Downtown Madison, NJ, in full swing during the Bottle Hill Day festival / Photo: Borough of Madison

PPS heartily congratulates the Borough of Madison, New Jersey, whose downtown was recently named one of the 2012 Great Places in New Jersey by the state chapter of the American Planning Association. It is an affirmation of the Borough’s unwavering dedication over the past 30 years and demonstrates the power of a community to transform a place through persistent efforts over time.

Here at PPS, it has been exciting to witness the “before and after” of Downtown Madison, beginning with a plan we created in 1980. “It was one of my first projects at PPS,” recalls Senior Vice President Steve Davies. “Since I had grown up in a similarly sized town, I immediately felt an affinity for the community. It’s been wonderful to have worked periodically with Madison over such a long period.”

In 1980, Downtown Madison, located on hour by train west of New York City, was in better shape than other small town centers across the U.S., though it was sliding downward. The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, located in nearby Morristown, had a special interest in Madison, given that it had been the original home of the Dodge family. It was their support, and other support which followed, that helped reverse the downward momentum and get the wheels going in a positive direction. But it was the citizens and leadership of Madison that really drove the transformation over time.

The revitalization of downtown Madison has focused on key public spaces and thoroughfares: Main Street (a state highway, which made it more challenging), Lincoln Place, Waverly Place, and the train station. Madison’s downtown is on the National Register of Historic Places, so amidst all of the physical changes and improvements, the question was always about how to build on downtown’s distinctive historic character and make it even better.

While much of the effort has been on improving the design of streets, sidewalks, and public spaces, the effort has been multi-dimensional. Based on PPS’s recommendation, Mayor Elizabeth Baumgartner created the Downtown Development Commission (DDC) in 1981, which took the opportunity to involve all stakeholders, from landlords and merchants to residents and the arts and non-profit communities – tapping into the inherent passion of the 16,000 people who call the place home. Playfully underlining the later feat, Davies adds, “No one agreed with anybody in 1981. Merchants thought that the problem was with parking.”

The commission, in turn, hired the first downtown manager in New Jersey, and one of the first in the country. “You know, we didn’t say it this way in 1980, but 80% of the success of public spaces is in the management,” says Davies. “In recommending they hire a downtown manager, the outcome in Madison was trendsetting.”

The manager began with programming, marketing, filling retail, and getting everyone on the same page. Programming was launched to highlight what is local and seasonal, and has also been an important kernel for spurring Madison’s renewed vibrancy. Today, the downtown is marketed under the banner of the Love Madison Shop Madison campaign.

Madison went beyond great programming and well-designed spaces to earn its distinction as one of the state’s Great Places. In another move, the Police Department created a “town man” post with an officer stationed at the intersection of Main Street and Waverly Place. The town man acts as a local ambassador, giving directions, making suggestions, and helping shoppers cross the street. Good management practices like this have been indispensable to the revitalization of downtown and the experience of Madison as a safe and welcoming place.

The road to establishing successful programs is not always a straight one and usually requires experimentation. One of PPS’s recommendations back in 1980 identified Waverly Place as an ideal spot to get a farmers market going in downtown. A market was created, but it started as a smaller affair sited in a parking lot outside of the center. When the lot needed to be repaired, the market was relocated to Waverly Place and became an even bigger hit. Mary Anna Holden, Mayor from 2008 to 2011 and long time community advocate, sent an email to PPS at the time saying “It took 25 years to follow the recommendation, but it worked!”

In addition to the now hugely popular farmers market, the DDC and community partners organize other programs throughout the year. These include Bottle Hill Day, a community festival celebrating local culture and downtown businesses, and May Day, a town-wide streetscape beautification day to improve Madison’s parks, business districts, and public spaces. The DDC also links with local colleges to provide shuttles and welcoming tours of downtown for students.

Easterly view on Lincoln Place from Madison’s train station showing roadway, sidewalk, accessible crosswalks, curb, drainage, lighting, shade tree and landscaping improvements / Photo: Robert Vogel

More recently, the Borough came to PPS because they had to replace utilities under Lincoln Place, where the train station, post office, and movie theater are all located. Davies notes, “It felt like a back alley, not a major entrance into downtown.” Following ideas generated at a public Placemaking workshop, PPS prepared a plan to remake the street – which had to be completely torn up in any case – to make it more walkable, including a planted center islands to calm traffic in front of the train station, new sidewalks, and simple interventions at problem intersections with stop signs. Construction was completed in 2011.

“I always knew this was one of New Jersey’s great places, so it’s nice to have it recognized” said current Mayor Bob Conley about the recent APA designation. “The process we went through with Lincoln and Waverly Places was well thought-out; using PPS resources to help, we brought in residents and merchants to all have an input, and it’s obvious that it came out beautifully!”

The work of creating great places is never over and done, but step-by-step communities like Madison are making huge progress. Congratulations, Madison, on this exciting milestone. We look forward to more stories about the life of your public spaces yet to come!

Meet Hatuey and Elizabeth! / Photo: Patrick Wall

Elizabeth Hamby and Hatuey Ramos Fermín are people connectors. As artists, activists, and Bronxites, their creative collaborations are all about gathering information from neighbors and presenting it in ways that allow communities to better understand themselves and the urban spaces they create. The two have worked in all kinds of public spaces, from major thoroughfares and street corners to laundromats, grocery stores, and vacant waterfronts.

Recently, they organized Boogie Down Rides: Bicycling is Art. The artists used the social act of biking as a springboard for talking with people about the creation of healthy, active urban environments. Throughout the month of May 2012, they set up many different formats for engaging the public: a temporary bike shop that simultaneously served as an education hub, group rides across the Bronx, and visioning workshops about biking and greenway initiatives in the city.

The project was organized as part of the public art exhibition, This Side of Paradise, by No Longer Empty at the Andrew Freedman Home. I recently sat down with Hatuey and Elizabeth to talk about Boogie Down Rides and the other urban projects they have in the works.

What was it about your community that inspired Boogie Down Rides? Was there a particular need that you were responding to or wanted to address?

Hatuey: Boogie Down Rides grew out of another project of mine, Transmit-Transit. It explored the idea of taxi drivers as a mode of transport in the the Bronx, and the need for cabs to move around. Public transit in the north-south direction works well but east-west not so much. No Longer Empty first approached me about that transportation project, which became a video installation at the Andrew Freedman Home that connected the gallery space to the outside world. Then we began thinking about how to physically and conceptually expand transportation within the community. Transportation was a major theme extending back to Mr. Freedman’s time, with Mr. Freedman being a major backer of the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), New York City’s original underground subway. The IRT addressed the linking of open space from Central Park to Van Cortlandt Park. Extending the idea of Transmit-Transit beyond cabs, we wanted to look at bikes as another viable option to address mobility in the Bronx.

One of the great things about Boogie Down Rides is how it brings together many activities that people may not normally associate but which all contribute to healthy places. Your tagline, for example, is Bicycling is Art. Can you explain how biking, public art, and urban spaces are linked in your project?

Elizabeth: Instead of representing reality as a painting, we live it on a bike. The bike embodied action for this issue of transportation in the Bronx, where biking is a social act and a political act. Instead of designing a solution to a problem, we tried to figure out the questions that exist in real life through the experience of biking. We both live in the Bronx. It’s part of our day-to-day reality, and because we’re artists, we have a compulsion to make what we see public.

The project also involved community visioning sessions for the Bronx’s longer-term development. What came out of these sessions?

Elizabeth: The visioning sessions were really spearheaded by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which was just launching an interactive toolkit to gather data and address threats to active transportation and public space. They were key in leading some of the concrete visioning work happening around the Sheridan Expressway, where dangerous connections make it unsafe to bike between the parks. Rather than focusing on cause and effect, the visioning sessions were about figuring out opportunities for improvement. Safety—specifically, feeling safe in public—was an ongoing theme in the conversations we had with our neighbors.

Bronxites show some love for their bikes at a Boogie Down Rides event / Photo: Boogie Down Rides

Throughout your various interactions with the public, did you come across questions or reactions that particularly surprised you?

Elizabeth: One of the most surprising things that we learned from Boogie Down Rides was the number of adults—particularly women—who had never learned how to ride a bike, and who were very excited to find out about opportunities for biking in the Bronx. In the instance of another project, Mind the Gap/La Brecha, we talked a lot with folks in our neighborhood about their ideas for the waterfront. One of the critical components to the waterfront that came up over and over again was the basic need for clean public restrooms!

Collaboration seems integral to your work. What other community partners were vested in Boogie Down Rides?

Hatuey: Conversations and collaborations were important from the start; we worked with Transportation Alternatives, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Bronx River Alliance, Bike the Bronx, Bronx Health REACH, Partnership for Parks, Velo City…

Elizabeth: We also had a meeting with City Planning and the Mayor’s Office where we were able to show our recommendations. It was perhaps an unusual case in that the Mayor’s Office and City Planning came to us. Our collaborations really grew organically, and our project was timely in terms of how they related to conversations already happening in New York about biking, complete streets, and the South Bronx Greenway Plan.

And did people express any misconceptions that you were able to address through these collaborations?

Elizabeth: I think that artists working in public the way that we do are often confused with non-profit or other community-based organizations. We often talk to people about the role that artists play as citizens and neighbors in our communities—and the ways that we hope that our work can help make our neighborhoods more safe, lively, and liveable.

Any advice you would give to communities who are trying to build healthier places?

Elizabeth: You have to remember the factor of critical mass. If you notice a problem, someone else probably has too, so it becomes about working together in a long-term way.

Hatuey: It’s realizing there are already resources within the community, and that becomes the main point of departure. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel. You want to create space to bring stakeholders together.

Elizabeth: Also humility and willingness to listen and genuinely collaborate—those are really important, in regard to attitude. There’s a lot of work that goes into working together.

Hatuey: Listening is the biggest thing, listening with a big ear.

A dance troupe performs in the Andrew Freedman Home during No Longer Empty's "This Side of Paradise" / Photo: NLE

Since ceasing operations as a grand retirement home in the 1980s, the Andrew Freedman Home had been standing quietly inconspicuous on its spacious lot off the Bronx’s famed Grand Concourse. Just a handful of activities had been taking place on-site, mostly in the basement: a Head Start preschool program, a food bank, a thrift shop. The property owner, the Mid-Bronx Senior Citizens Council (MBSCC), began thinking about how to more fully utilize the multi-storied mansion to bring this unique space into active community use.  That was the impetus for the phone call that MBSCC and Holly Block of the Bronx Museum of the Arts (BMA) made to No Longer Empty (NLE), a Brooklyn-based arts organization that organizes site-specific public art installations to revitalize fallow spaces.

For NLE, “site-specific” means including both the physical place and the people who live and work in the surrounding community. By using art to interpret physical space and its historical context, NLE uses its installations to re-frame vacant, forgotten spaces as places that are open for interpretation. As Executive Director Naomi Hersson-Ringskog explains, “What we do well is listening to the initiatives, challenges, and caveats the community expresses.”

No Longer Empty’s exhibition “This Side of Paradise,” served as the impetus for community groups to engage with the space and link this resource with their own plans and needs. Getting conversations flowing among existing cultural organizations, including members of the nascent Bronx Arts Alliance, inspired visions of the events and programs that the mansion could host and also led to new creative collaborations.

In addition to opening up avenues of dialogue, Naomi also says, in terms of the physical site, “The first thing we do is open the gates. It’s a sign of welcome and a way of getting the community to start associating with the site and what the site should be.” One of the groups that took advantage of the space was the Bronx Children’s Museum (BCM). With its gates open, the mansion turned into fertile ground for Museum programming, especially with the BCM’s new home still under construction.

Rolling out the red carpet to welcome the community--literally! / Photo: NLE

NLE’s Director of Programming and Outreach, Jodie Dinapoli, recalls talking with the BCM’s Executive Director, Carla Precht, who wished to develop an early childhood program that would explore the question “What is art?” The mansion, filled with the works of more than 20 artists through NLE’s exhibition, became an ideal site for realizing interactive tours and workshops. The BCM, working with three teaching artists, paired-up with local children’s organizations, two of which were literally under the mansion’s nose: Head Start, which was operating from the basement floor, and BronxWorks, which was across the street. It was an outstanding example of how people began to re-connect with a long-ignored space that was already along the route they followed in their daily routines.

The mansion became recognized as an asset in a variety of ways. For Inspirit, a Bronx-based dance company, rehearsal space is always a necessary resource. The re-activated mansion was able to provide not only physical space but inspiration and a unique performance context. Another performer, Diana Crum, expressed a “[craving for] more spaces in between: performance settings where artists and pedestrians gather to experience time-based work and in the process forge a temporary community, ripe for reflection and re-imagining.”

Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory used the mansion’s unique setting to film and document their work. For Boogie Down Rides and the Bronx Arts Alliance, the space became a convenient gathering spot for meetings. BronxNet, which produced the film of featured artist Mel Chin, began using the space to offer media courses throughout the run of the exhibition and possibly on into the future. Reflecting on the process of these successful collaborations, Jodie emphasizes, “Collaboration is beautiful, but requires diligence. To be a true success, each group must define their objectives, goals, and needs.”

The care taken to interact and engage with people throughout the programs and events helped this private space achieve the warmth and vibrancy of a true public destination. As the hosts of the space, NLE staff and volunteers remained active and engaged with the site once programs were underway. They observed that many visitors, especially non-habitual art-goers, will hesitate at the doorway to the exhibition or the event. One of the simplest methods for putting a visitor at ease and imparting a sense of belonging was to have a friendly greeter at the front desk. A smile and a hello goes a long way in cultivating a welcoming environment. “Our tone is about engagement,” Naomi says. “We want to engage people in conversation, which is the way to share knowledge and inspire more curiosity.”

Children search for Easter eggs on the Freedman Home lawn / Photo: NLE

As with bringing vibrancy to a place, the aspect of a warm human presence cannot be overestimated in creating vibrant exhibitions and programs. On the day of NLE’s Easter Egg Hunt at the mansion, volunteers were present to walk people up and down the street between multiple events also being orchestrated by the BCM and the BMA. It turned into a huge day out on the Grand Concourse for close to 800 children with the feel of festive neighborhood block party.

On the other hand, not every activity that occurred in the space was planned. With the gates unlocked, local workers would spontaneously use the front lawn and garden as a lunch spot. “This was an example of how the community began using this private space in a public manner,” Naomi says, reflecting.

Creating an open testing ground for ideas both spontaneous and planned is a great value of NLE’s Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper approach to public art. Although NLE only temporarily occupies any site, the spirit of nimble mobility is ideal for sparking communities into new awareness and playful experimentation with their everyday surroundings. The ability of any community to recognize the potential of its hidden assets is is the first step to turning a place around.

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To learn about one of PPS’s favorite projects up in the Bronx, visit our project page for the Bronx River Arts Center (BRAC) renovation and expansion!

Larry Lund

A great public market doesn’t usually just happen–there are a lot of smart, dedicated people behind the scenes who work to make sure that markets are set up to serve their surrounding area. Like any public space, markets work best when they reflect the people who live nearby. They are places for buying and selling food, yes, but they’re also places for meeting and learning about neighbors, accessing services, and becoming part of the daily life of a community.

We recently had the opportunity to speak with Larry Lund, a long-time Placemaker and head of the Chicago-based Real Estate Planning Group (REPG). Larry is an expert on markets, particularly in regard to how they scale up and down to fit the communities in which they are based. If you’d like to meet Larry and learn more about this subject, there is still time to register for the 8th International Public Markets Conference, which will take place in Cleveland, Ohio, just two weeks from now, from September 21-23rd, 2012.

How did your interest in markets begin? How does it relate to what you do now, with real estate planning?

I got involved with markets back in the mid 1980s, when Fred Kent pulled together a group to discuss how we could use Public Markets  to rejuvenate town centers. Our emphasis was on looking at markets as a model for rebuilding activity in the downtown area. Since then, the Public Market movement has evolved from a focus on Placemaking to include a better delivery system for fresh food Now, PPS is talking about how markets can be more than just a center for food—they can deliver other goods and services to communities, as well.

I started the Real Estate Planning Group in 1990, so I had already been working on markets before that, but most of my market projects  have been with PPS. I have now worked on more than 50 Public Markets throughout the country. My primary role working with PPS is to do the economic and market analysis. Even though markets have been around for hundreds of years, the nature has changed and we have had to find new methods to estimate potential using sophisticated tools like gravity models and survey techniques to estimate market shares. It’s very important to try to get the scale right for the market setting and to have some rational basis for estimating sales potential and tenant mix. There is lots of  talk  about sustainability from an environmental standpoint, but we also try to bring the concept of  sustainability from an economic standpoint: is there enough money here so that vendors can be successful and the market can operate in a sustainable fashion. Markets need to meet customer expectations, vendor needs, and operate in a sustainable fashion for whatever entity develops the market.

How important are the characteristics of the surrounding place? Can markets drive development, or are there components that need to be in place already?

There are some characteristics that you absolutely need for a market to work well, like visibility and accessibility. Historically, markets were always in or near the center of trade routes, and there’s an intrinsic need for that even today. If there’s a strong sense of place already, before a market locates somewhere, that obviously helps. However, in some cases, putting in a market can help develop a place if the market is large enough and visible enough. We’ve seen, in the US, how a market hall strengthens the center of towns and can complement other uses such as retail, office, and residential.

A bustling street market in Markets Conference host city Cleveland / Photo: PPS

What’s always a challenge is trying to get the scale right, and that’s something I’m going to be talking a lot about at the Markets Conference in Cleveland later this month. There’s an equation here in terms of sustainability, making sure there are enough people and enough vendors to support your market. Markets have a great appeal in just a visceral sense, but not all of them turn out to be successful. You still need a good location for them, and you need enough people who have access to the area. The larger the market, generally speaking, the larger the draw. There has to be a relationship with the population around the market; it’s important to understand who your customers are: their interest in fresh foods, their sensitivity to prices, and what the competition looks like.

What a lot of people don’t recognize is that there’s also a big difference between farmers’ markets and year-round public markets. The economics around both of them are radically different. It’s important to understand that, if you have a successful farmers’ market, changing that to what I call a public market building is a big leap for everyone, and a lot of analysis has to be done before making that decision because the nature of the market changes.

One of the attractions of farmers’ markets, besides outstanding food products, is the ephemeral nature of it. These markets are one or two days a week, and they’re seasonal; the ‘event quality’ is a very strong attraction for people. That changes when you start institutionalizing it into a market building, where the economics require you to start running the market six or seven days a week. For farmers to turn themselves into permanent vendors changes their business model, too. I often say that my role is to make sure that the visioning process doesn’t turn into a hallucination, and that there’s economic support in changing the business structure.

Can you explain more about scaling markets to their context? How are markets different in big cities versus more rural communities? How are they similar?

Most of my work is related to repositioning existing enclosed markets and responding to  the desire of successful farmers’ market wanting to become a  year-round event. In either case it is usually  more challenging in rural areas than it is in urbanized areas, and I have to say it’s even a challenge in urbanized areas in being able to find vendors today who can handle that year-round schedule. It’s difficult to find butchers and fishmongers, for instance. It’s even especially difficult to find  produce vendors—the main driver in most markets—who can operate full-time. When you want to run something on an annualized basis the seasonality draw begins to disappear.

That’s not to say  markets cannot run year-round and sell in the winter time, but it’s difficult if you don’t have a wide variety of food. Today there’s a whole issue of commitment to the local food movement and what that means for the customer. That’s something that has to be considered if you’re aiming to create a local-food market versus allowing food to be imported to your area and offering a full scope of services. I always caution that market managers have to understand their goal in building a public market building. I think a lot of people don’t give that enough consideration. Different kinds of markets meet different objectives.

What I’m seeing now is a series of market buildings people are developing that only have maybe three or four tenants. They’re not farmers, but you’ll find a bakery and a charcuterie and a coffee place, and they develop into third places. People are looking at these places as community-builders. You can see this happening in Seattle, for example, outside of the Pike Place Market. There are a series of buildings that have sprung up around the market that are more about creating an enjoyable place for public gathering than delivery of fresh local food—they’re great third places built around the food movement.

These storefront buildings have developed into a food cluster that offers something for each part of the day. In the morning, that the bakery serves coffee; the charcuterie starts serving sandwiches at lunch; in the evening, you may have a wine bar that’s part of this cluster. There are things to activate the space throughout the day, which makes it a nice neighborhood attraction for people to come to.

A mix of uses ensures that the area around the Pike Place market is always bustling / Photo: PPS

For our last question, how do you expect the upcoming markets conference in Cleveland to shed light on these issues?

In one of the sessions, we’re going to be talking about the scalability of markets extensively and getting people to focus on what the sponsor’s objectives are. We’ll show examples of different kinds of markets & what people have been doing around the country to meet various needs and community goals. We’ll help people identify and think through that process to make sure they have a project that’s successful.

Markets have to adjust themselves as they see who their customers are, and this is part of the discussion we’ll be having: how markets evolve even after they open. An exciting thing about markets is that they allow for change, and they adjust to their customers. The whole thing is about getting the scale and mission right. It’s always easier if you can do that up front, but frankly all retail has to go through that transition and evolution of understanding their customers and vice versa. The needs and demands of consumers are always changing. Our goal is to help people meet their objectives and be economically sustainable in delivering all the good things that  markets can deliver to their communities.

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Celebrating 25 years since its first gathering, the 8th International Public Markets Conference will set a new direction for the vital role markets play in transforming local economies and communities. Click here to register today!

The Pearl Brewrey's Farmers' Market has helped to make the site a food destination / Photo: John W. Schulze via Flickr

Food – we need it, we love it, and we structure our lives and cultures around it. San Antonio, Texas, is a city that is starting to structure its neighborhoods around it, starting with an ambitious redevelopment project called the Pearl Brewery. Located on 22 acres along the banks of the San Antonio River north of downtown, today’s Pearl is a multi-use campus of buildings originally founded as the J. B. Behloradsky Brewery and City Brewery over 120 years ago. The current vision for the site is for a vibrant urban district to grow out from a culinary destination that brings people together around the celebration of local food and culture.

Since PPS first got involved with the master planning process for Pearl in 2005, we’ve watched this place change the way that San Antonians think of food and its role in their city. Senior Vice President Phil Myrick, who is working now on the next phase of expansion, describes Pearl as “the vision and bold scheme of a local entrepreneur of hot sauce and salsa.” This entrepreneur and visionary developer is Kit Goldsbury, who purchased the fallow Pearl campus in 2001 through his investment firm Silver Ventures. Developments currently underway at Pearl include a plaza and hotel and the addition of retail, restaurants, and residential units that now number over 200.

The main brewery building's landmark tower watches over the site / Photo: RedTail_Panther via Flickr

A key development milestone was Kit’s courtship of the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) which led to the establishment of  a third campus at Pearl in 2010 (their other two residences are in Hyde Park, New York and Napa Valley, California). Says PPS’s Meg Walker: “CIA was an early anchor for Pearl, which was housed in a smaller building before moving to its current and larger home. The Farmers Market at the site also got going early on, along with food festivals in the parking lot.” The weekly market in particular was a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper way of weaving local, fresh, and seasonal foods into daily life of the site’s neighbors. Together, the CIA and Farmers Market have been key in re-framing Pearl as a major destination at the intersection of community life and healthy, local food.

Future plans for Pearl reflect a well-curated mix of creative uses in support of food endeavors of all types. The presence of the CIA will act as a major stimulus for other food and cooking events on the campus, tapping into the power of triangulation to enhance the vibrancy of the place. Ideas for the public plaza, for instance, include edible gardens and a chef’s table, while the Black Box aspires to be a pop-up space for young entrepreneurial restaurateurs.

Latin American food  is a common thread throughout these ventures, as are creativity and comfort. “This stems from an articulated vision and desire to give back to the San Antonio community in a nurturing way through food,” Meg explains. Part of the nurture is designing a space that provides comfort to its users in the most practical of ways. Elizabeth Fauerso, chief marketing officer at Pearl, says, “The need for shade and water provisions to make the campus feel welcoming and usable in a hot climate was one of the key considerations in designing the landscape.”

Plenty of shade makes Pearl enjoyable even in San Antonio's hot summer months / Photo: The Brit_2 via Flickr

Pearl also hosts a variety of activities and programs, including cultural events (films, parties, conferences, and live performances) and engaging services and retail like the independent Twig Book Shop and Bike World bike rentals. Well-connected by an expanded Riverwalk and a bike share station , Pearl uses the Power of 10 to create a magnetic destination for the surrounding community. “Pearl is helping set an exciting drumbeat for San Antonio,” says Phil. “In several of the local workshops that PPS has conducted recently in the city, when asked to map San Antonio’s best places, participants have mentioned Pearl despite it being brand new to the scene. There is a feeling of serendipity that people associate with it.”

The momentum behind Pearl’s transformation is remarkable, but at the same time planning remains responsive and flexible. Meg emphasizes, “Pearl is not springing full-grown out of the developer’s head. While some developers want everything at once, build-out at Pearl has been evolving incrementally over the past six years, gradually bringing restaurants in and creating places people want to visit as a destination. And it’s working. People love it.”

In the larger context of the city, Pearl is the leading edge of River North’s rebirth as a vibrant arts district that promotes an urban lifestyle and creative living opportunities. In fact, the combination of dense urban housing and the infrastructure to embolden its growth is a key tenet of the plan for a vibrant central city. In February 2012, HR&A published a report, Center City Strategic Framework Plan, Implementation, commissioned by Centro Partnership of San Antonio and the City that illustrates how Pearl helps fulfill the city’s goal to encourage more people to live downtown. “Residential growth is the key to unlocking the benefits sought by the city,” the report explains, “including downtown amenities, redevelopment of existing building stock, and the presence of more vibrant neighborhood life on the street and in the public realm.” Anchored by the amenities and vibrancy of Pearl’s food and cultural attractions, the River North district  is enjoying a population boom that would have been unimaginable just five years ago when it was mostly vacant industrial land by the highway.

Going back to Kit’s original vision, Elizabeth says, “Pearl is his love letter to San Antonio.” In helping create the heart and soul of the neighborhood, Pearl’s potential as a public multi-use destination is kickstarting the economic development of a more livable, nourishing downtown.