Preserve a pedestrian mall?

I am generally cool to pedestrian malls because so few of them seem to work. So I was a bit surprised by the call to save the Charlottesville Downtown Mall I just found in the newsletter of the The Cultural Landscape Foundation.

I've never been to Charlottesville so I don't know the merits/demerits. Any first-hand knowledge?

Comments

[Gomez]

Aren't all malls pedestrian malls? ;P

Seriously, though... U Village is one example of a pedestrian mall that seems to work, even given it's surrounded by parking lots. Every time I walk down there to grocery shop at the QFC on a weekend or weeknight, it's swarming with people and most of the stores and restaurants appear to do considerable business.

Yet you go to The District in suburban Las Vegas, laid out in similar fashion, and it seems kind of empty and hollow. Even in this area... Redmond Town Center has a pedestrian mall that's hit and miss with patronship.

I wonder what it is that makes pedestrian malls such a low percentage venture, and how certain ones succeed.

[David Sucher]

To my understanding, a "pedestrian mall" is a street which has been closed to cars' it's not a shopping mall like U Village.

[Kent]

I grew up in Eugene in the 70s which had a somewhat moribund pedestrian mall downtown.

Having since lived in and traveled to many truly great urban areas in the US and abroad I do tend to agree that simple pedestrian malls usually don't work that well.

Most of the really great pedestrian spaces I've seen are not sitting in the middle of the street blocking the traffic grid, but instead occupying space off the street. Think about NYC. It's filled with little squares and parks shoe-horned into all sorts of available spaces but none of them are blocking off streets.

Another example closer to home is Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square. A fabulous pedestrian space with no street blockage whatever. I was living in Seattle during the whole Westlake Square fiasco when Seattle did everything wrong. The city took a good location for an urban square, put a nondescript shopping tower on half of it, then tried to compensate by blocking off Pine St and disrupting the traffic flow. The whole thing was just a complete abortion.

Re: U-village. In a manner of fashion it is sort of a pedestrian mall. But differs from the ordinary closed off street type of mall in that the city has abandoned the streets to the developers so the entire space is private. U-village, therefore, can patrol the street spaces with Nazi-efficiency to keep out the riff-raff. And, I suspect the property ownership patterns in U-village mean that the developers can control the entire space which couldn't happen on a normal streetscape with dozens of different property owners, many of whom might be absentee or non-cooperative.

[Brian]

Haven't been back to Charlottesville in forever. I remember the mall being very pretty (lovely brickwork and street furniture) but rather sleepy and economically torpid. I would note that my UVa Alumni magazine always contains advertisements for quite fancy condominiums downtown, so it appears things have changed.

[Daniel Nairn]

I'm in the process of moving to Charlottesville right now. My only recollections of the mall from years ago were very positive, but I do know that it took quite a while before the mall did become the vibrant center of the community it now is. The design itself apparently did not immediately rejuvenate the downtown.

I just spent a few days in Helena, MT, another town with a 70's-style pedestrian mall that still exists. It is kept up nicely and may draw a few tourists, but I've never seen more than a handful of people walking through it. It's kind of a unique case, because the historic downtown is actually on the very edge of the city abutting a hill. I think the only reason they have not reconverted it back into a street is because it's not really in the way of anything else.

[ARK]

Many American pedestrian malls failed, leading to an unfortunate new dogma: that pedestrians malls "don't work" in the US. This is, of course, incorrect.

There are quite a few highly successful pedestrian malls in the USA, including Boulder, and Charlottesville. There are others, often in college towns, that are not quite as lively (for instance, Ithaca.

There are several key factors in pedestrian mall success, including:
- competent design
- placement in the street grid
- land use mix.

Europe and other continents are chock-a-block with successful ped malls, but too often, US malls were built without understanding pedestrian dynamics, in a location that did not have sufficient foot traffic, and in a downtown with too much business space and too little housing and entertainment.

[Brian]

Napa, CA is another example of a somewhat struggling pedestrian mall. The difference is they tried to copy Santa Barbara's "passeo" system. Main Street is still open to vehicular traffic, but the main commercial spine is now the pedestrian passeo which parallels the street. While there are two junion department stores and a couple of restaurants, and the streetscape design is somewhat pleasant, it has never really taken off. Main Street proper has a couple of unfortunate mistakes dating from the 1970s-including a government office building that is a blank wall almost a block long. While Napa is seeing some investment (a new resort hotel, a block long three-story mixed use riverwalk project, and new shopping space, it is currently pretty sleepy down there. The downtown couldn't even support an independent bookstore (two closed or moved). we'll see what happens, because they are spending millions on new parking and commercial/office/residential space.

[ThresherK]

Burlington, VT?

Seems to have the right mix of business, retail, nearby living quarters, non-stratified economic mix. Of course, having their ped mall in a city one can get around in without driving to each and every place is a big plus.

Never been to Charlottesville. Can someone discuss the human scale of that wrt Burlington?

Oh, one more thing: I've come to think that suburban New England has way, way too many Sq ft of retail. What about the rest of suburban America. What's gonna be shown as overbuilt sooner: Ped malls or auto malls?

[Sean]

I was in Charlottesville a few weeks ago. I made a point of visiting the pedestrian mall there since I am involved with a project in St. Louis that will re-open the street along the failed 14th Street Pedestrian Mall.

Unlike most of the 200 or so pedestrian malls that were established during the 1970s, the one in Charlottesville seemed to be doing quite well. When my family visited, it was on a Monday evening right after a thunderstorm. Nevertheless, there still was a good amount of foot traffic of locals, students, street musicians, and other tourists up and down the street. The mall was lined with a healthy mix of restaurants, outdoor cafes, banks, theaters, a pharmacy, and a variety of other shops. (I took a lot of photos and would be happy to send via email to any who would like.)

[Matt the Engineer]

I've been to wonderful foot-only areas in Italy, China, India, Germany, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Thailand, and Turkey. These were always my favorite part of each country, and I wouldn't hesitate to move to any of them (ok, maybe India). What do they all have in common that pedestrian malls here lack? Density. I don't mean that these had to be in massive cities - often they were in towns of a few thousand people. I mean people living in 3-story high connected buildings with narrow footpaths in-between.

In such areas there is no space created for cars. There are no parking lots, no garages, no need for sidewalks, or street parking. This allows people to live much closer together, which then allows businesses to thrive. Open a restaurant and you have an instant market of thousands of people within a 5-minute walk. Put on a play and you have thousands of people there in minutes. People chat with neighbors on the street, and promenade with their children and ice cream cones (there are always ice cream cones).

Why do ours fail? I don't know. But I'm guessing it's because we expect people to drive somewhere to walk. Which is a completely different idea than walking a few blocks from your home.

[Matt the Engineer]

One more city with a nice pedestrian mall: Seattle. Pike's market does a great job as a pedestrian mall. Sure, they let cars on the street, but I don't think anyone will claim that this is the reason for it's success. I'd love them to get rid of the cars to make more room for restaurant seating.

[Waldo Jaquith]

We'd no more get rid of our Downtown Mall than tear down Monticello. It's the economic, social, and artistic core of Charlottesville. I assure you, the Downtown Mall is in no need of "saving."

[Jarrett]

The resistance to pedestrian malls seems to be distinctly North American. (Canada has it too.)

Overseas, you won't find more places that seem culturally similar to North America than Australia is, but Australians build pedestrian malls routinely. Even cities as small as 50,000 often have one in their CBD, always with fronting retail of various scales, and they always seem to do well.

As Matt the Engineer notes, land use patterns make all the difference. Some US malls have failed because they were retrofitted into a city that hadn't planned around them, whereas in Australia pedestrian malls are considered an intrinsic and necessary part of a healthy town centre.

It's also worth noting that Australia's planning culture has more powerful tools to fight the growth of "big box" styles of development that kill these old downtowns -- in part because land use planning is an area of state authority, rather than purely local authority as it is in the US. Australian states can therefore make policies that protect local communities from racing to the bottom in their struggle to compete with one another for development.

[rund]

Australian malls are in no less danger than North American ones - in Sydney at least six have already been reopened to traffic.
I think density and mix of uses is the key, as alluded to by most of the comments so far.