Surface parking lots are enduring scourge of Downtown
The latest vision for Downtown Columbus is coming together after months of workshops and public feedback, with former Mayor Michael B. Coleman presenting the findings thus far on Tuesday to the city’s Downtown Commission.
The plan’s engineers are aiming for Downtown to bustle with 40,000 residents and three times that many workers by 2040, drawn by better housing, transportation and entertainment options that will keep the city’s core vibrant around the clock.
“What I’m seeing from this is the general theme is that more is better: more residents, more affordable housing, more activities Downtown, 40,000 residents by 2040,” Coleman said.
If that theme sounds familiar, it might be because Coleman was beating this very same drum as much as 20 years ago, during the first of his four terms as mayor while unveiling an earlier incarnation of a Downtown plan.
That’s not a dig, mind you. A quick look around Downtown today reveals growth of all kinds since then. The Riversouth developments that Coleman had envisioned in 2002 have risen on what back then were mostly vacant lots. The failed City Center mall is gone, replaced by the John F. Wolfe Columbus Commons. The Scioto River is flanked by new and revitalized greenspaces.
But it is funny how, whenever these plans are unveiled, they are promoted as New! and Improved! Finally, Columbus will have an identity!
This time around, the work at hand is billed as “envisioning the next wave of change.”
Tumbling forward in this next wave of change, we can hope, is the death of the surface parking lot.
Because if there has been one constant through decades of Downtown planning, it is this: People may love their cars, but they loathe surface parking lots.
This enduring hatred was voluminously expressed during the gathering
of feedback from the public on this last plan, some of which you can find pinned to an online map of Downtown.
The map is a pincushion of remarks on surface lots.
“Parking lot city,” one pin says. “A space of potential, wasted, boring and mostly lifeless,” reads another.
“Please develop the southeast side of Downtown. Why is it so empty?”
“The whole downtown looks like it was bombed in WWII.” Incoming!
People have hated surface lots for a lot longer than the duration of this latest fact-finding mission. The lots were despised 20 years ago when Coleman introduced the 2002 Downtown plan and well before that, when surface lots were popping up Downtown like mushrooms on a rotting tree stump.
But parking lots were hated by Americans even earlier, soon after their love affair with the automobile began. One report issued in Chicago in 1964 by the American Society of Planning Officials began this way, followed by a quote that might have been written about the end of any recent weekday in Downtown Columbus:
“Most parking lots are ugly. In the words of one authority:
“‘… parking lots seen at ground level become huge wastes of bulging, shiny, monstrously colored vegetation 5 feet high. Then, after eight hours or so, this parking lot transforms itself into an empty, paved (usually black) waste of equally depressing appearance. Moreover, at certain periods a parking lot has all the unpleasant characteristics of a noisome industry — small, smoke, noise, glaring lights, and, in addition, a disrupting effect on traffic.’”
And, from another study nearly 50 years later:
“The current density of surface parking lots must be addressed and local government, business districts, developers, businesses, communities, and designers must work together and take action. The daily eyesores and tragic gaps in the urban fabric do not have to become part of local downtown culture.”
I mean, they ain’t wrong.
So, we can hope that this latest vision for Downtown brings about the demise of these “daily eyesores.” But what to put in their place?
There is plenty of feedback on that too. Housing is a big one. More shops and entertainment options. Added greenspace.
On that online map, pinned to a surface lot at North 11th and East Long streets, one commenter wrote, “this area would be great for an urban Meijer store.”
Urban Meijer. Now that sounds so very Columbus.
tdecker@dispatch.com