[URBAN NOTE] "What's So Great About the Return of Downtowns"

[rfmcdonald]

I agree almost entirely with Justin Fox's sentiments as expressed in this Bloomberg View op-ed.

I’m writing this on a warm Monday evening in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. It’s Halloween, and the city’s trick-or-treat action is elsewhere. Still, there’s a good number of people out and about -- with maybe 1 in 10 in costume -- eating in restaurants, drinking in bars, strolling along the Alabama River waterfront, listening to some dude play guitar in the outdoor bar at the Renaissance Hotel, listening to some other dude play guitar in the manicured alleyway known as “The Alley,” and so on. As for me, I’m sitting in my seventh-floor corner room at the Hampton Inn, built as the Greystone Hotel in 1927, after eating an excellent dinner of chicken gizzards, cornbread, sausage and pickled vegetables1 a few minutes walk away at Central, which appears to be the city’s nicest restaurant.

Twenty-five years ago, you couldn’t do any of those things in downtown Montgomery. I know because I lived here then. The Elite (pronounced “ee-light”) Cafe, the downtown institution where F. Scott Fitzgerald used to eat, closed a few weeks after I moved in, and with that disappeared pretty much the last reason (other than interactions with local government agencies) to go downtown. My office was only a few blocks away, on the slope of Goat Hill, atop which the Alabama Capitol stands, and my apartment was only 10 or 15 blocks from that.2 But my life happened on Goat Hill, in the neighborhood around my apartment -- Cloverdale -- and amid the burgeoning sprawl of the city’s east and south.

There had been efforts through the decades to bring activity back downtown, but things seem to have only really gotten going with the construction of the riverfront park and an adjacent minor league baseball stadium in 2004. The Renaissance and attached Montgomery Convention Center opened in 2008, as did the restored Hampton Inn. The Alley came in 2009. The city borrowed lots of money to make all this happen and, in a development somewhat unique to Alabama, the state’s pension funds chipped in, too. It seems to be paying off. Downtown Montgomery is back.