A big steaming piece of Shig

[tags]los angeles, urban planning, paul shigley, downtown[/tags]

Pasadena not only has a beautiful city hall, pictured, but it was also named California’s best mid-size city downtown by an urban planning blogger. Find more images in Flickr’s Pasadena photo pool.
Credit: Lush.i.ous via Flickr (Creative Commons license)

California Policy & Development Report’s editor, Paul Shigley, compiled his list of favorite downtowns in California’s mid-sized cities. The winners surprised no one, as his preview for this list mentioned there had to be more to downtowns than Pasadena and Santa Barbara.

Sho ’nuff, Pasadena and Santa Barbara have the number 1 and number 2 mid-size downtowns in California. An alternative headline to this entry could have been “We’re Number 1,” as big cities of Long Beach and Los Angeles placed third and fourth in California’s list of big city downtowns.

Southern California was well represented, and one shoo-in received a backhanded compliment from Shigley.

This time, 94 cities were eligible.

“These cities couldn’t be much more diverse,” wrote Shigley in his blog. “They range from old regional centers (Riverside, Modesto) to inner-ring suburbs (Lakewood, Daly City) to fast-growing bedroom communities (Temecula, Elk Grove). Some of these cities have visions of grandeur (Irvine, Roseville), and some are blue-collar factory towns struggling to regain their footing (Fontana, Richmond). Some are California icons (Santa Barbara), while others are icons of post-war planning practices (Thousand Oaks, Sunnyvale).”

The list wasn’t long, as many of the 94 cities — with populations ranging from 75,000 to 300,000 — do not have a distinct downtown area.

Without further ado, here is the list of the best mid-city downtowns:

1. Pasadena
2. Santa Barbara
3. Chico
4. Berkeley
5. Santa Rosa

These are all deserving of their place on this list. Santa Rosa, too, which has a lovely compact downtown even though the rest of the city is a stultifying exurb with the backs of cookie-cutter subdivisions facing broad, desolate arterials.

Shigley kissed up, then kicked down, Santa Monica. This would have been a strong number one contender for great downtown. It has heavy pedestrian traffic, the beach, great transit service and was the inspiration for redeveloping downtowns as fun destinations.

Shigley gave reasons for putting Santa Monica as both an honorable mention, but also most overrated:

We concede that many people like downtown Santa Monica. Heck, we even gave it an honorable mention above. The Third Street Promenade is magnificent urbanism in just the right place. But take away Third Street, and what do you have? Not much besides a mix of uses and pretty good bus transit. Big chunks of land are poorly utilized, a freeway divides things up and there is little architecture of note. … Yes, some of the coolest, modernist-style mixed-use and residential buildings anywhere in Southern California are in close proximity to downtown. But it doesn’t hang together as an urban district. There are too many things pulling people away from the downtown, including the beach, the funkiness of the Ocean Park neighborhood, and the civic center, which is on the other side of the freeway. …

Other Southern California cities receiving thumbs-ups include the Valencia Town Center in Santa Clarita as “best manufactured new downtown”, Fullerton as “most underrated (even by us)”, and Santa Monica, Riverside and Ventura as honorable mentions.

The routinely cantakerous Rob Dawg should at least have a smirk on his face for that one. But he has alluded to Shigley’s colleague Bill Fulton remaking downtown Ventura akin to Sherman remaking Atlanta. That simile was also used to describe Metro’s hub-and-spoke bus plans.

And now for the dogs in Shigley’s kennel of the most disappointing downtowns:

1. San Bernardino
2. Redding
3. Antioch
4. Costa Mesa
5. Richmond

Two of the five are here in Southern California. And it’s hard to argue with San Bernardino earning the top of the bottom. It has a downtown that would best be desribed by World Wrestling Entertainment commentator Jim Ross as “bowling shoe ugly”. Here’s Shigley:

Where to begin? Downtown San Berdoo has been a depressing and dangerous place for a long time. The Carousel Mall (originally called the Central City Mall) opened during the early 1970s, helping kill off mom-and-pop businesses. Before long, the mall itself started to decline and for two decades it has been a white elephant surrounded by empty parking lots in the midst of downtown. For years, developers have been interested mostly in freeway frontage elsewhere in town. During the last 10 years, the city and developers have cooked up numerous schemes to revive downtown, ranging from wiping out part of downtown with a series of lakes and canals, to re-using the mall for housing. But it has been little more than talk.

The Carousel Mall link has pictures and the history of the sad-sack mall from Labelscar, a blog chronicling shopping malls and dead and/or dying retail stores in North America.

The only other Southern California city on the list is Costa Mesa, which is really more known for the South Coast Plaza and Orange County Performing Arts Center than a discernible downtown area.