It’s one of the Motor City’s coolest places to be — and be seen. And now Campus Martius Park is spurring efforts to clone its bustling success.
Inspired by downtown Detroit’s award-winning gathering spot, planners at the Michigan Municipal League are trying to seed the idea in small towns.
The latest effort of the Municipal League, a statewide group of hundreds of cities, is in Berkley.
In Berkley, a Detroit suburb of 15,000 people, city officials and downtown merchants have spent years talking up a pedestrian plaza that would adjoin 12 Mile Road at the heart of the city’s linear downtown. This week, the city plans to close a side street — Robina — for a two-month experiment in what downtown gurus call “place-making.”
“We’re going to see what the effects are on traffic, and on the businesses here, and on pedestrians, and we’re going to be programming some exciting events in that space,” said Sarah Craft, a Municipal League consultant. The goal is to see if this “place-making” exercise warms the community to the spot as a gathering center, enough so to make it permanent, Craft said.
Targeting millennials
A prime target for pedestrian plazas is that demographic that marketers love, the millennials — people who graduated from high school around 2000, the start of the new millennium. These trend-setting 30-somethings are coveted by merchants and school boards for their shopping dollars and school-age children, respectively.
The more of these trendies who move to — and stay in — Berkley or anywhere else, the more prosperous its downtown can be, and the more that home prices rise while schools fill as young families put down roots, according to urbanologists like Toronto’s Richard Florida, author of “The Rise of the Creative Class.” Florida has said, millennials vote with their feet, moving in droves to areas that cultivate pedestrian-friendly urban fun. Under his scenario, their destination towns are pretty much the opposite of the autocentric suburban sprawl in which many millennials grew up.
Berkley’s plan got attention last week from scores of Michigan’s local leaders at the Municipal League’s bi-annual meeting, held on Mackinac Island.
“Our little Robina initiative has been mentioned several times as an innovative way to make a downtown the place to be,” Berkley Mayor Pro Tem Steve Baker said. The hope is that residents and visitors will decide it’s fun to be in downtown Berkley and, frankly, to spend money there, rather than at malls or on the Internet, Baker said.
“We’ll have a soft start to it, encouraging folks to come out, have a cup of coffee there, maybe catch up with friends” on furniture soon to be arrayed in what is now the street, he said. Next, the city will start to schedule events, from small concerts to outdoor yoga, said Theresa McArleton, Berkley’s parks and recreation director.
Safety at plazas
Planners as well as police say that a downtown full of people is not only more prosperous, but safer, too, with more eyes to see what’s going on. Plazas have encouraged people to gather in downtown Farmington and Mt. Clemens. A small but elaborate plaza is under construction in downtown Royal Oak that will have enclosed parking for bikes. Other plazas are planned for Jackson and Cadillac. All of those are public land, according to the Municipal League.
But occasionally, an employer or nonprofit group creates one. On the west side of downtown Detroit, DTE Energy plans to pour $5 million into a big vacant lot it owns next to its headquarters. With construction to start in earnest next month, the utility aims within a year to turn the derelict land into an outdoor hub that rivals Campus Martius, company executives told the Free Press in June.
Some plazas blossom in stages over years, even decades — like the big greensward used for summer concerts and winter skating near Warren City Hall, said Macomb County Director of Planning and Economic Development John Paul Rea.
“Right now, it’s a very successful area for certain events and activities that shields people from the traffic on Van Dyke,” Rea said. But the area has “huge potential,” he said.
“They’ve got 18 acres back there, and the dream is that they someday can have residential high-rises, feeding people to that area, and they’ll add commercial office and dining and services and more landscaping,” Rea said.
Berkley’s temporary plaza will soon have picnic tables, benches and landscaped planters, city manager Matthew Baumgarten said. It’s to be a paved plaza, not a grassy park, “although we’re drawing parallels to Shain Park,” Birmingham’s recently refurbished downtown space that studded its greenery with sculptures and a band shell, he said.
If Berkley’s trial period proves popular, the temporary traffic barricades — slated for both sides of 12 Mile at Robina — would give way to something more alluring. The city would seek grants to invest in a permanent plaza, and “we’re also hoping that this is something that can be crowdfunded,” Baumgarten said. No price tag has been set, however.
No sure thing
Are there downsides to downtown plazas? In Berkley, the blocked off street may confuse motorists, said Kathy Abrahamian, co-owner of Alice’s Perfect Fit Alterations, located right at the southwest corner of Robina and 12 Mile.
“How are people going to find me?” Abrahamian said last week at a community meeting, where a dozen merchants and residents voiced suggestions for the plaza. Leaders promised to study her concern and to address it with fresh signage.
Also, not every plaza pulls in pedestrians. Longtime Detroiters may recall the flop in the 1980s when city planners blocked motorists from what then was northbound Washington Blvd.
From Michigan Avenue to Grand Circus Park, they forced all traffic onto what had been the southbound side. City Hall then unleashed years of construction barricades, devastating the small merchants along the strip. When the area re-opened, pedestrians found shuttered shops, balky concrete blocks for seating and an overhead “light bar” hung from bright-red railings that coordinated with nothing else around.
The area was soon given over to vagrants and litter. A 1988 Free Press editorial called the light bar “garish” and said: “It’s time, we think, for the city to rethink the monstrous damage that it has done to Washington Blvd.” .
Ultimately, the light bar came down and auto traffic was restored to the strip. Downtown residents can be found walking their dogs on the grassy Washington Boulevard median. And, notwithstanding the return of cars, its wide sidewalks now accommodate a steady flow of pedestrians heading to and from downtown Detroit’s events, hotels and restaurants — not to mention, Campus Martius Park.
