THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 15, 1997 TAG: 9701150036
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: 82 lines
THAT HULKING CASTLE of steel and glass that surveys downtown Norfolk from its perch on Brambleton Avenue is far too valuable to be toppled to make way for a hockey arena.
Instead, this Howard Johnson's and former Holiday Inn should be preserved as a monument to the failed planning ideas that produced it. It illustrates much of what is wrong with downtown Norfolk, most of it the legacy of urban renewal in the 50s and 60s.
So just what is so wrong with this very large hotel, which occupies the site known as the Golden Triangle? Let us count the ways.
One, the complex shrinks away from the street, holding its rooms and main lobby away from Brambleton Avenue, St. Paul's Boulevard and Monticello Avenue, as if it feared contact with the dirty masses below. To get into the hotel on foot you have to ford a moat of parking lots and curving driveways, plus scale a small hill.
Two, it takes up too much land. It's almost as if redevelopers of that era got bonus points for destroying as much of the city around it as possible. It's enough land for three or four blocks of a conventional city. Instead, it all goes to hold one badly designed hotel.
Third, it arrogantly has no physical relationship to anything around it. It's a self-contained universe, where one was meant to sleep, eat, drink and make merry without ever having to go outside. It's exactly the opposite of why people visit cities now.
Finally but not leastly, it is surrounded by streets as badly designed as the hotel. In this neck of the woods, St. Paul's, Monticello and Brambleton all resemble highways. Few buildings front on them. Walking along them is more like walking along Virginia Beach Boulevard or Military Highway than a comfortable city street.
All these faults add up to not a very nice place to be. The choices are either to remain marooned in your sterile castle, or walk into a dismal part of downtown. Planners of that era wrongly saw the car, and not the pedestrian, as the key to downtown revival.
The faults of the Golden Triangle are multiplied all around downtown, and they pose an ironic challenge for the city: redeveloping the redevelopment. Look at Scope, the City Hall complex and the NationsBank building. They have too many windswept plazas and awkward driveways. None touch the street in a good way.
You can see how far city planning has gone in the opposite direction by looking at most city-backed projects in the last few years, from the new branch of Tidewater Community College on Granby Street to the $32 million in townhouses off Boush Street announced Monday. All pay homage to the primacy of the city street. Even the MacArthur Center mall, although largely suburban in its design, at least pays lip service to the street with its frontage along Monticello Avenue.
The downtown Marriott Hotel which opened a few years ago is a particularly good comparison. The last place its designers looked for inspiration was the Golden Triangle. The Marriott compactly fits in with the city blocks around it. Itsfront door opens nearly directly onto Main Street. Its parking isn't sprawled across downtown, but is compactly siphoned into a parking garage. Not that I like parking garages, but they are better than acres of asphalt.
The construction of the Golden Triangle is especially troubling because it paved the way for the destruction of the beautiful Monticello Hotel. The singularly unattractive Federal Building now sits there. The Monticello, torn down in the 1970s, used to elegantly sweep around the corner of Granby and City Hall. It was the grand hotel of Norfolk. If it still stood, perhaps it still would be.
Perhaps I shouldn't be so harsh on those 1960s planners. Downtown planners are still struggling with the question that perplexed them in 1960: How do you make a city designed for carriages, steamboats and trains fit into a world dependent on the automobile?
Hindsight is easy. Cities have a fragile and delicate structure, one that is not easily replaced once it is torn out. We should keep this in mind when and if we build the hockey arena, wherever it goes. ILLUSTRATION: Staff file photos
TIME CAPSULE: In 1961, a time capsule was buried next to the hotel's
pool, intended to be unearthed in 2000. It's probably not going to
make it that far.
Staff map
KEYWORDS: NORFOLK CITY PLANNING DOWNTOWN