Posts about Blank Walls
Retail
CVS brings transparency to Georgetown
A few weeks ago, Phillip Kennicott wrote a nice piece in the Washington Post about the death of the shop window in Washington. The thrust of the piece was that more and more, stores are blocking up their front windows in order to increase their shelf space.
Around town, nobody seems to be more of a purveyor of these blocked windows than CVS. And so it's a pleasant surprise that CVS has recently made huge changes to the front of their two Georgetown stores to open up their respective shop windows.
Above is a photo of the M St. CVS. You can see that with the introduction of the self-check out kiosks, the store has removed the front counter. This enabled them to clear out the whole front window. Just compare it to what it used to look like:
A lot better, don't you think? (Although turning it back into the Biograph would be an even better step).
They brought similar changes to the Wisconsin Ave. CVS as well. Here it is before:
And here's what it looks like now:
In short: Thank you, CVS, for bringing a little more transparency to Georgetown.
Cross-posted at Georgetown Metropolitan.
Public Spaces
Little changes presage big ones at City Place Mall
A lot of things have kept City Place Mall from success since it opened in 1992. The five-story mall at Colesville and Fenton in Downtown Silver Spring has a mix of discount and off-brand stores that attract shoppers from across the region but aren't relevant to well-heeled people living in the immediate area.
This fountain will be removed, opening up the entrance to City Place Mall. Photo by the author.
It also suffers from a reputation for crime, notably a drug-related shooting during rush hour last fall. (The lack of an Internet presence beyond this listing and a Wikipedia entry doesn't help, either.)
Like most enclosed malls in an urban setting, City Place's biggest flaw is that it presents big blank walls to the street, meaning that pedestrians who don't know what's in there have no reason to go inside. That's what owners Petrie Ross Ventures seek to fix about City Place in the first phase of a major renovation, approved by the Montgomery County Planning Board last Thursday.
Nighttime (left) and daytime (right) views of the new City Place entrance at Colesville and Fenton. All images taken from the Planning Department's report.
They want to renovate the plaza at the corner of Colesville Road and Fenton Street, the mall's most visible entrance but perhaps also its most foreboding. Signs for anchor stores Marshalls and Burlington Coat Factory are plastered several stories up, making them hard to see for people on foot or driving past. A large sculptural fountain, lined with spiky strips to discourage loitering, blocks the door.
A plan of the new plaza.
The developer's proposal would take out the fountain and repave the entire plaza, making it easier for people to circulate and open up sight lines. This will hopefully discourage loitering and make the space feel safer. A tree that interferes with wheelchair ramps at the crosswalk for Colesville Road will be removed.
And a new metal screen, similar to the ones placed along Ellsworth Drive and Fenton Street in 2005, will wrap around the corner. It'll display large tenant signs, a new sign for the mall itself, and a video screen "that will televise events, ads and information as an aesthetic response to this admittedly commercial enterprise," according to a report filed by Planning staff. The screen will be required to display public information and event calendars every five minutes.
The proposal doesn't address any changes to the restaurants flanking the entrance, Taste of Morocco and a shuttered Ruby Tuesday that was vandalized in the fall of 2008. Both eateries' street-facing windows are either covered up or tinted, and their patio seating - a great way to activate the plaza - is largely unused. Hopefully, renovating the plaza will encourage at least Taste of Morocco to open up to the outside.
The ten-screen movie theatre atop City Place, closed since 2004, could be converted to offices.
The office addition, both within the existing mall and in a nine-story office building on top that was first approved twenty years ago, brings a customer base that could draw new, higher-end retailers to City Place. As recently as last summer, the developers had unsuccessfully courted Park and Planning to occupy the 300,000-square foot tower. But without office tenants willing to take a chance on the mall's potential turnaround, it's likely that nothing could happen at all.
Renderings of the renovated mall and office tower addition, seen from the corner of Fenton and Ellsworth (left) and Colesville Road (right).
In the meantime, there's a possibility that City Place Mall could get a new name. All of the renderings above show new signage at the corner of Colesville and Fenton reading "The Galleria at Silver Spring." As Silver Spring, Singular first suggested in 2006, the name City Place carries with it some serious baggage and could use a new moniker to get disenchanted shoppers interested again.
Parking
Supermarket chains blind to walkable urban business opportunities
Many of DC's supermarkets turn long, blank walls toward the sidewalk. This space represents an enormous missed opportunity for retailing. Supermarkets like Manhattan's Fairway line their sidewalk frontage with produce stands. This draws customers into the store who see an appealing mango as they walk by, go inside, and end up buying a few items. Clearly, they've determined that any loss to theft pales in comparison to the profit in drawing more customers. Yet DC's supermarkets leave these spaces dead and unused.
Left: Fairway on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Right: Safeway on 17th Street in Dupont.
Photos by swruler9284 and M.V. Jantzen on Flickr.
It seems puzzling that stores ignore this obvious opportunity literally right in front of them. According to a developer who's tried to attract supermarkets to DC, our chains, like Safeway and Giant, cling to very suburban business models despite having many successful stores in the city. They primarily measure stores by their "average receipts", the average amount of money a customer spends on a single visit.
Adding small-ticket items like produce outside the store would bring in more customers and even more total profit, but decrease the average receipts. Despite raising the store's profits, the national headquarters would very likely see the change as diminishing the store's performance.
Most of New York's supermarket chains focus entirely or almost on that market. Fairway, Food Emporium, D'Agostino, Gristede's, C-Town, and others don't answer to suburban managers who measure their stores by the standards of the typical auto-dependent strip mall store. Many of these stores can operate successfully in small spaces, and are happy to locate half or more of their stores below ground or on the second floor. They know they don't need an enormous 20-foot-high sign. And even in buildings with no parking, they can thrive.
Meanwhile, Safeway largely neglects its Dupont Circle store. Safeway, Giant, and other regional chains, when negotiating to become anchor tenants of new developments, still insist on large facades facing the sidewalk, suburban-sized signs, and vast quantities of parking, often including parking reserved exclusively for the store's patrons.
It's not all bad. Even these same chains are thinking more creatively on some of their new stores. The new Georgetown Safeway will engage the sidewalk much more than existing Safeways. My developer source says that some chains are open to adding sidewalk vending. If those outside-the-DC-box examples succeed, then our supermarket chains will learn to incorporate these elements in other stores in less-rich areas. As with many large businesses, however, these chains move and change slowly. We may well have to wait a long time for them to wake up to profit opportunities in urban areas.
Development
Breakfast links: The more things change...
Photo by JamesCalder on Flickr.
Killing transit is the "public good"? It must be nice to have rich law firm partners in your town. Sidley Austin is donating pro bono legal time to help the Town of Chevy Chase fight the Purple Line, reports the Action Committee for Transit. Chevy Chase has also spent or appropriated at least $500,000 to oppose the line. If your town had a $2 million surplus, it too could spend a lot of money to hurt neighboring communities!
Which is worse, clubs or drugstores? DC Metrocentric looks at the street-killing properties of most clubs, which are lifeless all day and full of blank walls. These are good reasons clubs ought to occupy basements or second floors.
Also: The Montgomery County Council is fast-tracking massive sprawl in Gaithersburg; Georgia Avenue is becoming more commercial, to some controvers; the New York Times is under the ridiculous impression that the small White House inner circle sets DC's trends.
Bicycling
Transportation across the nation: from fantasy to reality
Vanshnookenraggen's future MBTA map.
The best Boston fantasy map yet: Vanshnookenraggen has a new and really nice looking future MBTA map combining commuter, heavy and light rail.
More free bikes: A Wisconsin college is offering free bikes to students who don't bring a car. (I still ride the bike I got for free during college while interning at Microsoft.) WashCycle suggests DC schools take a page from this idea and contribute to SmartBike kiosks on their campuses.
Less free parking: New York is implementing performance parking in Greenwich Village and on a segment of Brooklyn's Kings Highway.
Pro-bike, pro-pedestrian California politicians: The California legislature recently passed two important pieces of legislation: a Complete Streets Act, requiring local transportation plans to "meet the needs of ... pedestrians, bicyclists, users of public transit, motorists, children, the elderly, and the disabled," and Fair Share for Safety, "to ensure that the needs of bicyclists and pedestrians are addressed in the development of its safety programs."
Preservation
Historic post preservation: the Ronald Reagan Building
[Autoposted while I'm in France]
Three years ago, I was in DC for a conference at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. Here's what I wrote:
Five Things Not To Do When Building A Convention CenterThis building is still just as awful. Recently I was down at the Wilson Building, and wanted to get some food. There are big signs that say "FOOD COURT" up on the street, in a clear attempt to try to get people to go to their food court. But (unless I was being totally blind, and I don't think I was), once you get into the main area, there's no sign saying where the food actually is. I think it's down in that well, but then there are still no signs, and instead are forbidding metal detector-guarded entrances. I ended up giving up and walking up to eat on F Street.1. Surround your building with an imposing stone facade that completely isolates it from the nearby street. Place no cafes or other businesses on the street, no places to sit, or anything to engage pedestrians.
2. Place doors at frequent intervals along the exterior, but then lock almost all of them.
3. Make your building extremely confusing to navigate.
4. Fill your building with large marble rooms that are completely devoid of furniture, forcing people to sit on the stairs or marble ledges.
They can afford this funky neon stuff, but apparently not any benches
for the people sitting at the right.5. Name your building after Ronald Reagan.
If you follow these simple steps, you too can have as wonderful a conference center as the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, DC!
Many DC buildings do it, but putting food in the center of a building is not the way to go. When stores are along the street, people can walk around and find something they like. When they're buried, even with big signs, it can work okay for people who work in the area every day, but prevents lively street activity and is extremely frustrating for the casual visitor.
Development
Wisconsin Ave Giant is a great project
I've been picking on bad projects a fair amount lately, so it's time to highlight a good project: the proposed redevelopment of the Wisconsin Avenue Giant in western Cleveland Park. This project will replace bland, single-story buildings and large surface parking lots along Wisconsin Ave and Idaho Ave with an appropriately scaled mixed-use project that will engage the street with many individual stores and residences.
The north parcel, in the triangle made by Wisconsin, Idaho, and Newark Street, has small stores all around on the ground floor and residences above. There is also an opportunity for businesses on the second story (of the types that prefer the lower rent and lower visibility of an upstairs location, like yoga studios).
South of Newark Street, the Giant will occupy most of the site. However, the project places several smaller stores in front of the store on both the Wisconsin Ave and Newark Street sides. On the Idaho Ave side, which is more residential, there will be townhouses fronting on the street.
This is a great solution to the problem of blank walls around big supermarkets. A supermarket usually wants to put full-height shelves around all its walls, blocking any windows. Therefore, when we build a supermarket right on the street, we end up with long blank walls. Here, the Giant gets to have a nice entrance on the street, but the rest of the store is inside the block, allowing it to have no windows without hurting the streetscape.
The project does have two levels of underground parking. While I usually complain about excessive parking, I don't think this is excessive. Supermarkets do generate more vehicle trips because people do indeed buy a lot of food at once and make frequent trips to the supermarket. Until we have lots of corner stores allowing people to walk to the corner to buy some fresh produce, that's going to continue. Also, this area isn't very close to any Metro stations. Wisconsin has bus service, but there's less potential for complete transit-oriented living than right at Columbia Heights, Eastern Market, or Georgetown.
My favorite part of this project is the treatment of Newark Street. Too often, traffic engineers either design the road entirely for cars and try to keep people off while maximizing vehicle speed, or close a road completely which is great for pedestrians but can create "superblocks" and dead space that is less safe. Instead, this project paves the center section of Newark Street with something like cobblestones, creating a wide plaza that's open to cars but also more pedestrian friendly, using subtle visual cues to show that this isn't a rapid driving space.
Why can't these folks design all the development projects in DC?
Public Spaces
Zoning Update may restrict long storefronts and blank walls
Today is the third meeting of the Retail Strategy zoning update group. I can't make it, but I really like two of the proposals they will be discussing: a frontage limit for stores, and a limit on blank walls facing the street in retail space.
Dupont CVS: many windows, all blocked.
Photo by M.V. Jantzen on Flickr.
A street with more storefronts is better than just one big one. A big single store limits the diversity of retail on that block, and also means that most of the front is probably just windows or walls. It's better for the street's activity to have more entrances that lead pedestrians to go in, see some merchandise, and then go back out to get to the next store rather than staying inside a single building for a long period of time. It's also just better to have more different types of stores facing the street. If bigger stores build deeper instead of wider, there's more street room for other stores.
The other issue, discussed last week, is the problem of blank walls. Office of Planning suggests the zoning code:
Restrict the amount of ground-level street frontage that is blankGreat ideas!— either walls or covered-over windows. (CVS is perhaps most infamous for this practice, but big law firms are killing streets all over downtown DC with their street-level conference centers, and there are other perpetrators such as the Studio Theater and Whitman-Walker Clinic on 14th Street.)
Edited to add: I really like that Office of Planning is using language like "killing streets," even if it's just in their suggestions for discussion topics rather than more formal documents. These practices do kill streets, and we shouldn't mince words, nor should our government officials tasked with protecting the streetlife.
Architecture
DC keeps getting blank walls
Two new developments in Washington, DC continue the disappointing trend of creating buildings that present blank walls to the street.
Just as New York did in the 1970s and much of today's downtown DC, developers create fortress-like apartment buildings, offices, and extol these very buildings for their unconventional exteriors without recognizing their neighborhood-draining properties.
DC Metrocentric praised both these buildings, calling the first (an office building on 14th 15th Street) "a wonderful departure from the ordinary", despite its blank (and ugly) garage filling the entire front of the lower two floors. Of the second (condos in Adams Morgan), they declared it to have "curb appeal" due to the interesting stone facade, but a stone facade and a big garage door don't engage passersby.
A parking garage should not occupy the entire ground floor of any building. If parking is needed, put it underground, or in the back of the building. Any building on a commercial street, or downtown, should have retail on its ground floor; on a residential street, front doors, windows, or a yard with seating to facilitate residents sitting outside and increase "eyes on the street".
Zoning can do more to encourage good buildings, and less to encourage bad ones. Today, most areas are zoned for minimum parking requirements which often force developers to devote space unnecessarily to parking. The DC Council should remove these requirements, and instead ensure that the street-facing ground floors of buildings make better, neighborhood- Update: I spoke with Eric Colbert, architect for the Lot 33 building, the one on the right with the stone front and garage entrance. According to him, he would never put a parking entrance in front, except that in this case there is no alley behind due to the terrain (it's on a hill), and confirmed my suspicions that putting parking in the building was mandated by zoning (though I don't know whether or not the developer would have wanted parking even if they could have made the choice).
Public Spaces
The blank wall today
We can at least excuse the awful blank street-facing blank walls of New York buildings like Manhattan Plaza or the Atlantic Center mall because, when these buildings were built in the 1970s, nobody knew better.
But why would anyone build this in a busy Brooklyn neighborhood today? And will someone in the NYC government please stop disasters like this? As with the buildings from the '70s, we'll be stuck with them for a long time.
(Gowanus Lounge via Streetsblog)
@ggwash
- Successful speed cameras require fair speed limits
- Amid scandal, don't lose sight of Gray's policy achievements
- Montgomery plans 160-mile, "gold standard" BRT system
- Bethesda gets new but terrible bike racks
- DC's parks are 5th best in the nation, says "Park Score"
- VDOT ignores own data, pushes widening I-66
- DC's divide need not be black and white
Greater Washington
District of Columbia
