Forget All Your Troubles, Forget All Your Cares

Nor is it a pipe. It's from a site advocating that Parcel 5 in Rochester be used for more than an unneeded theater for touring Broadway shows.

'Scuse me, at this point I have to interrupt. Rob's coverage of Rochester's Midtown Plaza was good, but before our documentation heads west from Batavia, I think we need to talk just a bit more about Victor Gruen.


Pedestrian malls have been a recurring subject of our travels and writings—right up there with Lightning Field, corn weenies, industrial pollution, and Jeff Francis. Six years ago, we stopped by Fresno just as plans to destroy Gruen's pedestrian mall there were gathering steam. That six-block-long plaza was distinctive not only in being the second large-scale effort in the country to close downtown streets in order to stimulate street life and attract shoppers who might otherwise be turning their consumerists gazes to the burgeoning suburbs but also in being a kind of artwork in its own right. Gruen did not simply close the street; working with the great Garrett Eckbo, he transformed the space with landforms, water features, plantings, and an array of midcentury sculptures.

All that's gone now, thanks to the cultural vandalism of now-former mayor Ashley Swearengin and the group now know as the Downtown Fresno Partnership. (This is the current incarnation of our old friend PBID Partners of Downtown Fresno—what a powerful and meaningful rebranding!) As I said in 2012, it isn't that Fulton Mall was in great shape or that downtown Fresno didn't need help—it's that when you're a struggling city with a distinctive feature, you need to make the most of that feature, not throw it away. But that's what they did, with Swearengin delivering the mall's death knell while standing literally on the same spot where it had been dedicated. The street still has a husk of a water feature and some spindly new trees to replace the ornate older ones, but they are sad gestures.

Fresno is not the only small city to have removed its pedestrian mall, but this one was more historic, more extensive, and more beautiful than most. And anyway, it's not the mall itself that was hurting downtown Fresno in recent decades, it was capitalism, which is something the Downtown Fresno Partnership presumably knows something about. But that's a story for another time—and probably a different venue.

You might think from the current website of the Downtown Fresno Partnership that the sculptures and other features of the mall have been carefully preserved nearby. See, there's a whole page labeled Fulton Artwork, which encourages you seek them out, providing links to specific buildings and locations.

That last sentence is so understated as to be subterranean.

Those links, however, go all but nowhere. Some lead to real estate information for specific buildings. Others promise more information someday. None actually shows sculpture or artwork. It's cold comfort that Ashley Swearengin got her ass kicked sufficiently when she ran for statewide office that she vowed not to try again.

In the words of Robert Moses, "You must start with knowledge, not cyanide."

What Rochester is facing at Parcel 5 is a slightly different case. Gruen's central building is already gone, though some of the complex around it remains. The new development favored by the municipal powers-that-be seems to be blinkered in the usual ways: what's proposed and seems likely to go through is generic, ill-thought-out, and buoyed by the usual gaseous development rhetoric.

Whatever Victor Gruen's flaws and delusions—and there were many—he at least believed in downtowns as multifarious public realms, defined by some things that human beings like: unencumbered spaces (indoor or outdoor), walking, greenery, social engagement, art. In Fresno, they came to see not much value in these things. A similar thing happened, with no real results, in Sacramento. Whom is Rochester going to emulate? Those places or New York City?

The Great White Way. Photo via Agile City; photographer unidentified.