Massachusetts city aims for a downtown remake
Architect Richard Heapes made his name more than two decades ago by planning Mizner Park, a stylish, extremely popular town center that rose like a phoenix from the site of a failed shopping mall in Boca Raton, Florida.
In the years since, Heapes moved to Street-Works LLC, a design and development company based in White Plains, New York, where he orchestrated endeavors such as Blue Back Square — gracefully stitching a 20-acre mixed-use complex onto the venerable town center of West Hartford, Connecticut.
Now Heapes is involved in probably the most challenging urban project of his career — the replacement of most of the existing downtown of Quincy, Massachusetts. The scope of the Massachusetts project is enough to make many planners queasy. Street-Works, where Heapes is a principal, intends to build practically a new downtown — “20 blocks of pretty traditional development: retail on the ground floor, something else above it,” as Heapes puts it — where now stands the partly attractive, partly nondescript business center of Quincy.
Street-Works envisions two hotels; destination retail, including a movie theater, a department store, and a supermarket; street retail with at least 30 restaurants; a wellness
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Good project — but two big problems.
I commend Street-Works and Quincy for embracing the private financing model. But it would have been proper, in my view, for the city to develop the public parking garage itself as other governments have done. But two big problems remain: First, what happens to the small businesses seen in the photos — mass extinction? There is no mention of how to work them back in the mix or where they go during construction. This is a problem for ALL new urbanist / infill / retrofit projects in gray fields (ie., sites not totally abandoned). We talk a good game about how we love small, independent, local retailers — and then we gladly wipe them out and displace them with these big projects with expensive rents.
Second problem is the "several" 20 story buildings. You have got to be kidding me — Quincy (pop. 92,000) neither needs nor can support these. Look at the handsome building in the first photo; it's not 20 stories and will be overwhelmed by such buildings. Is that what this is all about: building glass boxes and post-modern/deconstructivist/ bla bla bla titanium-skin skyscrapers? And what corporations will be filling them up in this economy and by that, I mean the next five years? Good luck with that. Richard Heapes apparently does not care much for local calibration of the Transect. This element makes an otherwise good plan into a fundamentally flawed one. I don't believe New Urbanism should be about injecting 20-story high rises into places where they have never existed.