Centennial Mills: Boondoggle or Iconic Landmark?

In 2000 the Portland Development Commission (PDC) purchased the four-acre Centennial Mills site for $12 million.  After two botched development proposals, PDC’s return on investment is approaching “boondoggle.” The PDC has paid out $550,000 to consultants after rejecting their plans.  This loss is not insurmountable, but the loss of trust just might be.  Harsch Investment Properties (HIP), which prepared the latest plan, was not allowed to gather public input. Jordan Schnitzer, who heads HIP, finally shared the firm’s vision with a crowded gathering in the Pearl District.  The presentation was well received, which only added to Schnitzer’s lament. “The city has lost its way,” he concluded.   

PDC once had direction.  In 2006, it funded a six-month public process that set the framework to turn Centennial Mills into a community focal point that captured history, embraced sustainability, complemented nearby parks, and provided connections to the waterfront. http://www.pdc.us/Libraries/River_District/Centennial_Mills_Framework_Plan-Feb_07-2007_pdf.sflb.ashx HIP's plan effectively integrated these points, but its $38 million subsidy was too much for PDC.  Schnitzer, a philanthropist rooted in the community, is not without hope.  He proposed moving the Oregon Historical Society to the site, an idea that foundations and corporations could support. It also has precedent.  

In 1944 after a scheme to develop Portland’s West Hills foundered, a Committee of 50 was formed to establish the “Forest Park” the Olmsted Brothers identified in their 1903 park plan. Four years later, Forest Park opened to the public.  Can history repeat itself?

Once again, the Olmsted Brothers offer guidance.  They warned against confining creeks to “large underground conduits at enormous expense” when they could provide “delightful local pleasure grounds.” Tanner Creek suffered this fate and its outflow abuts Centennial Mills.  Schnitzer’s team proposed restoring a portion of the riverine wetlands.  Revitalizing nature would strike a synergy with Tanner Springs Park, as its restored marsh recalls the natural pre-engineered landscape.  

Centennial Mills also has a rich cultural history. The mill business established Portland. Lucrative wheat exports turned a frontier settlement into a prosperous city, and this wealth procured a definitive civic realm that was progressively expanded.  Pioneer Courthouse, Olmsted parks, and the city’s sustainable environs are the product, historian Carl Abbott writes, of a “moralistic political culture that valued the public good over individuals.” 

Centennial Mills should tell this story.  It would make the perfect bookend to Portland State, a center of civic education that celebrates the past and envisions the future.  As the world becomes more urban, retrofitting abandoned industrial properties is essential, and   Centennial Mills would be Portland’s exclamation mark.

Access is the key.  Plans exist to bridge the railroad, and the structure, like New York City’s High Line, should provide pedestrians with a visceral experience.  In addition, students could walk from Jamison Square to the Willamette River and learn how wetlands were transformed into a rail yard and then an urban neighborhood, where wealth and poverty co-exist.  Despite its reputation, 33% of the Pearl District’s residents earn less than $25,000 annually (the city average is 25%).

It’s time for a public discussion. In the meantime, Mr. Schnitzer could secure a new Committee of 50 to rescue a fading vision.  Centennial Mills is a test. Integrating parks and urbanism is not just about “business prosperity,” the Olmsteds wrote, it measures a city’s “intelligence, degree of civilization and progressiveness.”

For more on the Olmsteds in Portland see: http://www.pbs.org/wned/frederick-law-olmsted/learn-more/john-charles-olmsted-the-pacific-northwest/

The Cady Way Trail: An Investment in Humanity

2016 marks a quarter of a century since Orlando, Winter Park, and Orange County completed plans for the Cady Way Trail, Central Florida's first bike trail.  Like the Cady Way Cycle Track, it was a tortuous two-year process to turn a plan into reality.  I devoted a semester to the project, directing the analysis of 25 Environmental Studies seniors who produced a 100-page document.  Included in the study was:
1. The project's anticipated economic benefits
2. The connections that could create a regional bike system.
3. Points for resolving conflicts with property owners.
4. A plan (with costs) to line the trail with native plants.

Students presented the report to the Orlando Parks and Recreation Board.  It was a valuable experience for the college seniors.  Studies show that completing an indepth project and presenting it to a group outside of academia develops essential job skills.  The student research also helped  planners in Winter Park and Orlando make their case.

I had studied the Pinellas Trail (it is the focus of "Recycling Eden," a chapter in the book, Visions of Eden), and I knew that property owners would be wary of building a bike trail on a defunct rail line near their homes.  This issue quickly came to the fore at a neighborhood meeting held at Winter Park High School.  "I'm afraid some one will rob my home and use the trail as a getaway," a resident claimed.  My response, "You are much more likely to have a criminal rip you off and escape on an abandonded right of way."  I followed with an account of how residents living next to the Pinellas Trail residents had the same concern, but once the bike trail went in it became a valued amenity.  It not only raised property values, but a number of homeowners redesigned their lots to provide better access to the trail.  Today realtors list 13 properites for sale on the Cady Way Trail, a selling point for a linch pin in a growing regional bike network.

Map of regional network on Cady Way Trail

A shift in the federal funding of transportation projects in the early 1990s (the Inter-Surface Transportation Efficiency Act) made it possible to span highways and link trail systems.  The bike bridge over Semoran "Boulevard" (using boulevard to describe State Road 436 deserves a law suit) was crucial to the success of the Cady Way Trail, as few humans would brave crossing the six-lane arterial.  I was reminded of the chaos that ensues on SR 436 when the flashing lights of a highway patrol car caught my eye as I biked over the highway on an otherwise calm Saturday afternoon.  The four car accident pictured below marks another round of statistics in a metropolitan area where someone dies every 44 hours in a traffic death.  The carnage also reminded why Florida suffers the highest bike death rate in the nation.

4 car collison viewed from Cady Way Bike Bridge

The 436 bike bridge cost $5.9 million to build.  This is relatively cheap when considering that FDOT has allocated $770 million dollars to "improving" the State Road 408-Interstate 4 interchange since 2006.  In other words, FDOT could build 130 bicycle bridges for the cost of one interchange.  The math is simple, an easy lesson in understanding why death comes more quickly to bicylists in Florida. To add insult to literal injury, FDOT claims the $2.1 billion being spent on Ultimate I-4 will enhance  "livability."http://i4ultimate.com/project-info/ Given that Metropolitan Orlando suffers the highest pedestrian death in the nation (followed by Tampa Bay, Jacksonville, and Miami) what FDOT means by livability is open to conjecture.  For a fact, it does not match the definition the City of Orlando employed in its sustainability plan: neighborhoods with “complete streets and green public spaces” that “encourage walking, public gathering and neighborhood-oriented shopping activity.”

Tax Dollars Employed to Improve 408 Interchange in 2006

Obviously, FDOT's concept of livability runs counter to good planning.  In 1926, Lewis Mumford warned that the trend towards engineering cities to the scale of the auto constituted "a kind of barbarism." It covered the landscape with "a machine-made fabric, increasingly standardized, regimented, characterless, spreading outward by a process seemingly as automatic as the spread of grassland, forests, and jungles in nature."  The soul of the city was being lost.  "Traffic and commerce are the names of the presiding deities, human beings...merely units," Mumford concluded, "designed to run or use elaborate mechanical devices." 

FDOT's worship of traffic efficiency has severed the souls and cost the lives of too many Floridians.  I am looking forward to returning to Portland, where I do not have a car.  My machine of choice is "Man's Most Perfect Invention," the bicycle.http://i4ultimate.com/project-info/ I am just thankful that a generation ago a small group of Orlando city planners had the vision and determination to invest in humanity. 

For more on Lewis Mumford, see "The Sacred City," The New Republic January 27, 1926 and Donald Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life  

Rollins College: Exemplar of the American Renaissance

       Richard Kiehnel completed the Rollins campus plan in 1927.  The library, set to be a commanding 29-story structure, was the centerpiece.  Set at the terminus of a central axis that bisected a linear green and a common lawn, the dominant structure slated to be the tallest building in Florida paid homage to the University of Virginia and its founder, Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson built an “academic village” that placed the Rotunda, a half-size adaptation of the Pantheon housing the library, at the terminus of a linear lawn.  The rounded cranium housed the “brain” of the University, and it faced an unbounded horizon to symbolize the flow of knowledge into the young Republic. Jefferson envisioned a new kind of university dedicated to educating leaders in practical affairs and, a century later, his iconic hand directed Hamilton Holt.   

      Kiehnel grouped 29 structures to form a neo-Renaissance academic village.  Given the climate, openness and connection were keys.  Loggias and covered walkways linked the campus, while buildings were set on quadrangles and small courtyards to capture breezes and foster air circulation. “Breezy and cool” was how Holt described the scheme to create the first “open-air college” in the United States.

        The library was never built to its outsized specifications.  In fact, funding for

Mills Library was not secured until 1949, the year Holt retired. Designed by James Gamble Rogers II, the two-story steel framed stucco had a commanding arched entryway.  From its steps, one could glean a picturesque view that extended into Winter Park, as the oaks framing Interlachen Avenue directed the eye to the horizon.  This vista was also the route students took to complete their graduation ceremony. They marched across Mills Lawn to the Congregational Church on Interlachen, where they were introduced to the community as citizens ready for service. 

Rollins Graduation ca 1932

      The campus showpiece, Knowles Memorial Chapel and the Annie Russell Theater, was completed in 1932.  The Rolyat set the standard.  The buildings framed a cloistered patio garden centered on a Spanish tiled fountain circled by inlaid cypress.  Kiehnel designed the Annie Russell, while Ralph Cram, a noted ecclesiastical architect, designed Knowles Chapel.  The chapel reflected 17^th Century Spanish architecture, a period when Renaissance fashion transitioned to more classical forms.  The campanile, modeled after the Toledo Cathedral, towered over the campus.  Above the chapel’s entrance a carved stone tympanum depicted Spanish conquistadors planting the first cross in American soil, a reminder that Florida’s unique history was embedded in the college’s calling to prepare young minds for the future.

Knowles Chapel Bell Tower

       The campus was built largely in accordance with Kiehnel’s plan, but it had, from a modern perspective, a glaring omission—there were no parking lots.  In 1927 the automobile was an option, but once it became a necessity the campus’s pedestrian orientation suffered.  The widening and realignment of Fairbanks Avenue severed the central axis.  Graduation ceremonies were confined to campus and parking lots soon covered sites designated for open space.  In the 1990s road rage entered the picture, as Central Florida suffered the nation’s highest pedestrian death rate.

       Looking to the past for inspiration, the college and Winter Park championed a pedestrian-oriented urbanism patterned on the American Renaissance.  In 1997 Dover-Kohl redesigned Park Avenue.  Sidewalks were widened for outdoor dining, vehicular travel lanes were narrowed and bricked, and a prescription was provided for designing buildings based on the principles of traditional civic art.  In 2002, Rollins College commissioned Chael Cooper & Associates, in affiliation with Dover Kohl, to design the McKean Gateway and the Rinker Admissions Building on Fairbanks Avenue.  Taken together they established a definitive terminus and signified the willingness of both college and city officials to restore a walkable, pedestrian-centric community.  In 2014 a gateway was built at the head of a new walkway that bifurcated the linear green centered on Mills Library.  The Harvard Gates inspired architect John Cunningham’s concept for this signature piece, which marked the reestablishment of the historic central axis.

Rollins Gateway 

       The last three presidents of Rollins, Thaddeus Seymour, Rita Bornstein, and Lewis Duncan, labored to create the intimate sense of place Hamilton Holt revered.  Their efforts not only produced the most beautiful campus in the nation, they restored a vision grounded in the iconic ambitions of American higher education.   

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Rollins College: The Renaissance Origins of the Most Beautiful Campus in America

     In August 2015, Princeton Review named Rollins College the most beautiful campus in the nation.  The decision was based on survey results, but the iconic beauty of Florida’s oldest college is rooted in history.  Its harmonious blend of Mediterranean Revival Architecture, intimate greens and plazas, scenic vistas, covered walkways, and oak-shaded paths is an exemplar of the American Renaissance, a generational effort to mold an unparalleled prosperity into a new urban civilization. The movement began in the 1880s and disappeared after 1930, “the last full flourish of the Renaissance that begun in Italy in the 15^th Century,” Henry Hope Reed writes.http://www.amazon.com/The-Architecture-Humanism-History-Classical/dp/0393730352 

       New England Congregationalists founded Rollins in 1885 and sited it on Lake Virginia in Winter Park, which was modeled on Riverside, Illinois, Frederick Law Olmsted’s prototype suburb.  Olmsted set a precedent for the American Renaissance by employing “the arts of civilization” to channel the “flood” of urbanization into humane form.  Like Riverside, Winter Park was centered on a rail station in a park and designed to the pedestrian scale.  Its 1883 town plan, which had concentric circles denoting five-minute walks radiating from the train station, ensured easy access to nature and transportation.  Rollins occupied the downtown’s southern terminus and, like Florida, it developed in unique fashion.     

     When the college was founded Florida was a backwater, the least populated state east of the Mississippi River.  A decade later, Henry Flagler had energized Florida’s dormant economy by building a series of luxury hotels in conjunction with his new rail line.  Eastern elites flocked to architectural marvels set in stunning subtropical settings.  The Royal Poinciana Hotel in Palm Beach, the world’s largest wooden structure, was Flagler’s crown jewel and a precursor of Florida’s future.

      In the 1920s tourism became a staple of the first consumer economy, and Florida attracted the greatest investment in real estate capital in history. “The story of Florida is a story of adventure romance written through a long history—four centuries...The early search was for the Fountain of Youth and for gold, and the modern one is not essentially different,” John Nolen noted at a 1925 city planning conference. Flimflam and opportunism was rampant, but there was also significant investment. Villages turned into cities, and by decade’s end Florida was the first former Confederate state to have a majority of its population classified as urban.  Nolen, an Olmsted disciple, had multiple commissions in the state he called, “the nation’s great laboratory of city planning.”  The aesthetic competence that imbued Nolen’s new town of Venice marked the zenith of the American Renaissance.  Classical forms and a sophisticated park system placed recreation and leisure—the essence of tourism—on a higher plane.  An amphitheater adorning a beachfront park epitomized the neo-Renaissance plan’s essence—classical motifs celebrated nature and the arts to elevate the modern mind. 

Note amphitheater adjacent to the parkway terminating at the Gulf

          Hamilton Holt, the new president of Rollins, also adhered to this logic. A confidant of Nolen, the longtime editor of The Independent accepted the position “because Florida is the one state…where the spirit of progress most prevails and where results follow quickest from effort.” A consummate reformer, Holt wanted to break the staid academic formula by marrying pragmatism and the liberal arts.  He would direct Rollins, he wrote Nolen, on an “adventure in common sense education.”

       Holt’s first priority was to commission a plan for the 70-acre campus. An American Riviera was arising in Florida and the accomplishments of Rollins alumni George Merrick, the developer of Coral Gables, inspired Holt.  The new Miami suburb had drawn national attention for its unmatched assemblage of Mediterranean Revival architecture.  With its open courtyards, tiled roofs, stucco exteriors, high ceilings, and arched windows and doorways, this style combined practicality and aesthetics to meet the challenge of Florida’s hot, humid climate, Merrick also donated a 600-acre site for a private university in 1925, the year Holt came to Rollins.  

         By 1926 Holt had studied a series of Mediterranean Revival projects in Miami and St. Petersburg.  He chose the Rolyat Hotel as a model for Rollins.  Richard Kiehnel, a talented architect who introduced Mediterranean Revival to Florida, designed the St. Petersburg hotel (it was turned into a private school after the real estate market crashed in 1926).  Inspired by a medieval Spanish monastery, Kiehnel arranged a series of buildings around a large central plaza.  A dominating tower based on Seville’s Torre Del Oro was the focal point, an emphatic statement Holt wanted to replicate.

Rolyat Hotel ca 1925

My next blog will analyze the Plan for Rollins.  On the relationship between Holt and Nolen see

John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planner, http://lalh.org/john-nolen-landscape-architect/

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Homelessness Demands Enlightened Plans not Poltical Correctness

Homelessness is defining the public agenda in Los Angeles and Portland.  In September, Mayor Eric Garcetti declared that homelessness had reached a “state of emergency” and Mayor Charlie Hales stated that a “homeless crisis” had beset Portland.  Since then the cities have allocated a combined $130 million to the issue.  Ted Wheeler, the frontrunner in the Portland mayor’s race after Hales dropped out, has made homelessness a priority in his campaign.

This summer I assessed the homeless use of public parks in Portland. In the course of my research, I walked five miles a day on average and regularly interacted with the homeless.  It was sobering.  Just as there are few atheists in foxholes, encountering the homeless—humans confined to a prison without walls on the edge of the abyss—produces either good existentialists or classical Hobbesian liberals, who see humans as fallen creatures destined for ruin without the oversight of a civic sovereign. Politically correct academics, I learned, have a different take.  Homelessness is not an existential crisis that demands interdiction; rather speaking “truth to power” and raising class-consciousness is the solution to a marginalized population deprived of inclusion.

Last week I attended the Society of American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) Conference in Los Angeles.  I was eager to see how historians are mining the past to address homelessness, as SACRPH’s stated mission is “bridging the gap between the scholarly study of cities and the practice of urban planning.”  American city planning has a rich history of housing the less fortunate. A century ago, John Nolen declared the novice profession’s mission was “housing the industrial classes, which is agreed to be one of the pressing problems of our civilization.” Nolen’s precedent, however, was ignored, as social theory not historical analysis informed the conference's opening plenary’s discussion of the homeless.   

Catherine Gudis, a cultural historian, addressed the issue in a session entitled, “Social Justice Through a Historical Lens.”  She introduced the subject by trumpeting her participation in a parade that celebrated “the accomplishments of Skid Row people and their visionary initiatives.” A worthy endeavor, but after the event Gudis assuredly returned to suburban Riverside where she is employed.  She never shared her encounters with the homeless, a population plagued by mental illness, drug addiction, and physical ailments.  Nor did she mention the need for enlightened plans to coordinate policing and social services.  Instead, she offered academic adages that stressed process over plans, offering street performance and art as mediums to procure a more inclusive public sphere and to inspire political action. Political action, of course, is not enough.  Moreover, to romanticize homelessness as a class struggle is to invite anarchy.  

This fall elected leaders in Vancouver, Washington (part of Metropolitan Portland) lifted the ban on camping in public spaces.  Within two weeks, 150 people occupied the edge of a residential neighborhood near the downtown.  The encampment had no leadership, policies, or infrastructure—no planning—and chaos ensued. Sleeping bags, shopping carts, mattresses, coolers, garbage, luggage and bike frames collected on street corners.  Amy Reynolds, an administrator with the nonprofit that runs Share House, the shelter around which the camp formed, was besieged by calls from alarmed residents complaining that, "Somebody is defecating in my yard. People are undressing outside my house. People are having domestic disputes, getting in screaming matches and physical fights.”http://www.oregonlive.com/homeless/2015/11/vancouver_tries_legal_camping.html  A reality check ensured, and city officials closed the camp.  The lesson learned is that homelessness demands a comprehensive solution, which only well-designed plans can secure.  

Whether attempting to mitigate homelessness, climate change, or housing affordability, livability is the key to good planning.  The Obama Administration restructured the Department of Housing and Urban Development on the Six Principles of Livability, which are drawn from the New Urbanist template for establishing pedestrian oriented neighborhoods with access to transit and a mix of uses. Livability is also keys to the Housing First initiative, which advocates moving the chronically homeless into apartments without preconditions.  Making housing the first the step to stability and sobriety is a radical reversal of standard practice.  In 2006 Lloyd Pendleton, chair of Utah's Task Force on Homelessness, championed the approach, and since then three quarters of the state’s homeless have left the streets.

The Portland Business Alliance is sponsoring Pendleton, a former executive manager of for Mormon Church’s Welfare Department, to speak to the “homeless crisis.” The city, the organization contends, “needs solutions now.”  Academics tend to deride the New Urbanism (SACRPH attendees greeted the term with catcalls) and the Mormon Church, but these organizations are skilled in implementing path-breaking plans that can solve a national crisis.  As history shown, this is the prerequisite to solving problems that demand political acuity not political correctness.