creative corridor presentation - downtown little · pdf filethe creative corridor introduces...
TRANSCRIPT
Low Impact Development Plan
Project Information/Descriptive Data/Sustainable Design Information
1. Intent and Innovation: The Creative Corridor offers a vision for the reclamation of a neglected Main Street while providing an affordable downtown living option presently unavailable in Little Rock. The vision retrofits a four-block segment through a new land-use mix that includes residential, tourism, work, and the cultural arts rather than Main Street’s traditional retail base. The challenge involves restructuring a public realm conceived for workaday commercial throughput to now serve 24/7 urban lifestyles with a high level of livability (embracing all 10 of AIA’s Principles for Livable Communities). This model Complete Streets project preserves 891,000 square feet of existing space in 28 historical structures and stipulates mixed-use functions in 532,000 square feet among four proposed infill structures.
Complete StreetsThe Creative Corridor demonstrates Complete Street principles wherein streets for downtown contexts are designed to accommodate all transportation users—pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists, and public transit users of all ages and abilities in a safe manner. The Creative Corridor expands amenities for pedestrians, provides dedicated bicycling lanes, rationalizes parking, calms traffic, and plans for the eventuality of rail transit. Complete Streets entail compact, mixed-use land uses and multi-modal transportation investments that factor access and equity in addition to mobility. The Creative Corridor introduces affordable urban housing on Main Street next to bus and rail transit facilities. Complete Streets also reward walking, meaning that streets are vibrant frameworks supportive of non-traffic functions related to gathering, recreation, and shopping. The Creative Corridor introduces shared street configurations
The Creative Corridor: A Main Street Revitalization for Little Rockwith particular attention to novel townscaping and frontage systems connecting public and private spaces.
Low Impact Development StreetscapesThe Creative Corridor’s Low Impact Development (LID) treatment network—ecologically-based stormwater runoff management—integrates the recommendations of an EPA “Greening America’s Capital” study for Main Street. The street becomes an ecological asset as the Creative Corridor treats water pollution on site rather than transfer pollutants elsewhere. LID landscapes include urban tree systems to mitigate heat island effect accompanied by native xeriscapes that enhance biodiversity. The street features a promenade and shared street landscapes to deliver many of the 17 recognized ecosystem services—atmospheric regulation, disturbance (flooding) regulation, water regulation, sediment control, nutrient cycling, waste treatment, pollination, habitat, etc.
Public, Private, and Nonprofit PartnershipsThe City is brokering unique relationships with developers and nonprofits to subsidize consolidation of scattered arts groups, including space for more than 600 students in summer and after-school education programs in theater, symphonic, ballet, and visual arts on building ground floors. These education programs recruit from and support all income groups, and their productions constitute a new economic development ecology on Main Street. The City has also incented the introduction of affordable housing in the Main Street district.
2. Energy: Building envelope employs passive solar design strategies with shading strategies at the street level and fin technologies to optimize desirable solar gain and deflection.a. Predicted reduction in overall community EUI compared to current or equivalent conditions: A 50% reduction for renovated (window and insulation replacement and MEP systems) and new buildings including new LED lighting for public right-of-way.b. Predicted percent contribution from integrated, community-based renewable resources: n/a.
3. Community Connectivity: Little Rock has too much parking. Surface parking is rationalized with a reduction in surface area without losing capacity. Traffic is calmed in the first phase; bicycle travel facilities and expanded pedestrian areas are introduced in the second and third phases; and rail transit infrastructure is introduced in the fourth phase. This will be the first affordable downtown neighborhood.a. Parking ratio: project converts lot-based parking along Main Street to structured parking within mixed use. Parking never becomes its own land use. b. Automobile trip reduction: 25% reduction since one-third of trips are for work commutes. The public transit component should lead to another 25% reduction for a total of 50%.c. Walk Score rating: 94 Walkers’ Paradise.
4. Water: New buildings will incorporate green roofs, and the LID retrofits will substitute pervious paving and landscaped-based treatment facilities for impervious paving—an 18,000 square foot reduction in impervious paving. a. Percent precipitation managed on site: 100% capacity within a 25-year storm event.b. Percent waste water used on site: against state law.c. Regulated potable water reduction from baseline: buildings are targeted for a 50% reduction.
Project Challenge: From Commerce to CultureThe Creative Corridor retrofits a four-block segment of an endangered downtown Main Street through economic development catalyzed by the cultural arts rather than Main Street’s traditional retail base. The goal is to structure an identity for the Creative Corridor rooted in a mixed-use working and living environment anchored by the arts. The challenge involves restructuring a public realm conceived for workaday commercial activities to now serve 24/7 urban lifestyles with a high level of livability. The project approach employs four developmental phases in the corridor’s transformation to a downtown node. Nodes provide a sense of centrality and opportunity for social life that counters the dominance of mobility in corridors. Retrofit strategies entail right-of-way reconfigurations accommodating streetcar rail transit as well as pedestrian-oriented streetscapes and townscaping structures that frame a new land-use ecology of residential, tourism, work, and the cultural arts. An additional challenge regards the compatibility between proposed larger infill buildings using curtain wall technologies and early 20th century commercial buildings fashioned from the expressive order of brick and stone. To ensure coherence among different eras of development, design solutions rely on the urbanism of streetscapes—landscape architecture, ecological engineering, public space configurations, frontage systems, and miscellaneous assemblages.
The Creative Corridor Plan is premised on the aggregation of cultural organizations scattered throughout Little Rock. Some of these groups exist at the financial margins and their ongoing viability increases through new synergies common to aggregation. Facilities slated to anchor the Creative Corridor include instruction and production space for the symphony, ballet, arts center, visual artists, theater, and dance, as well as a culinary arts economy that triangulates restaurants, demonstration, and education. Despite adaptive reuse challenges to residential, large-format office, and cultural production functions, the Creative Corridor generates niche value from the reclamation of a heritage environment whose exceptional place-making qualities cannot be replicated.
Preparation by the CommunityProject planning was funded under the National Endowment for the Arts’ signature “Our Town” 2011-2012 grant program, enabling public-private partnerships and more than 30 organizations to collaborate on the planning effort. The City’s Main Street Task Force and property owners participated in design workshops, as well as the region’s primary cultural arts groups who have agreed to relocate to Main Street. The current planning effort follows up on a three-day charrette with 120 attendees conducted by the Mayors’ Institute on City Design in late 2009. During 2010, Main Street was the subject of an environmental streetscape design study featuring Low Impact Development (LID) under the EPA’s “Greening America’s Capitals” program. Based on the Creative Corridor plan, EPA and the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission just committed $1.2 million in capital funding to implement the plan’s demonstration LID streetscapes under their section 319 Nonpoint Source Pollution Program, beginning in 2013. The plan leads the effort to change the City’s codes, making LID (currently illegal) a by-right standard for the ecological management of urban stormwater runoff. Meanwhile, the City and project team are preparing tenant build-out plans for the 500-block of Main Street. Other historic structures in the Creative Corridor are either under contract or undergoing more than $30 million in rehabilitation.
The goal is to structure an identity for the Creative Corridor rooted in a mixed-use working and living en-vironment anchored by the cultural arts. The challenge involves restruc-turing a public realm conceived for workaday commercial throughput to now serve 24-7 urban lifestyles with a high level of livability.
Main Street DeclineLittle Rock’s Main Street decline happened late; a victim of the City’s zealousness in securing federal urban renewal funds beginning in the 1950s. The Central Little Rock Urban Renewal Project eventually became a national model for urban neighborhood clearance: 580 acres of the downtown were demolished, including 471 commercial buildings (more than 1600 buildings total in a city of 193,000) and population density dropped from 18 people per acre to five in 1970. In some downtown neighborhoods the population dropped 75 percent. Currently sustained by state office tenants, Main Street is an urban island among a few intact downtown districts floating within an otherwise undeveloped street fabric. Downtown’s single largest land use is parking, and the City’s retail base is not coming back anytime soon.
Alignment between Public and Private InvestmentsThe design vision is holistic but the approach is based on incremental implementation that reinforces identity building with each subsequent phase. Urban revitalization efforts are generally susceptible to failure when they either lack capacity for incremental development or balance between public and private investment. Particularly in today’s risk-averse financing climate with limited capital flows, viable
A vivid and integrated physical setting, capable of producing a sharp image, plays a social role as well. It can furnish the raw material for the symbols and collective memories of group communication….Indeed, a distinctive and legible environment not only offers security but also heightens the potential depth and intensity of human experience.
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City
“ “Capitol Avenue
Main Stre
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Downtown Little Rock: Intersection of Capitol and Main
Film School
Ballet
Symphony Orchestra
Arts Center
Repertory Theater
Music Center
Artists
Dance Project
Fashion Studio
Culinary School
Capitol Avenue
Main Stre
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epertory Theater
Arts Center
Culinary S
chool
Music C
enterB
alletFilm
School
Dance Project
Fashion Studio
Artists
Sym
phony Orchestra
Scattered Cultural Assets Aggregated Creative Corridor
urban plans will have to be structured around small-grained infill development strategies reliant on staged or self-financing. Thus project phasing begins with prudent right-of-way improvements proportional to expected market development without getting too far ahead of expected tax yields (e.g., more than 150 affordable and middle-income housing units have been developed with over 100 more under contract). Each phase establishes self-sufficiency without reliance on a subsequent phase to appear complete.
Public improvements send important signals to the market and maintain a de facto development momentum. Working with developers who will subsidize tenant space for cultural groups and affordable housing, City participation steers market interest and incents appropriate, equitable development accommodating all income levels within the corridor. Creative Corridor identity features Complete Streets practices for pedestrian-oriented environments, reinforcing the production and enjoyment of the creative arts, and general livability. Public improvements result in a built public realm commensurate in distinction with proposed high-quality architectural facilities.
Design Approach: From Traffic Corridor to Green NodeThe project approach employs four phases of development in the transformation of the corridor segment to a downtown node. Nodes provide a sense of centrality and opportunity
for social life that counters the dominance of mobility in corridors. Each phase can be accomplished in succession, or all at once, as private investment and political will permit. Each phase entails transformations among public right-of-way improvements, building frontage, and infill proposals involving new buildings.
Phase 1: Develop nodes for enhanced pedestrian activity which serve as gateways marking the Creative Corridor segment of Main Street. Through the introduction of shared street strategies that privilege a pedestrian environment supportive of non-traffic functions like outdoor dining and theater gathering, gateway nodes frame intimate social spaces within an otherwise continuous corridor.
Phase 2: Develop a center to the Creative Corridor marking the most important intersection symbolically in Little Rock—Capitol Avenue and Main Street. A large central plaza for vehicles and pedestrians accommodates large public events and forms an appropriate gateway to the state capitol building to the west. The shared street configuration houses an elevated lawn/amphitheater, arcade, and space for mobile food trucks to service events and downtown office workers.
Phase 3: Connect the three nodes with a thickened edge or pedestrian promenade on the west side of the
street, bordering the proposed plaza at the intersection of Main Street and Capitol Avenue. The pedestrian promenade is a two-block allee of trees housing outdoor dining courts, public art, and consequential low impact development pocket parks for ecological-based stormwater management to be funded by the EPA. The LID treatment train includes flow spreaders, pervious paving, bioswales, tree box filters, and filtration facilities to control sedimentation and treat stormwater runoff.
Phase 4: Install rail transit infrastructure and facilities per Metroplan’s (Central Arkansas’ regional planning authority) proposal for future streetcar expansion, and relocate dedicated tree-lined bicycle lanes to parallel Scott and Louisiana Streets. The three streets combined offer full multi-modal passage between downtown and urban neighborhoods to the south.
Merits: A Model Complete StreetMain Street is an important link in our cultural gene pool, representing a placemaking intelligence whose loss diminishes our collective city-building capacities. The Main Street design vision punctuates a long participatory process undertaken by City leadership to revitalize this corridor in a region that has been ardently anti-urban and pro-property rights. The Creative Corridor offers a retrofit program beyond passive frontage preservation and failed street beautification to negotiate challenging adaptive reuses, including corporate property owners—who have demolished historic Main Street structures—scheduled to build large contemporary mixed-use office structures on the four vacant lots (Arkansas law does not permit transfer of development rights). Rather than simply rely on frontage guidelines, planning and design negotiate conflicting architectural traditions through the use of townscaping elements and structures (i.e., arcades, urban porches, amphitheaters, vitrines, etc.) that bridge right-of-way design with building interiors. Design adds development value to win market concessions.
The Creative Corridor employs comprehensive Complete Streets practices to phase the introduction of demonstration public spaces unfamiliar to the City—integrated LID treatment network, shared streets, streetcar transit and tree-shaded bicycle lanes, outdoor performance facilities, and green roof terraces. Despite the shift from a familiar retail-oriented public realm, adaptive reuse engages the full range of urban design, landscape architecture, ecological engineering, and public art to structure a 24/7 corridor identity for this new residential, tourism, and work land-use mix. The City is also collaborating with developers to incent the inclusion of affordable housing among the residential units planned for Main Street (Arkansas law does not permit inclusionary zoning). In the upside of down, design sets the stage for policy reform of state enabling legislation and municipal development codes supportive of livable downtowns.
Main Street became to America what the piazza was to Italy.
Richard Longstreth, The Buildings of Main Street: A Guide to American Commercial Architecture
“ “Programmatic Elements of the Creative Corridor
Classic Main StreetMain Street was once a high-density hub of activity in Little Rock—boasting 50% of the county’s commerce and housing one of the
nation’s most extensive streetcar systems (48 miles) for a city of only 40,000!
Main Street TodayBeautification has not sparked any revitalization initiatives...
Urban Renewal580 acres of the downtown were demol-ished, including 471 commercial buildings (more than 1600 total in a city of 193,000) and the population density dropped from
18 people per acre to five in 1970.
1980196519201890’s
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2012
Given the new mix of uses dominated by the cultural arts and residential, Main Street must be livable after work hours—24/7.
Among the most common technique for making Main Street work as a design is the enhancement of any nodal space, or even the whole creation of such nodes that now serve as greens, vest-pocket parks, or squares. The nodes help introduce an element of centrality and enclosure, and in so doing attempt to influence our perceptions of Main Street as a safe social environment.
“ “
Richard Francaviglia, Main Street Revisited
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Capitol Avenue
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Main Street
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existing 1 2 3 4create gateways... develop a center... thicken the edge... create a transit district!
Creative Corridor Phasing Strategy
infill building
The first step to defining the Main Street Creative Corridor will be the establishment of the two urban thresholds as pedestrian tables.
1 Create Gateways
North Gateway Plaza
South Gateway PlazaTo
Capitol
Artist Lofts
Culinary School and Apartments
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Rain gardensPlaza seatingStreet light gardenPublic art padContinuous pedestrian tableGreen wallUrban staircaseUrban patioBack-in parkingProposed transit system
View looking into the North Gateway Plaza from the new culinary school.
rain gardensare planted depressions designed to infiltrate stormwater runoff, but not hold it.
rain garden
right of way
rain garden
permeable pavement
throughway
cardinal flower
muhly grass
red oak
Chinese pistache
pervious paversallow water to vertically flow
through hard surfaces. As substitutes for impervious paving, they support both pedestrian and vehicular
traffic.
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300-302 Main StreetFulk and C.M. Taylor Buildings
313-315 Main StreetGus Blass Wholesale
320-322 Main StreetThe Mann Building
300 Block West 300 Block East
Since architectural guidelines are not politically feasible, townscaping elements and frontage systems mediate between new and old structures, big and small scales, and create anchoring spaces in the corridor.
Recycle existing and assorted Main Street lamps as a light garden, creating a gateway feature.
The plaza patio creates new gathering spaces that extend
into upper levels.
Plaza street furniture arranged in room configurations.
Remove
Remove
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SouthGateway Plaza12
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Rain gardensPlaza seatingStreet light gardenPublic art padContinuous pedestrian tableRepertory Theatre marqueeGallery boxesAtriumBack-in parkingProposed transit system
rain gardensare planted depressions designed to infiltrate stormwater runoff, but not hold it.
pervious pavingallows water to
vertically flow through hard surfaces.
As substitutes for impervious paving, they support both
pedestrian and vehicular traffic.
View looking north from the South Gateway Plaza.
yellow coneflower
maiden grass
ginkgo biloba
littleleaf linden
new frontage
right of way
rain garden
permeable pavement
throughway
613-615 Main StreetFulk-Arkansas Democrat Building
609 Main StreetGaverty Furniture Building
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Recycle existing and assorted Main Street lamps as a light garden, creating a
gateway feature.
Never shutter a building on Main
Street
Remove reflective film from glass
Complement recent renovations to the Arkansas Repertory Theater with a new LED marquee, adding additional signage and a sheltered pedestrian entrance.
New room-scaled gallery vitrines in the spirit of early 20th century storefront logics.
600 Block East 600 Block West
Remove
Mixed-Use Art Theater and Office Complex-to be developed by a corporate
landowner
Capitol Avenue Plaza
Amphitheater
0’ 150’
The second step is to define the central event plaza at the intersection of Capitol Avenue and Main Street—the most symbolic intersection in Little Rock.
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Develop A Center 2
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AmphitheaterPlaza pavilionTransit stationsPublic artMovie screenCafePlaza clubRoof gardenBack-in parkingProposed transit system
View looking northwest into the Capitol Avenue Plaza.
transitstationamphitheater
permeable pavement plaza throughway
View looking south from the roof garden at Capitol and Main.
View looking south from the North Gateway Plaza.
Replace inappropriately installed street trees with a new LID
pedestrian promenade
Tech Startup and Retail
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Thicken The EdgeLink phases 1 and 2 together with a thickened pedestrian promenade.
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LIDPedestrian Promenade1
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BioswaleGarden roomArcadePublic artGallerySymphony rehearsal spaceBack-in parkingProposed transit system
bioswalesare open, gently sloped, vegetated channels designed for treatment and conveyance of stormwater runoff.
permeable weirstypically constructed from treated lumber, with spaces between
each timber to provide slow passage of
stormwater through long, narrow openings
View looking north from the LID pedestrian promenade in the 400 Block.
white lupine
horsetail
lacebark elm
little bluestem
rain garden
right of way
bioswaletree
moundpermeable pavement
throughway
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Plaza structures facilitate a larger pedestrian-scaled activity within the gateway intersection connecting the state capitol complex and Main Street.
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500 Block West 500 Block East
500 Main StreetThe State Bank Building
534 Main StreetPfeifer Brothers Department Store
Frontage systems and townscaping elements serve new cultural arts groups and their educational programs—the symphony, ballet, arts center, and individual artists.
Remove window treatment and reflective film from ground floor offices (typical).
Remove
Remove
600 Block
500 Block
400 Block
300 Block
Create a Transit District!Make Louisiana and Scott Streets bicycle boulevards and extend the existing streetcar
system along Main Street, connecting downtown to first ring suburbs.
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