I think that Kalamazoo has really great “bones,” so to speak. It’s an area with a lot of potential – places like The Epic Center, the State Theatre, the Art Institute, the Civic Center, and Climb Kalamazoo can all serve as great generators. The Kalamazoo Mall (the pedestrianized stretch of Burdick Street), where Gazelle Sports is located, has some really great potential. I think that, in lieu of making that area more friendly to cars, it might even be beneficial to make it completely pedestrian. The entire Mall could serve as a generator in and of itself. It is very pedestrian friendly, and drivers will be willing to make a short trip to experience that area of Downtown. Some areas could definitely be more developed – Bronson Park has some great generators, why not put a nice little cafe of some sort closer to that area? Or an artsy home goods store by the Art Institute?
So Kalamazoo is on its way to becoming a destination city – it tries to portray itself as such, and I think the potential is there, but for whatever reason, the city is sometimes quite empty, even the mall. Perhaps Gibbs’ suggestion of bringing in recognizable brands would help draw more traffic to the area.
I think the following three things could help improve Kalamazoo’s downtown area significantly:
- Adding recognizable brands to the mall area – examples include Starbucks, Apple, Gap, Restoration Hardware, etc.
- Expand the retail area past JUST the Mall – there are some antique shops scattered about the city, but the majority of the shopping is located in the Mall. It’s a nice two blocks, but people go through two blocks pretty quickly.
- Completely overhaul the city layout for drivers! The excess of one way streets is incredibly confusing and probably deters shoppers from finding parking and spending time downtown.
The following excerpt from Lagerfield’s article on Gibbs (What Main Street Can Learn from the Mall) illustrates the importance of making a downtown area friendly to drivers as well as pedestrians:
In the past the neglect of commerce by planners and architects was compounded by an inability to cope with the automobile. The car has generally been treated as an enemy, with disastrous results for downtown commerce. During the 1960s and 1970s, for example, there was a great vogue in planning circles for banning cars from downtown streets and creating pedestrian malls. The experiment was disastrous. Many downtown malls have since been ripped up, and the streets rebuilt for automotive traffic.
…The city’s new master plan calls for a radical alteration of the traffic pattern. …Instead of flowing through town as quickly as water, traffic will slow to the speed of syrup. The idea is to transform this soulless thoroughfare into a vital city street.
As Gibbs sees it, Clematis Street is fighting the same problem that a lot of other American main streets are: it doesn’t have a purpose any more. During the 1920s it connected the train station, on the west end of town, with the ferry to Palm Beach, on the east end. But after two bridges, on either side of town, began funneling traffic around Clematis, its fate was sealed. The Woolworth’s, the McCrory’s, and the Sears, Roebuck all continued to prosper for a while, but business inevitably followed the cars.
Historians analyzing the decline of America’s towns and cities after the Second World War usually put most of the responsibility on the federal government’s head. The interstate highway system and federal mortgage subsidies for single-family homes spurred suburban growth, the argument goes, and doomed the downtowns. In Gibbs’s version of urban history, based on his travels, another force looms large: the highway bypass. As the number of cars on the road soared after the war, town merchants and residents sought relief from traffic-clogged streets. Their demands coincided with the interests of the state highway departments and traffic engineers, who wanted to keep building roads and whose highest professional goal was the unimpeded flow of cars. Routing highway traffic around the outskirts of town must have seemed the obvious thing to do. The downtowns thus unwittingly initiated their own march to a commercial grave.
The one way streets in the heart of downtown Kalamazoo probably act as a deterrent to shoppers, who may stick to the two way streets encircling the city. Why bother trying to navigate one way streets to find parking somewhere when you can just keep driving and you’ll eventually hit the strip malls of West Main? I don’t think the Mall should be demolished, because it has been more of a success than the ones created in the 60s and 70s. But I think that the streets of downtown need to really be rethought and overhauled – there are some one-way streets that are four lanes wide. Why not convert that into a two-way? I really don’t understand the point of one-way streets in the first place, and downtown Kalamazoo seems feature only one-way streets sometimes. If that were changed, I think the city would be pleasantly surprised by the increase in visitors and shoppers.
abigailnora
