From Tampa Bay & Company:
Tampa Bay & Company is proud to announce that the NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Committee has selected Tampa Bay, and the University of South Florida, to host the 2015 NCAA Division I Women’s Final Four Championship.
I hope local media lays off the lesbian angle this time. If local media is still around in 2015, that is.
Downtown Clearwater is still working on their effort to find an identity. Their five step process?
Some of the plans in the five step process could be used in other areas seeking to find themselves.
That’s right, folks! It finally happened.
Tampa has finally been named the flightcomparison.co.uk World Destination of the Week! Here are some highlights of their review:
… more commercially oriented than other Florida destinations, but it has plenty to offer…
… grand museums and golden beaches, all flavoured with a distinct Mexi-Flori zest.
… minimal traffic and discounts aplenty if you visit during summer. However, summer is hurricane season and can get very humid.
Getting around town can be done mostly by public bus…
Fun-Lan Drive In… atmosphere is still as great as it was nearly sixty years ago.
Not sure about that “public bus” comment.
And I’ll leave it to you to figure out what “Mexi-Flori” is (google it!).
I’ve been thinking about two things in the past week or so, and both have to do with the opportunity, artistic and otherwise, provided by living on the edge of a frontier, an exurban terra incognita.
Thing One: Getting in on the ground floor of any movement or trend is an appealing thought. Your chance to make big profits, be a big shot, re-invent yourself. But the reality of ground-flooring an urbanist movement on the new city frontiers is that of guts, risk, and hard, gritty work.
It seems to me that if your vision of a revitalized city neighborhood seems eminently do-able and just around the corner, it is far too late for ground-flooring. When the local zoning, law enforcement and neighborhood schools and shopping districts are on the way up, so are the property values and speculators.
Historically, who have been the first in?
Which places in the Tampa Bay area appeal to this demographic?
My suspicion is that if it is going to happen on a macro scale, urban pioneering is already happening in subtler, hidden but substantial ways. Without any media coverage. In neighborhoods that are a little, or a lot, scary. Places you don’t visit or have forgotten about. Places that are unpleasant to look at.
Thing Two: Sprawls like the Tampa Bay area have been described as “soulless”, but to the degree than any place has a soul, certainly the Tampa Bay area must have one. Perhaps it is a diffuse essence which is, like everything else in the Sunbelt, spread too thin to be distinctly visible. What is the Tampa-ness of Tampa Bay? What is the special thing that makes it not, say, suburban New Jersey? Or Jacksonville?
Here are some things that do not give regional definition to the Tampa Bay area:
“Do what they did, you’ll get what they got.”
I am not sure that Tampa Bay needs to reinvent the wheel on its way to urban viability, but…
Many of the cities that have truly come back from the edge and become centers of creative post-industrial life are very different from the Tampa/St Pete metro area. They had cores that were restorable, high-density housing stocks, transit systems, and a tradition, no matter how disrupted, of urbanity, with traditional neighborhoods and spaces. With some notable exceptions, the TB area has little of this. Remaking but a part the Tampa Bay metropolitan area will be a real bootstrap job, even if we find models to emulate.
So it may be vital to find post-war sunbelt cities to learn from, if only to avoid their costly mistakes. Which auto-centric cities have done the best job of coming back from placelessness?
It is tempting to think that isolated pockets of artists, galleries, music venues scattered across the Tampa Bay area could go a long way toward making the metro area more livable; it might even be true. But I think, for several reasons, this approach is flawed:
Can the Tampa Bay area, the 19th largest metro area in the US, but with disproportionately fewer cultural resources than other areas, afford to spread its creative community so thinly? As transportation costs increase and time becomes more precious for many of us, is a commuting scene viable? (Not if you’re planning on having a few drinks, I hope).
With the principles of urbanism in mind–
– what part of the Tampa Bay area is best suited for a big vibrant arts community?
Channelside Bay Plaza (formerly known as the “Shoppes at Channelside,” which was formerly known as “Channelside at Garrison Seaport”) is seven years old. The St. Pete Times says Channelside businesses are struggling, mainly because locals don’t frequent the place.
Nope - locals don’t go. But that is not the only thing - Channelside Bay Plaza has all sorts of problems.
First of all, Channelside businesses don’t really get along.
Remember, Hooters paid for a trolley to get downtown workers over to Channelside during weekday lunchtime. But after four years, and with trolley visitors spending money at several Channelside stores, none of the other businesses wanted to help with the cost, and so the trolley no longer runs.
Guy Revelle has an ownership stake in Stump’s, Howl at the Moon, Splitsville, and Tinatapas - four places that serve alcohol. When other drinking-only establishments attempted to open, Revelle, who never misses an opportunity to be quoted, whined about Channelside becoming a mini Ybor City.
Next on the list is Channelside’s terrible marketing. I only hear about Channelside around major events, and they seem to want to capture only downtown visitors (not locals). In fact, we don’t hear much of anything since Channelside marketing director Susan Martin over two years ago (found in a July 2006 tbt* column spelling out Channelside’s marketing problems).
But even worse than just limited advertising, are the individual businesses failure to provide any consistency. Unless there is something big going on nearby, many of the businesses don’t bother keeping their places open. Back to the Times article:
Business people walk over from their hotels only to find the complex half-closed.
“We get a lot of tourists who are in their hotels looking for something to do. They come down here during the day and say, ‘This is it?’” - Tinatapas bartender Jason Lewis
Area residents have all been there at least once. But not many are going back. Besides the fact that parking is expensive AND a pain in the ass, Channelside Bay Plaza is so visitor-oriented that it comes off as some lame-ass tourist trap:
“There’s nothing down there to draw you. It’s over-rated.” - Channel District resident Denise Becknell
“I really don’t go over there.” “It’s so young. It’s all clubs.” “I don’t think it’s high quality.” “It’s kind of cheesy.” - 36 year old Victory Lofts resdident Jill Lifsey
“It’s pretty plastic.” - Channel District dance studio owner Luisa Meshekoff
Yeah - Channelside residential buildings are full of empty space. But if the shopping center wants to thrive, they are still going to need local support. Tampa Bay residents need a good reason to go though the hassles of parking, and Channelside simply doesn’t offer much to fight that perception.
Let’s quit pretending. Tampa isn’t a city. St Petersburg isn’t a city. Clearwater and all the other municipalities in the Tampa bay region are not cities in the traditional sense. Lacking a coherent functioning core and distinct boundaries (other than saltwater), they are, or have become, no more than jurisdictional regions.
The small urban cores of the now arbitrary sections that make up our metro area were ripped out in the 60’s and 70’s,and the foresight and political will to restore whatever value they once had is not evident at this time. I once had the privilege to watch a city rise up from decay and sprawl and become a great creative and tech center. It wasn’t easy, and it took guts and visionary leadership and the united will of its citizens through neighborhood associations.
With lots of exceptions, people in the US live in a place because they like the place. People live in the Tampa Bay area because they like sunshine and warm temperatures, proximity to the Gulf. Low taxes. People choose exurban areas because they like racial and cultural homogeneity. Lawns. And shopping malls. Freeway closeness. And all the kinds of land use that are impossible without cheap oil.
This is not to say that exurbanites dislike art or innovation. They simply value it too little to pay for it, with dollars or with the psychic cost of urban life. (I would argue that the psychic cost of exurban isolation is higher, but I’ll do that another time). They aren’t offended by the squalor of a US 19 or [your favorite corridor of glaring hell here].
These preferences aren’t arguable. They are simply preferences. It may be useless for urbanists to attempt dialogue with those whose highest values are the lowest taxes. Cities with good transit, great art and technical and educational achievement, cities that attract and keep knowledge and cultural workers don’t come cheap. The leaders in tech innovation, art, and the urban amenities– and high-paying job growth– are not low-tax cities.
So what about those of us who stay behind in the diaspora? The cities that never were are not coming back. Should we just suck it up and establish a brave new exurban aesthetic? Or is it better to nurture little outposts of creative community dotting the metropolitan area, coming together occasionally for regional celebration? Can that essential creative critical mass be sparked without diversity and the constant inflow and outflow of new creative blood? Are online dialogues with the like-minded a satisfying substitute for coffee house and tavern exchanges?
Tampa Bay isn’t that different from any other post-WW II collection of sunbelt suburbs in search of a city. LA, Phoenix, Albuquerque, El Paso, Houston, Orlando, Jacksonville - the built landscape is pretty much the same.
Designed to isolate us in autos and ranchettes, these sprawls give us lawns and shopping malls and de facto segregation by class and ideology as well as ethnicity. (Thanks, Greatest Generation.)
This isn’t good for the creative class. And a diverse creative class is a big part of what makes cities livable and attractive to the knowledge workers who generate the dollars in the post-industrial economy.
Oh, yeah, and that includes tourist-dependant economies — Pinellas, I am looking at you.
Mayor Iorio signed on to this concept. In 2003, anyway.
The man-made environment in the bay area — sprawling, low-density, built-for-cars– doesn’t throw people together in a stimulating creative stew the way it does in high-density environments. A friend of mine, visiting St Pete a while back, summed it up for me:
“The most important art contacts you’re gonna make– they’re at the laundromat, at the coffeehouse, on the bus, on the street with a really ugly terrier on a leash. You can’t help but run into them. I mean: Run. Into. Them.”
Tampa Bay is hemorrhaging its creative class, and that is worse than you think. They are leaving for places where they can find respect, employment, amenities, and like-minded people.
Can intentional design break us out of this creativity drain?
Where do you go every day to rub elbows with creative, stimulating people?
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