Adaptive Reuse: Toledo's Portside Marketplace

[thelakelander]

LOL, yes that's it! I also think people don't fully understand the story behind the rise and fall of the festival marketplace concept. Rouse initially hit it big with marketplaces in Boston and Baltimore. Believing they could revitalize significantly smaller cities, they formed the Enterprise Development Company (EDC) to bring festival marketplaces to smaller cities willing to provide heavy subsidies. Initially, it looked like he had a winner when Norfolk's Waterside did ok during year one. They quickly pushed the concept to places like Toledo, Flint and Battle Creek and those centers went belly up literally as soon as the doors opened. They actually knew these projects could not be supported by the market but these projects also had big entities like the Kellogg Foundation behind them. By 1990, the festival marketplace concept was dead. If anything, the Jacksonville Landing performed a lot better than its counterparts in other second and third class cities across the country.