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I realize your thread is on street-level vibrancy. It reasons outside of a key view in Manhattan. Few will show the same vibrancy. The level of residents who shopped at least in cores, never will return. Retail survives differently and shopping long from being more so core-centric.
Also street-views tend to be early morning views. Not... all but most I find. Even for Manhattan you can tell many are with its ugly shuttered stores of painted pull-down garage-like doors showing closed as proof of early timeframes.
No, actually, this thread isn't about street-level vibrancy. It's about mixed-use downtown neighborhoods with high density.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MDAllstar
You can make an argument that we won't return to that level of vibrancy because shopping isn't done downtown, but the vibrancy isn't really what I am focused on with this thread. I am talking about downtown's becoming neighborhoods where tons of people live and play. That shift could be coming I think with a much higher density than anywhere else in cities which hasn't been the case for most cities because of the prevalence of office space.
It's really online ordering that's changing the game. It's very much easier to live in rural areas now than just a few years ago.
For the larger topic, no downtown will ever be the destination that it was 100 years ago. Lots of downtowns are busy or even very busy, but you don't have to eat there to eat well, you don't have to shop there for the latest and best items. And the convenience of amenities is much less important when they can all be easily ordered online from any suburb
It's really online ordering that's changing the game. It's very much easier to live in rural areas now than just a few years ago.
For the larger topic, no downtown will ever be the destination that it was 100 years ago. Lots of downtowns are busy or even very busy, but you don't have to eat there to eat well, you don't have to shop there for the latest and best items. And the convenience of amenities is much less important when they can all be easily ordered online from any suburb
I’d say at least 95% of people still go grocery shopping. But the consolidation of goods into mega stores (largely post war) is a big reason places look less busy.
But people also go out more so you really don’t need the same volume of people to sustain the same amount of restaurants, but more people to support the same number of stores. I think the vibrancy is better spread over the week vs concentrated in a Sat afternoon
I’d say at least 95% of people still go grocery shopping. But the consolidation of goods into mega stores (largely post war) is a big reason places look less busy.
But people also go out more so you really don’t need the same volume of people to sustain the same amount of restaurants, but more people to support the same number of stores. I think the vibrancy is better spread over the week vs concentrated in a Sat afternoon
This is the part people missed about this thread. We are having a conversation about population density in the future. How much housing can be built or office-to-residential conversions in the downtown area so high levels of density are reached.
This is the part people missed about this thread. We are having a conversation about population density in the future. How much housing can be built or office-to-residential conversions in the downtown area so high levels of density are reached.
I guess that I missed it. Most of the old photos that I saw were retail districts. That's really where you see vibrancy. Having residential with some retail doesn't really do it. You need a high street.
Cities losing population? All the data from 2022 has shown that trend has reversed and cities are booming again. The 2022 census numbers will show explosive growth as most cities have now filled back up which has lead to crazy rent growth and occupancy levels.
As for future density, how do you explain New York City streets? I think the vision people are missing here is the ability to build new housing and convert enough office to housing to create extreme levels of density. If you can build blocks and blocks of density at the 100k-200k people per sq. mile range, the streets will stay busy in the downtown neighborhoods. You don’t agree? Cities have to be intentional in building it.
This may mean upzoning neighborhoods in the downtown and surrounding area so residential high-rises can be build everywhere. If you build nothing but residential highrises with first floor retail over a long distance, what do you think the streets will be like?
I dunno. Most I've read and trends after the pandemic seem to point to folks moving away from cities.
New York City is a different city, and it is sort of its own "animal," when comparing vibrancy, density and overall pedestrian traffic to other large US cities. It has more than double the population of the closest city, LA.
I live here in Brooklyn, and there is not one urban area (except possibly Chicago in some areas) in the country that can compare apples to apples to Brooklyn's density, vibrancy and city experience--let alone Manhattan, or New York City on the whole.
Chicago has good urban areas and a good argument, but even it seems much less vibrant downtown than pre-pandemic. San Francisco, Boston, DC and Philly have areas that are decently robust and vibrant, but pale in comparison to NYC.
My thinking is that New York City is just so MUCH larger than the other cities, that the result of constant people flow is simply felt in terms of vibrancy in most of NYC's neighborhoods. And even if NYC lost 300k due to the pandemic, and 150k moved back, that loss is not even really felt much, overall. Especially in a city with roughly 8.6 million people.
I am a big proponent of urban living--and absolutely dislike suburban living. But I get why some people prefer the suburbs, or rural areas--it's cheaper and easier living on the whole.
I guess that I missed it. Most of the old photos that I saw were retail districts. That's really where you see vibrancy. Having residential with some retail doesn't really do it. You need a high street.
That is how I saw it.
Each old view was in the traditional core where retail and bus and rail terminals were hopping being as that eras airports of today. They had it all and it took a village adding - visitors, tourist, conventioneers and their families to of course office workers staying for more. Weekends minus office workers clearly needed the rest for its hopping streets. Some as in Manhattan and Philly to SF had a high live-in population too.
Still many were not with high residential aspects to very few as Chicago's core was not. Yet old scenes show it bustling and packed. The whole city headed downtown to shop and for its movie palaces and catch the train and bus out or in from there. 90s onward the push of more live-in residents came and especially north of the river pushing the traditional core northward.
Now on c-d it is debated who has the fastest growing new residential buildings going up or office to residential conversions biggest push to boast. Yet their streets can remain quiet. I've viewed street-views alone... in sunbelt cities adding residences to boast and streets are dead most times in street-views. Its like not there. Drive to the garage to office and home. Does a mall there really count? It has parking.
Our old downtowns/cores had residents from every neighborhood head to its core to create them people jams. Old film of downtown shoppers and for coming nightly for entertainment still headed there in the mid-1960s . By the 1970s the bottom fell out as the decade went on. The big change came and those of the Greatest generation gave up on big city cores unless for work. Some XXX shops before videos showed up in cores and old movie palaces showed X to R rated films the crime murder ones..... Boomers still younger then skipped the downtowns they created and the movies drawing viewers wanting thesemor action-packed ones. You view 70s movie markees in downtown then and see what was showing. The palaces began their nose-dive with so many lost.
The city outer neighborhood malls/plazas got built and the suburban ones boomed. White-flight hurt retail in their former neighborhoods and it died as did most traditional downtown shopping in larger cities. "You had to live thru some eras to see the change as us Boomers did when young" as we too then embraced the malls. There is a reason some cities have nothing left of their main shopping streets. The lucky ones renewed it before it died or built it back to be struggling today.
I also agree Manhattan is its own too dense of a beast. Few will live all their life there....
Each old view was in the traditional core where retail and bus and rail terminals were hopping being as that eras airports of today. They had it all and it took a village adding - visitors, tourist, conventioneers and their families to of course office workers staying for more. Weekends minus office workers clearly needed the rest for its hopping streets. Some as in Manhattan and Philly to SF had a high live-in population too.
Still many were not with high residential aspects to very few as Chicago's core was not. Yet old scenes show it bustling and packed. The whole city headed downtown to shop and for its movie palaces and catch the train and bus out or in from there. 90s onward the push of more live-in residents came and especially north of the river pushing the traditional core northward.
Now on c-d it is debated who has the fastest growing new residential buildings going up or office to residential conversions biggest push to boast. Yet their streets can remain quiet. I've viewed street-views alone... in sunbelt cities adding residences to boast and streets are dead most times in street-views. Its like not there. Drive to the garage to office and home. Does a mall there really count? It has parking.
Our old downtowns/cores had residents from every neighborhood head to its core to create them people jams. Old film of downtown shoppers and for coming nightly for entertainment still headed there in the mid-1960s . By the 1970s the bottom fell out as the decade went on. The big change came and those of the Greatest generation gave up on big city cores unless for work. Some XXX shops before videos showed up in cores and old movie palaces showed X to R rated films the crime murder ones..... Boomers still younger then skipped the downtowns they created and the movies drawing viewers wanting thesemor action-packed ones. You view 70s movie markees in downtown then and see what was showing. The palaces began their nose-dive with so many lost.
The city outer neighborhood malls/plazas got built and the suburban ones boomed. White-flight hurt retail in their former neighborhoods and it died as did most traditional downtown shopping in larger cities. "You had to live thru some eras to see the change as us Boomers did when young" as we too then embraced the malls. There is a reason some cities have nothing left of their main shopping streets. The lucky ones renewed it before it died or built it back to be struggling today.
I also agree Manhattan is its own too dense of a beast. Few will live all their life there....
How do you feel about the saying “build it and they will come” when talking about downtowns? I’m not really talking about creating the vibrancy of the 1920’s, I’m talking about the mixed-use of downtowns in 1920. People used to live downtown back then. The question is are we going to get back to a time where hundreds of thousands of people live downtown?
What if a city has an area that is 5 sq. miles of high-rise buildings. How many people can that area hold if most of those buildings are residential?
I think a big change the supermarket. Like you don’t have to visit 6 different shops. You make 1 trip for your cleaning needs, meats, liquor, produce, bread, etc. you make 1 trip now. Maybe two if you want something special.
Same thing you have big department stores vs a dress store, shoe store, furniture store etc. now you have places that sell everything.
You can buy tomatoes, lightbulbs, flowers, bleach, beef and socks at a city target. That’s one trip in 1923 that’s 5 separate stores. So that’s more people on the street for the same set of chores
Today's big discount department stores do combine five (or more) stores that would have been separate in the 1920s and still are today — dry goods*, grocer, drugstore, hardware store, furniture store — but the department stores (*many of which originated as "dry goods" retailers) of the 1920s already had sections that sold domestics (linens/bed/bath), appliances, housewares, furniture and even food (though not as much of it as one would later find in those new supermarkets). So the difference between today's department stores and the ones of the 1920s isn't as great as I think you portray it here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 2Easy
Or you order all of that and make no trips.
It's really online ordering that's changing the game. It's very much easier to live in rural areas now than just a few years ago.
For the larger topic, no downtown will ever be the destination that it was 100 years ago. Lots of downtowns are busy or even very busy, but you don't have to eat there to eat well, you don't have to shop there for the latest and best items. And the convenience of amenities is much less important when they can all be easily ordered online from any suburb
As MDAllstar or maybe one of the posters who followed up on his OP pointed out, on Philadelphia's Market Street east of City Hall in the 1920s, one would have found six department stores: Lit Brothers, Gimbels (which was based in Philadelphia even though it's more closely associated with New York), Strawbridge & Clothier, Frank & Seder, Snellenburg's and John Wanamaker.
Within a decade of the year that photo was taken, one of them — Strawbridge's — did two things that sort of mirror the debate we're having here: built a new, much larger store at 8th and Market streets, the city's principal shopping intersection (Lits and Gimbels also had their stores at this intersection), and opened its first branch store (three years after the 8th and Market store opened) in suburban Ardmore, followed shortly by a second in Jenkintown.
Put slightly differently, the seeds were being planted for the end of downtown's dominance at the same time as those pictures were shot. Work started on the nation's first planned suburban shopping center, Kansas City's Country Club Plaza, in 1921; four years later, the city's premier department store would open a branch there. Suburban Square in Ardmore, where Strawbridge's opened its first branch, welcomed its first stores in 1928. And so on.
The downtowns of those cities that had sizable residential districts either within them or close to them — Chicago, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia — seem to have weathered that era of dispersal better than many others, which suggests that MDAllstar's argument that boosting the residential population of downtowns will stabilize them now has more than a little merit.
And even though downtown living has been a minority preference for some time and will remain so for the forseeable future at the very least, this is a country of hundreds of millions of people, and it won't take all that many of them to support a vibrant downtown. Even the kids who emulate "Friends" after graduating college, then head for the land of lawns after they pair off, will continue to play a role in that.
To provide some visual evidence of the changes being discussed here, I took some pictures of the very block of Market Street MDAllstar featured when I went down to the Reading Terminal Market to pick up produce today. (jjbradleynyc and others: The great in-city public markets — Seattle's Pike Place and Philadelphia's Reading Terminal are perhaps the two best known — are indeed tourist draws, but they also manage to retain the affection and patronage of many locals, a lot of whom will travel into the city to shop them the way they once did the department stores. [I was a poster boy for a mid-2000s RTM marketing campaign that featured the faces of regular shoppers from all over the area; one of my fellow "faces of the RTM" lived in Bear, Del., and others lived in the northern 'burbs and on the Main Line.])
The RTM sits one-half block north of this block, beneath the former Reading Terminal trainshed (which is now part of a huge convention center just to its north). I couldn't shoot the photos from the same angle, as there are no longer buildings from which I could shoot a photo of the 1200 block from their upper floors, but these photos should offer you some point of reference for comparison. As there aren't lots of offices in this part of Center City, the traffic during the week is pretty close to what you see here on a Saturday:
One of the office buildings, which houses offices of Jefferson Health System, is in the first photo on the right, next to the Pennsylvania Convention Center Market Street entrance (former Reading Terminal headhouse). Snellenburg's, across the street in the 1920s, closed in 1962; the bottom two floors of the old store were left standing afterward. Those floors got demolished to make way for the two apartment-over-retail towers on the left (with the big Jumbotron billboards, installed under a city ordinance that promoted billboards on Market east of City Hall ("East Market" or "Market East") as a way of enlivening the street), part of a six-building development that includes a hotel, a building devoted to the design trades, and another Jefferson medical office building (the sixth building is on hold until conditions warrant it). Thomas Jefferson University Hospital sits one block southeast of this one.
The third building on the left is the Loews Hotel (nee Philadelphia Saving Fund Society building). Designed by local architects Howe & Lescaze in 1932, it's considered the first "International Style" modernist skyscraper in the United States. The building to its right is the headquarters of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA).
Clearly, foot traffic is nowhere near what it was in the 1920s, even though the same transit routes serve the street (buses have replaced the trolleys and a subway line runs under Market Street). But it's enough to keep the businesses there in good shape. But perhaps worth noting is that behind where I'm standing in the first photo is a three-block-long indoor shopping mall that just got a makeover intended to revive it, as traffic inside it (save for the below-ground floor that connects to the Reading Terminal's successor train station, a hub for SEPTA Regional Rail) has been anemic for decades. The Philadephia 76ers anniounced a couple of months ago that they want to build a new arena in place of the western end of this mall, which I take as a sign that the makeover hasn't really brought people back inside.
Apropos of nothing else in this post: jjbradleynyc, I imagine you're aware that Brooklynites have been moving to Philadelphia in non-trivial numbers over the past two decades plus. It seems that the level of urban amenities in Philadelphia is high enough to satisfy them while the rents and house prices are significantly lower. I joke that "the Brooklynites figured out they were paying New York prices for the Philadelphia experience and figured it would make more sense to pay Philadelphia prices for it." (Net migration between Philadelphia and Manhattan is towards Manhattan; it's net towards Philadelphia from the other four boroughs, but the net numbers moving from Brooklyn exceed those of the other three combined.)
Last edited by MarketStEl; 10-01-2022 at 10:25 PM..
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