Reinventing Park Central Square

Some of the strongest opinions about redesigning Park Central Square aren’t about the square itself but the fact that the underutilized public space has become a refuge for panhandlers, juvenile delinquents and transients.

Given the square’s current state, a community effort to revive the heart of downtown Springfield as an appealing commons with dining and entertainment options lining its perimeter may seem far-fetched.

But urban planner Phil Myrick, vice president of New York-based Project for Public Spaces, said Springfield is actually in a much better position to succeed than many cities he has worked with around the world. PPS is working with Springfield architecture firm Butler, Rosenbury & Partners Inc. to gather public input that will determine the future of Park Central Square.

Myrick said cities may differ, but they face the same urban quandary: Undesirable types infiltrate public spaces that aren’t fulfilling their potential.

“There’s absolutely no reason to go there. That is the problem,” Myrick said of Park Central Square. “That’s why the people who go there, go there, because they always seek out the void. We definitely want to make sure that – at the end of this project – there is no longer a void, but … a thriving public space that is going to be an anchor for all of downtown.”

Myrick said a Mike Shannon’s Steaks and Seafood Restaurant on the first floor of the Heer’s building and a downtown library branch in the nearby Kresge building will create much-needed after-hours traffic on the square’s deserted west side.

“It’s no longer going to be a ghost town,” he said. “There’s always going to be that major presence. … At the end of this redevelopment process, that (loitering) problem is going to be 99 percent solved.”

‘Reach out like an octopus’

There are a couple of keys to increasing the square’s activity, Myrick said.

First, organizers of center city events should make a concerted effort to fill the public space with “positive activity,” he said, rattling off a list of ideas that included outdoor exercise classes for the downtown YMCA and fundraisers for area nonprofits.

“The square has to reach out like an octopus to all the anchoring institutions that are downtown,” he said.

Rusty Worley, executive director of the Urban Districts Alliance, said more events are taking place on the square, which on Oct. 6 will be the site of Taste of Springfield – a smorgasbord of food and drink from the city’s leading restaurants.

“The square has been a space that no one has really taken ownership of,” Worley said. “It’s in our district … but no one’s really been charged with actively programming it.”

In conjunction with ramping up public offerings in the square, Myrick said ground-floor uses in surrounding buildings play a critical supporting role. The combination of Mike Shannon’s, a boutique hotel and the library branch with an attached coffee shop is a great start, he said, but there also are opportunities to enliven the square’s north side.

State office talk

Myrick said conversations about the state office building – a section of the square that some associate with the undesirable element – are fair game as the public input process moves forward. He said the state should at least consider leasing the first floor to private businesses that will boost commerce in that quadrant of the square.

But Richard Looten, facility operations manager for the state-owned Landers building, 149 Park Central Square, said the 10-story structure houses hundreds of government employees and doesn’t have any space to spare. Looten said the state hasn’t been approached about leasing the ground floor to businesses, and he didn’t think officials in Jefferson City had ever entertained the notion.

Moving the state offices off the square altogether is another topic that has received little discussion, said Looten, who personally favors a building with its own parking lot, lighting and signage. Looten said the Landers State Office Building and the Penny State Office Building, 101 Park Central Square, suit most of the state’s needs, noting that employees housed there also have a major economic impact downtown.

“I doubt if restaurants in the downtown area would want these 500 employees to leave,” he said. “They’re probably staying afloat because of the great amount of lunch traffic that’s generated from these buildings.”

Looten also rejected claims that the state services offered in the Landers building contribute to the loitering problem on the square.

“The problems are the people who come into the square and hang out in the square,” he said. “They’re not doing business downtown. They’re not doing business in the state buildings. They’re simply here causing problems.”

Enforcement issues

Some longtime Springfieldians – former city manager Tom Finnie among them – remember when downtown was overrun with vagrants and panhandlers.

Finnie said redevelopment along Walnut Street, South Avenue and the square’s east side edged out much of the undesirable activity.

In his 16 years as city manager, though, Finnie preferred the passive redevelopment approach to a hard-line stance directing police to run loiterers out of the square. In New York City in the late 1990s, mayor Rudy Giuliani applied pressure to greatly reduce the number of pornographic shops, homeless people and drug deals in Times Square.

While some locals support the Giuliani model for Park Central Square, city leaders in Springfield have been relatively lenient.

“They’re taking a very passive, very nonpublic approach to hoping the problem just goes away,” said Looten, the Landers building operations manager. “What ever happened to police officers walking through and saying, ‘Move along’?”

Springfield Police Chief Lynn Rowe said officers cannot legally banish people from a public park based on their appearance. The department’s primary concern is criminal behavior, he said.

“Our difficulty is making sure that everyone is treated equally and everyone has equal access,” Rowe said. “There are those who would like to see us run the people out of there, but we don’t have the constitutional authority to do that.”

Earlier this summer, the city enacted a downtown cruising ban and UDA removed benches from a pavilion in the square’s northwest corner, but Worley conceded that the move is little more than a stopgap measure.

“It’s the private sector that’s going to help us address this in a much better way,” he said.

Myrick compared Park Central Square to Pittsburgh’s Market Square, which PPS worked on about a year ago after the district attorney there shut down a handful of nuisance businesses linked to drug activity.

The action plan for Market Square was finalized in November 2006, and Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership has since hired two people to handle programming for the public space, said Patty Burk, the partnership’s director of housing and economic development.

Thursdays have become popular nights for outdoor dining in Market Square, and the increased activity has dovetailed well with live music there on the weekends, Burk said. The PDP also has dressed up the square with decorations and trimmed low-hanging tree branches for more visibility, she added.

“The more positive and productive uses you put in that space, the more positive and productive people you’ll have in the space,” Burk said.

SBJ.net Poll

Do you think loitering and undesirable activity is a problem on Springfield's downtown square?

Vote at sbj.net/poll.[[In-content Ad]]