Before & After: South Beach

[thelakelander]

Reopening of Fayetteville Street to cars in Downtown Raleigh in 2006. Previously, it had been converted into a pedestrian mall in 1977.

Tampa and Raleigh are two southern cities that quickly come to mind as re-energizing 60s/70s era failed pedestrian malls by reopening them to automobile traffic during the early 2000s. Jax is another city that killed off most of its remaining downtown retailers attempting to implement a plan to pedestrianize the area around Hemming Park in the 1980s.

As of now, the two blocks of Hogan between Forsyth and Monroe (or Duval) would make for an interesting Coral Gables style Giralda Plaza-style experiment ......and quite easy to pull off.


Giralda Avenue as a tired downtown street in 2009. (Google Streetview)



Giralda Street, reborn as a one block pedestrian mall called Giralda Plaza in 2019.


Instead of closing the street off 100% to automobile traffic, consider taking it down to a single 10 to 10.5' travel lane with a cycle-track and dump the extra space into extending the width of the sidewalk on the west side of the street. There's already a cluster of businesses on the east side of the street between Adams and Monroe and COJ controls the Ed Ball Building, meaning no one but itself is stopping that full block of retail storefronts from being better utilized.


East side of Hogan between Adams and Monroe.


West side of Hogan between Adams and Monroe. COJ controls what goes in to every street level retail space on the ground floor of the Ed Ball Building.

The block of Hogan between Forsyth and Adams is one that should be ground zero for the DIA. Specifically finding a way to get the old Furchgott's and Rosenblum's/Exchange Bank buildings back online. Activate those two spaces and you'll not only hit a home run with that block of Hogan, you'll also end up activating the largest remaining dead spaces on two full blocks of Adams on either side of Hogan.


Vacant storefronts on Hogan Street between Forsyth and Adams Streets.



The general thing Jax needs to do is to worry less about providing hundreds of millions in tax dollars for highly conceptual one-trick pony mega/master developer projects and spend $5 to $10 million on reactivating the streets in the core of the city where a high concentration of businesses and buildings already exist.

[itsfantastic1]

Speaking of pedestrian malls, a favorite YouTube channel of mine (City Beautiful) that focuses on urban development just recently released a video on pedestrian malls. Feel free to give it a watch as it seems to support Lake's claims and expands on some of his points too. Also, I highly recommend watching his other videos. Good stuff.

https://youtu.be/-Tg9IMCKa5M

[jaxlongtimer]

I feel like (at least in the US), the Pedestrian Malls are usually in more tourist/novelty areas.  Thinking about some of the more prominent urban shopping areas (5th Avenue and Herald Square in NYC, Michigan Avenue in Chicago, etc.) all are open to traffic (the mayor closed the Broadway/6th Avenue intersection at Herald Square to cars a couple years back but the streets themselves are still open to traffic).

To be clear, Broadway is also closed from Times Square (47th Street) to 42nd Street in addition to being closed from 33rd to 35th.  Yes, the cross streets remain open but not those sections of Broadway.  I found this NY Times article saying this was initiated in 2009:  https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/nyregion/20closings.html.  From my visits to NYC, it seems to be a big success.

There is the hybrid, making streets "pedestrian malls" for weekends, holidays and special events.  Check out Tokyo's famous Ginza district (its version of 5th Avenue) where the main shopping street is closed to vehicles on weekends:




Even Jax did this with Bay Street during the Super Bowl and it was hard to believe we were in Jax as it was wall to wall people.  One would think that would have provided us with some inspiration to implement more such opportunities but, hey, this is Jax.  When the "clock struck midnight," our Jax carriage turned back into a pumpkin.

What if we had a pedestrian mall with just lanes for (real) trolleys and bikes, no cars?  Any examples of that?

FYI, this Wikipedia article lists US pedestrian malls and notes, as Lake does, that over the years, many were reconverted to allow some traffic:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_malls_in_the_United_States