THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 13, 1996 TAG: 9604120065
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 164 lines
BEFORE THE PLANNED MacArthur Center mall, before much of downtown became a parking lot, before the bulldozers, there was another city.
It was one of low-rise brick buildings, of small stores, apartments and factories. It was a city whose streets traced back 300 years.
This city was removed on the edge of a bulldozer's blade, cleared under the banner of urban renewal. It was a program, powered by millions in free federal dollars, that meant to revitalize old cities by tearing them down.
The churches tell the story. Freemason Street Baptist, St. Paul's Episcopal, the Basilica of St. Mary were some of the few structures left behind. They now stand like lonely islands in a sea of asphalt parking, witnesses to the storm that swept through and cleared away their neighbors.
From the perspective of city leaders at the time, urban renewal tore down dilapidated buildings, an outmoded street system, and cleared the way, literally, for a new Norfolk of gleaming office buildings.
``I think redevelopment saved what was a decaying downtown,'' said Roy B. Martin Jr., councilman from 1953 to 1962 and Norfolk mayor from 1962 to 1974. ``It was an absolute necessity. At the price we did it with federal dollars, it would have been very foolish if we hadn't.
``There's no question that some things were taken away that had value, but you had to look at the overall picture. Unfortunately, some people were hurt, and some very fine buildings were lost, but in retrospect, I would not hesitate to do it over that way.''
But to others, urban renewal in Norfolk was a tragedy. It cleared away the heart of the old mixed-used neighborhoods, where small offices, factories, stores and housing co-existed. It erased the past, tearing down not only the homes but the streets themselves, leaving Norfolk, a 300-year-old city, strangely adrift, with little sense of place or history.
Other cities, with less history than Norfolk, have converted these old downtowns into centers of urban living, shopping, offices and tourism. The tighter fabric of buildings and streets support mass transit well. By tearing out this fabric, the city lost a potential resource, they say.
``I don't think many of those folks involved in that process would do what they did again,'' said Amy Waters Yarsinske, urban planner, author of ``Norfolk, Va., Sunrise City by the Sea,'' and co-author of the forthcoming ``The Center is the City: International Issues and The Identity of Place.''
``They wiped out several chapters of Norfolk history, and they ripped away the identity of the city. As an urban designer and planner, I can say we now treat such a plan like a scourge.''
One senior planner in Norfolk called the city's urban renewal the equivalent of ``doing brain surgery with a chain saw.''
Ray Gindroz, the Pittsburgh-based architect who works frequently with Norfolk, noted recently that downtown has physically isolated attractions - Harbor Park, Nauticus, the Opera House - and less an interconnected web of working, living and recreation that usually defines a city.
Norfolk's principal challenge as a city, Gindroz told the council, was to reweave that web.
Ironically, the city is now finding the history it disposed of in the 1950s a stumbling block to its plans for the $300 million MacArthur Center Mall on 20 acres cleared in urban renewal.
State officials, following a national historic preservation law passed in the 1960s partly in reaction to urban renewal, are requiring the city to document more completely the history of the site before building the mall.
``I expect if urban renewal were being done today, more of it would be saved, more of the buildings and streets,'' said David Rice, executive director of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, the agency that carried out the massive program. ``I would say that people know a lot more about how to do it right now then they did then.''
The core of Norfolk's post-war urban renewal was the Downtown project, an action which began in 1958 and aimed to clear away ``85 percent of the existing city,'' as one brochure proudly noted.
As the brochure noted, few cities practiced destruction with such a sweeping hand, knocking down hundreds of acres of streets and buildings with the hopes that largely conceptual plans would materialize.
``Many cities have tackled redevelopment on a piecemeal basis,'' said the 1958 brochure. ``Norfolk is doing it wholesale, with a multi-stage plan that is virtually unparalleled in the United States.'' About 485 acres were being cleared in and around downtown.
The ``Downtown project,'' an estimated 185 acres, stretched from Brambleton Avenue to the waterfront, and from Monticello Avenue to what is now the City Hall complex. Much of this area, even in the original plans, was planned for surface parking, in effect converting much of a dense downtown into a parking lot.
``This is the Downtown project,'' said the NRHA brochure. ``It is providing sites for a new Civic Center, office buildings, retail stores, major highways, parking areas and pedestrian malls.''
The buildings cleared in this effort, although run down, were not the ramshackle wooden slums eliminated in earlier redevelopment efforts. The Sanborn real-estate maps, kept in the Sargeant Memorial historical room at Kirn Memorial Library, show wholesale florists, grocery stores, offices, electrical supplies, warehouses, furniture stores, a lens grinder and a peanut warehouse on the area where the mall will rise.
For insurance purposes, the type of building material was indicated by color. The core of downtown was mostly pink or blue, meaning brick or stone.
The NRHA estimated at the time that 947 buildings were being cleared in the project. They were almost evenly divided between residential and commercial.
Norfolk was hardly alone in pursuing urban renewal. Powered by billions in virtually free federal money, cities all around the country cleared huge swaths of their downtowns and older neighborhoods.
The attitude of the times can be seen in that, in the original redevelopment plans for Norfolk, the Freemason neighborhood adjacent to downtown was scheduled to be cut in half by a new Waterside Drive.
At the time, Freemason was considered quaint, but not worth changing the route of a new highway. Eventually, it was one of the few areas saved after protests that the planned road would destroy several historic homes. The path of Waterside Drive was re-drawn. Freemason is now one of the city's principal assets, the type of downtown residential living the city is trying to promote.
But if Freemason was saved, much else was lost.
Gone to the bulldozers was the old City Market, a soaring brick building where the First Union bank building is now, with huge arched windows where shopkeepers once came and sold meat, fish and vegetables out of small booths. It was a center of the city.
Gone were the old burlesque theaters along East Main. Gone were historic homes comparable to those in Freemason that once graced numerous streets. Gone was Union Station, a rail hub noted for its marble foyers and grace.
The new MacArthur Center, if built as planned, will restore development to much of this area. But the mall, with is massive interior and parking garages, will form one huge block out of what once was eight city blocks. The old pattern of small streets and sidewalks will not reappear.
In coming months, developers should begin pounding pilings for the new mall. When completed in 1998, it will fill a chunk of downtown cleared 35 years ago.
Few believed then it would take so long. ILLUSTRATION: B/W Archival photos courtesy of the Sargeant-Memorial Room at
Kirn Library, Norfolk
[Color photos, no photo credit]
Old B\W photo compared to recent color photo< Atlantic Street,
looking north (at left, in the 1950s, and above, now). The Freemason
Baptist Church and the old Norfolk courthouse, now the MacArrthur
Memorial can be seen on the right side of the picture.
The northeast corner of Bank Street and Cove Street (since erased),
now site of the planned MacArthur Center mall.
At Market and Bank streets, looking north toward Freemason Baptist
Church.
Looking east on City Hall Avenue toward the courthouse ( now the
MacArthur Memorial), once the center of town.
VP Color map
Area Shown: MacArthur Center
KEYWORDS: REDEVELOPMENT DOWNTOWN NORFOLK MACARTHUR CENTER by CNB