S.D. Shouldn’t Rock ‘Round Clock : Become a Dynamic 16-Hour City Instead, Panel Suggests
It is advocated by some--and certainly believed by San Diego’s downtown planners--that a measure of a great city is whether it’s dynamic 24 hours a day.
Cities that never sleep are places like New York, San Francisco and Paris. San Diego aspires to join them.
But a more realistic scenario for downtown San Diego, at least in the short run, is for it to instead become a thriving 16-hour urban center, a panel of professional urban planners and architects said Friday.
Part of the reason, the panel suggested, is that San Diego suffers from its own attractiveness. The alternatives to living downtown--housing being a key ingredient in a 24-hour city--are too many, too varied and too appealing.
The panel met for a symposium called “The Dynamic 24-Hour City,” sponsored by the San Diego chapter of Partners for Livable Place. About 200 people--including architects, land-use consultants, city planners and officials from Centre City Development Corp.--attended the meeting at the Westgate Hotel.
Panel members included Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for the New York Times and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his criticism; Theodore Liebman, an architect with Liebman-Melting Partnership of New York; Edmund Bacon, an architect, city planner and author of books about designing downtowns; Larry Conrad, with Melvin Simon and Associates and currently involved in master planning downtown Indianapolis, and Rodney Punt, Los Angeles’ deputy director of cultural affairs.
Over and over again, the panel emphasized the importance of housing downtown. Such housing, they said, forms the basis of a downtown that stays alive after 5 p.m., when offices close and workers jump into their cars and head home to the suburbs.
By providing housing, which in turn creates demands for other services, such as grocery stores, schools and retail goods, San Diego can avoid the pitfalls suffered by similar cities such as downtown Denver, which “was growing but dull,” according to Liebman.
Once housing and the other elements are in place, San Diego’s downtown can keep its daytime vibrancy well into the night, the panel said.
The downtown housing issue is a controversial one as the City Council debates its designation of the Marina Redevelopment project near the waterfront primarily for housing. Santa Fe Pacific Realty Corp. wants to build a $37-million hotel in the Marina area. Company officials maintain that “housing is not an issue,” despite the city’s designation. The issue is scheduled to be heard by the City Council on Tuesday.
While there was unanimity on the need for downtown housing--particularly for families--there were divergent views on downtown redevelopment’s grandest achievement yet: Horton Plaza.
“It’s my firm commitment that Horton Plaza is one of the most significant works of this century,” said Bacon, noting that the center will have an impact on downtown developments throughout the country. “I believe very profoundly that Horton Plaza is the real answer . . . an incredible achievement.”
Not only does Horton Plaza represent a significant change in American architectural style, Bacon said, but it represents what he called the “rediscovered joys of living.”
Goldberger was more ambivalent. “On one level, it’s the silliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. “But on another level, it’s not bad at all . . . and actually quite impressive.”
He said it was like “a little bit of Disneyland trying to get out . . . except this time it got out.”
Among the questions that remain about Horton Plaza, Goldberger said, is whether it will “hold out year in and year out . . . (after) the novelty begins to wear off.” Goldberger said Horton Plaza fails to adequately connect to the rest of downtown, its blank exterior walls around the parking garage entrances showing that the shopping center “turns its back to the rest of downtown.”
Both Goldberger and Bacon said that Horton Plaza must be viewed as part of the solution to a revitalized downtown, and that in order for the center to be successful, it must generate extensions on other blocks.
Goldberger, who called the Gaslamp Quarter downtown’s best untapped source of architectural potential, described the rest of the core, particularly the office high-rises, as a wasteland.
“There’s a continuous absence of any real, significant downtown architecture here,” he said. “It’s dismal. . . . The office towers would be a source of embarrassment even in Dallas and Houston.”
While he had some misgivings about so-called signature buildings or “prima donna” architecture, Goldberger said San Diego doesn’t even have that.
Goldberger said he has learned, however, that the “quality of life can be great despite mediocre architecture.”
