. Wash the sidewalks.  The BID maintenance crews are doing a good job of picking up litter and sweeping, but the sidewalks need to be power-washed too—badly. An entertainment district needs good security and attentive maintenance.

13. Stop blaming the Legislature for problems that we’ve created for ourselves here.

14. Stop acting out of desperation.

15. Get out of the real estate business, but have a fair and open process for disposing of city-owned property.  This is where there is great risk of approving insider deals.  Don’t give land away.  Downtown development requires that the banks see some comps.

16. Take positive action to implement prior commitments.  The Warehouse Arts District is one of those commitments.

17. Think and act “Urban”!  Be guided by urban principles, not suburban principles.

With a countdown from local newsman and former downtown resident Dan Marries,  the brand-new marquee at The Screening Room on Congress Street was lit up Friday night to the cheers of a crowd of a couple hundred celebrants who filled the north lane of Congress.

The obligatory self-congratulatory build-up included on-stage recognition of people that made it happen, such as Michael Keith and architects Ibarra and Rosano, joyful appreciation from Arizona Media Arts Center denizens Giulio Scalinger and Claudia Jesperson, and political speeches.

After the new marquee was lit up, the Fox Theatre marquee–one block to the west, and the Rialto Theatre marquee–two blocks to the east, were turned on as well, in a symbolic reference to the fact that the three marquees have been installed and lighted just within the last several years.

Even as controversy envelops the property one block east of The Screening Room, the north side of the 6th Avenue to Scott Avenue block seems to be on its way back to vitality.  The Screening Room’s bright, but appropriately-scaled marquee, is the new visual anchor of that block, but it is flanked by the new Zen Rock nightclub, and the soon-to-open steak restaurant, A Steak in the Neighborhood.

The Screening Room, a cozy independent cinema on Congress Street, now has a real movie theater marquee, as of Tuesday morning. 

Congress Street is narrowed to one lane between 6th Avenue and Scott Avenue, so that workers can complete the installation of the sign.  The marquee was paid for by the Arizona Media Arts Center (AzMAC), which owns and manages the theater, and by a matching Facade Improvement Grant from the City of Tucson.

As noted before in this blog, the marquee will give The Screening Room a much-needed boost in its visibility and profile.   The theater is the home of the annual Arizona International Film Festival, and what AzMAC calls “Extraordinary Films Not Shown on Ordinary Screens”.

A lighting ceremony is planned for Friday, October 30 at 6:00pm, 127 E. Congress St.

There is an old expression that goes something like: “if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”.

Earl Wettstein's Big Hat: a 2006 concept for a Wild West Museum in Downtown Tucson

For Downtown Tucson, there has certainly not been a failure to plan. The questions for the Tucson community might be, “Did we fail to plan wisely or strategically? Did we fail to follow our plans with action? Did we plan too much? Were our plans economically feasible or were they just pretty pictures? And perhaps, “Should we thank our lucky stars that we failed to follow through on some of our plans over the years?”

Architect, artist, and former downtown restaurateur Bill Mackey has assembled Downtown master plans for an exhibit that may help answer some of those questions, and the exhibit opens tonight in the empty corner of the former McLellan’s store at 63 E. Congress St. The exhibit will have a soft opening on Friday, October 2, from 4-7pm, and have a grand opening on Saturday night from 6 to 10pm, during Club Crawl; then, 6-10pm the next three Saturdays–October 10, 17, and 24.

In “+-92: Downtown Master Plans, 1932-2009″, Mackey and colleagues Julie Ray, Rachelle Diaz, and Kimi Eisele will be exhibiting a retrospective of more than 100 master plans that includes comprehensive plans for the entire downtown area, area plans, studies, and site-specific project plans.

Some plans were more philosophical or topical than geographic in nature. Some became the basis of public policy for decades; others collected dust on a shelf. Before there was Rio Nuevo, there was El Centro; before that, urban renewal, and before that . . .

Mackey has tracked down diverse artifacts of the voluminous planning that Tucson has inflicted upon itself over the last three-quarters of a century, gathering plans from government archives, libraries, and the collections of historians and architects.

I met with Mackey and his committee a few months ago, and helped select the title to the exhibit.  The number 92 was selected rather arbitrarily, because, as Mackey observes, “there’s no way of knowing just how many plans there have been.”

By that time, Mackey had collected nearly 100 plans, not all of which could be called “master plans”. He had spotted some trends already;  plans have often reflected the values and priorities of their times.

“In the 1970s, the federal money was there for housing, so that’s evident in all the planning to grab federal funds and build housing,” says Mackey. “Now it’s all oriented towards transportation, so the planning reflects that.”  It’s safe to say that some planning concepts have been cyclical in their popularity.

While it’s easy to imagine such an exhibit taking snide swipes at plans that went awry or were never implemented, Mackey chose to devote some of the exhibit to “success stories”.   When I met with him over the summer, a worksheet he had created suggested that one could also do an exhibit on Downtown success stories that had NO formal planning behind them. Fourth Avenue, for example, has been conspicuously absent from official government-sponsored plans; despite that, or perhaps BECAUSE of it, Fourth Avenue is the most consistently vibrant part of Downtown.

Mackey’s pursuit of master plan acquisition has taken him to the archives at Pima County’s Planning Department (very fruitful, he says), the City of Tucson’s Department of Urban Planning and Design (not so much), the website of the City’s Transportation Department (very useful), the collections of architects such as Rob Paulus, Poster Frost Associates, and Burns Wald-Hopkins Shambach, and those of historians such as Alex Kimmelman. He’s also consulted some long-time planners and historic preservationists, such as J.T. Fey, Brooks Jeffery, Bob Vint, and Jerry Kyle, and taken some suggestions for where to look and what to look for from this writer.  Mackey’s colleagues from Pop-Up Spaces Design Co-0p helped create the presentation of the artifacts.   A small booklet on the exhibit is available for sale, to help defray expenses from this volunteer effort.

Building owner John Wesley Miller graciously offered the use of the space; Miller has subdivided the old discount store into On a Roll sushi restaurant and bar, a Jimmy John’s sandwich restaurant coming soon, and perhaps another restaurant at the corner.

Plan to check out the exhibit on Saturdays in October.

(The preceding is a revision of an article I wrote that was originally published in the August 2009 edition of Zocalo magazine, www.TheZMag.com. What follows is the Facebook posting for this event.)

Tucson artists Bill Mackey, Julie Ray, Rachelle Díaz and Kimi Eisele, representing several collectives and entities including Worker, Inc., Pop-Up Spaces and Design Co*op, present “±92: Downtown Master Plans, 1932-2009,” a compilation of over 100 Downtown Tucson master plans, comprehensive plans, studies and projects. The exhibition will include realized and unrealized plans authored from the early 20th century to 2009. An interactive timeline will help viewers track world events, economic and social trends, and Tucson’s history in relationship to the plans’ origins, realization, or death. This is a rare opportunity to see ALL of the planning for downtown Tucson in one space at one time.

Also included in the exhibition will be 92 images (by photographers including Josh Schachter) of spaces and places that make our downtown unique—some of these are a direct result of planning, some of which are not.

At the October 3 opening, a crew of official performing “apparatchiks” (i.e. officials in a large organization, usually a political one), will be on site to collect public input for current and future downtown master planning, for which there are no funds, of course.

A small booklet entitled “A Guide to the Master Plans of Downtown Tucson” will be available for purchase.

Refreshments will be provided at the Grand Opening on October 3.

Worker, Inc., Pop-Up Spaces and Design Co*op received pertinent plans, information, space, and materials for this exhibit from Pima County Planning Department Archives, City of Tucson Department of Transportation, Tucson Pima Arts Council, Poster Frost Architects, BWS Architects, Rob Paulus Architects, Wheat Scharf Landscape Architects, PARKWISE, Earl Wettstein, Alex Kimmelman, Donovan Durband, Si Schorr, J.T. Fey, John Wesley Miller Companies, MOCA Tucson, Wilko, and others.

Created in 1995, Worker Inc. is a company that specializes in promoting change in the built environment. In 2007, Worker Inc. saw the need for science based research of the more mundane processes of popular culture and formed the Neighborhood Residents Resources Ethnography Studies Unit.

POP UP SPACES seeks to produce temporary, interactive, site-specific installations in empty spaces in which the visitors are not just expected to be passive viewers, but asked to be active participants. The goal of these art-based experiences is to enhance economic vitality and public engagement in downtown Tucson through promotion of the area’s culture, history, architecture and business community.

Design Co*op is a collective of Tucson-based architects, designers, and artists working across disciplines to raise public awareness of the value of affordable and appropriate urban design.

For more information, visit

^{http://popuspaces.org, or contact Bill Mackey, 520-664-4847, workerarchitect@yahoo.com; Julie Ray, 520-891-8098, juliegraphics@gmail.com; Rachelle Díaz, 520-203-8363, info@popupspaces.org; Kimi Eisele, 520-882-6092, kimi@kimieisele.com.}

That’s the parking lot that covers the entire city block bounded by Church, Council, Court, and Franklin in the El Presidio district. That’s the parking lot owned by the Downtown Development Corporation, charged more than twenty years ago with spurring downtown redevelopment and given property such as this one to achieve just that objective.

While I hadn’t parked there, and in fact, almost never do as a matter of principle, I strolled over to see how many patrons of El Charro and Old Town Artisans (which was hosting a concert in its patio), and how many guests at the wedding across Church Avenue at the Z Mansion, had been given tickets for not paying voluntarily. I could see about ten cars in the lot had tickets on their windshields, including a few on the east side of the lot, closest to the Z Mansion. Those cars closest to the Z had parked in “Permit Only” spots, leased most likely to attorneys or other office workers in the area to park during their weekday work hours.

There are a few issues here. One is, how much responsibility do these people bear for not paying their fee?  Some responsibility, of course;  however, the metered on-street parking on three sides of this block (which is owned by a quasi-public entity) is free after 5:00 and on the weekends, so it’s reasonable to assume that many of the people who park in the lot on a Friday night don’t realize that there is a fee for parking inside the area at that hour, since it is surrounded by free spaces.

The signage inside the lot announces that the numbered spaces must be paid for and that those not paying will be given a $25 ticket, but the message “No free parking at any time” gets lost at the bottom of a long list of verbiage.  

And, there are no lights in the parking lot that allow for easy reading of the signs, or encourage anyone to park there with a sense of security. In other words, they charge $5 to park in an unlighted lot. No amenities at all.

Moreover, the Church Avenue entrance to this lot, where the Z Mansion guests most likely would have entered, doesn’t lead into a place where the signage is obvious. Drivers entering here would most likely—and quite reasonably—conclude that the sea of empty Permit Only parking spaces are fair game during evening hours.

The larger issue is whether it makes sense, from a strategic standpoint, to aggressively enforce at a lot that serves one of the few islands of nighttime activity in Downtown—especially at a parking lot that was funded by taxpayer dollars, even if it is being operated by a quasi-governmental entity now.

Is Downtown so flush with customers that it can afford to annoy those who come down for a special event or dinner? Shouldn’t anyone associated with Downtown be encouraging visitors to enjoy themselves and return soon, rather than driving them away?

Just a few months ago, a flurry of parking tickets written to visitors to the Spring Street Fair on 4th Avenue produced a frustrated response from the Fourth Avenue Merchants Association to ParkWise, the agency that was the author of the tickets.  A few hundred guests had parked illegally near Catalina Park in West University Neighborhood; during the Street Fair, parking options are limited.   

Yes, the parking facilities must be paid for, but my experience working almost ten years at the Tucson Downtown Alliance has informed me that the number one public relations problem from which Downtown Tucson suffers is the perception of parking obstacles. Expensive and often unexpected tickets are a big part of that perception.  Get a ticket after enjoying a Downtown meal, and you may think twice about coming down again soon.   Parking tickets are bad for business, plain and simple.

I hesitate to write about these things because I don’t want to discourage people from visiting Downtown; however, in the case of the parking lot across from El Charro, visitors have safe alternatives to parking at that lot. There is abundant metered on-street parking in the area that is free after 5:00 pm and on weekends, and is quite legal. On the night in question, I parked at a meter along Council, just half a short block from El Charro. Another member of our party parked just a little further away, near Old Town. A shorter distance than you would walk if you parked outside one of the malls.

Friday afternoon as I approached the corner of Scott and Congress on foot after leaving work a block west of that corner, I had a strange feeling, knowing that when I reached that spot I would not be able to resist the urge to look south towards where the former Santa Rita Hotel was undoubtedly gone, the last vertical section of which had likely been torn down that day while I was working.

Sure enough, there was an eerie void where portions of the hotel had stood just hours before.  Later I drove around the Santa Rita block, and marveled at the oddness of being able to see the Odd Fellows Hall (Barrio Food and Drink downstairs, Etherton Gallery upstairs) on 6th Avenue from Scott, and to see the back of Chicago Store from 12th Street. 

(For photos of the last days and hours of the Santa Rita, as it met its wrecking ball, visit the new website of Zocalo magazine, to which I contribute articles.  Publisher Dave Olsen has posted several photos that he took.  www.TheZMag.com)

A security guard was stationed at the 12th St. entrance to the chain-link fence surrounding the demolition site, preventing souvenir-seekers from grabbing treasures from the pile of rubble.  My collection of bricks from torn-down century-old buildings would have to do without a Santa Rita representative. 

Of course, the Santa Rita as it stood last week wasn’t quite a century old.  The oldest parts were built in 1917, the 1904 portions of the original structure having already been obliterated by subsequent renovations.  But the building still had character, and reportedly, lots of ghosts.  For years, the ghost tour company Lost Souls Paranormal featured the Santa Rita as the anchor of its Downtown walking tour.

During the first half of the 20th century, the Santa Rita was Tucson’s most elegant hotel.  Paradoxically it also hosted cattle auctions in its lobby.  Tom Mix spent his last night on Earth at the Santa Rita before crashing his car 48 miles north on the highway to Florence.

I know that I am expected to celebrate this conversion of a shuttered hotel to a modern office building as a step towards progress that Downtown desperately needs.  Within a few years, a shiny new TEP headquarters building will rise from the cleared-off rubble.  TEP will bring its employees over from the ground floor and some upper floors of the UniSource Energy Tower—Tucson’s tallest building, at 1 S. Church Ave. 

Apparently downtown will enjoy a net gain of daytime employees due to the influx of TEP employees from other parts of the city.  TEP will leave behind space at UniSource that a commercial broker such as Buzz Isaacson will undoubtedly find new tenants to fill eventually, and the UniSource Tower will be renamed again.  It was called United Tower and Norwest Tower, and probably some other names, since it rose in 1986.

What makes me melancholy about the whole thing is that there was a plan for the block a few years ago that hit all the right notes;  due to the economy, unfortunately, the project went into the tank.  The existing building was to be spared, renovated, and converted to a boutique hotel.  The rest of the block was going to be condos, parking, and an AJ’s store.  Pathway Development had construction documents prepared and moving through the Development Services process, but then the financing evaporated and so did the deal.  Architect Kevin Howard had designed the new construction to be somewhat of an homage to the original Santa Rita Hotel;  my vintage postcard collection had been loaned to him to use as inspiration. 

Wouldn’t that have been cool?  Old building meets adaptive reuse, with new construction taking the place of asphalt?  Housing to increase downtown’s resident population;  a hotel to boost downtown’s tourist and visitor population (all of whom would eat out at downtown’s restaurants and cafes); and a great grocery store that would have been the answer to years of community whining about why downtown doesn’t have a grocery store and “no one will buy a condo downtown” until there is one. 

I have no idea what Tucson Electric Power has in mind for the architecture of the new building, but it would be nice if there was some architectural gesture to that which had given way to make room for it.  The Broadway frontage should have some commercial space, restaurant or retail.  We’ll probably see another coffee shop;  probably not another barber.  (Downtown now has five barber shops or salons within two blocks of each other.)

I was involved with the early outreach efforts in the planning of the Scott Avenue improvements in the spring and summer of 2008.  The street looks nice, but I disagree with the removal of all the on-street parking between Broadway and the Children’s Museum.  It was great that the businesses and stakeholders were listened to, but when each one said they didn’t need parking in front of their building, the city took that as license to remove ALL the parking.  No one interviewed members of the general public, who may find it convenient to park on Scott one day.   Like when they are attending/visiting professional theater, the Fox, nearby museums, funerals, nightlife on Congress, or mass at the cathedral. 

Just four years ago, when we produced the Congress Street Master Plan (with fabulous public participation and the expenditure of over $300,000 on five months of work from some fine consultants), we reached some consensus that Downtown’s north-south cross streets such as Scott were important reservoirs for on-street parking because most of them are too wide for the traffic that uses them.  You could put in diagonal parking, create lots of on-street parking capacity, and calm the traffic at the same time.  Oh well, who remembers these things but me?

Sadly, and avoidably, there is no funding now to do the same quality of streetscape improvements to Congress Street that was done for Scott Avenue.  That’s a topic for another time, but the City did the improvements to a secondary street and then ran out of money to do the work on Downtown’s most important street. 

Notably absent from the Scott Avenue outreach was the HSL Properties company.  HSL, the owner of the Santa Rita block until July of this year, wasn’t “outreached” in the planning for Scott Avenue.  In fact, when I suggested we interview HSL, I was discouraged from doing so. 

So now TEP has its new side-street landscaped for free;  I guess TEP doesn’t want parking on that side of its block.

The Rialto Theatre Foundation and Rialto Block Project LLC (Don Martin and Scott Stiteler) have reached an agreement that will allow the Foundation to continue to occupy the so-called “Green Room” and office building at 211-215 E. Broadway Blvd., as well as the storefront bay at 316 E. Congress St., adjacent to the theatre lobby, until September 1, 2009. 

A release dated August 16 quotes Scott Stiteler, expressing hope that the two parties can come to an agreement “regarding a permanent resolution of matters related to the Theatre’s needs for space.”

The announcement gives the Rialto Theatre Foundation two weeks beyond an August 18 deadline to use the properties while it continues to negotiate for a longer term lease.  A judge had given the Foundation until August 18 at a July hearing that was held to determine if Stiteler and Martin could evict the Foundation from the spaces then.

While the spaces in question are owned by Rialto Block Project LLC, the theatre itself is owned by the Rio Nuevo Multipurpose Facilities District, whose board of directors has been involved in the negotiations.   The Rialto Theatre Foundation operates the theatre on behalf of Rio Nuevo. 

The Foundation has used the spaces for free but has expressed willingness to pay rent.   The two parties have not yet agreed on a lease term, and there does not seem to be a shared vision of the long-term space needs of the theatre or the relationship between the theatre and the rest of the block.  Nor does there seem to be a shared vision of the relationship between the Foundation and its landlord, the City of Tucson/Rio Nuevo, a circumstance that is very puzzling.

Rio Nuevo and the City of Tucson, for which Rio Nuevo is a proxy, have an inherent interest in protecting their asset, one of the few completed projects in Rio Nuevo.  Rio Nuevo and the City also have an interest in fostering private-sector investment and development in Downtown, which means they don’t want to chase off Stiteler and Martin.   This apparent dilemma need not play out as if Rio Nuevo had to choose sides.  

Nonetheless, the theatre itself is a unique National Register asset, and Rio Nuevo has a compelling rational interest in seeing this asset protected and enhanced.  From an outside perspective, however, there appears to be a reluctance to demonstrate leadership in protecting one of Rio Nuevo’s four completed projects.