Andy Conlin can't decide whether he's happy or wary about the antiwar demonstration that turned up at Arizona Center shortly after its November opening.
"I was flattered," says the Rouse Company's Phoenix point man at first, "because it showed that people were recognizing this as the community's focal point." But then visions of nervous shoppers and fuming boutique owners dance across his imagination, and suddenly he's not sure he should have said that. "Not that we want to encourage demonstrations," he adds.
What about other spontaneous happenings? Suppose a street preacher were to surface in Arizona Center's garden? Conlin's hands fidget, his brow creases. "A street preacher. I don't know . . . ."
His waffling isn't surprising. Phoenix is trying to fabricate a real downtown where nothing but high-rise file cabinets stood before, and there's no magic formula to guarantee success--just ask the Symington Company, whose year-old Mercado today attracts fewer browsers than Chernobyl.
Conlin's employer is $200 million deep into downtown Phoenix, and despite the early gush of visitors, Arizona Center could face leaner times once its novelty erodes.
Its success, as well as that of all downtown Phoenix, just might hinge on what Conlin decides to do when that first street preacher shows up.
A FEW WORDS from the Old Testament of urban design:
Downtown Phoenix was doomed far earlier than most of us realize, and for reasons that at first had nothing to do with design. In 1893 the first electric trolley clattered north from Washington Street, and Phoenicians never looked back.
"In the history of cities, there was a tremendous sense of relief when people could get away from the walking environment," says John Meunier, dean of Arizona State University's College of Architecture and Environmental Design. "People had lived downtown and walked and shopped and played in a high-density environment only because they had no choice. Once the trolley cars could take them away to their leafy suburbs, they went gladly indeed, because the high-density city was a bloody dangerous place to live. You talk about the plague of crack now--in the nineteenth-century city, there was smallpox, typhoid and cholera."
It wasn't until the Fifties that those safe, quiet, leafy suburbs--in other words, urban sprawl--fully strangled downtown Phoenix. That was the decade in which the city's area grew by 1,096 percent (from 17.1 to 187.4 square miles). And as people began not coming downtown, the architects, curiously, gave them more and more reasons not to come downtown.
The real problem with all those high-rises of the Fifties through the Eighties is not that they cut banal profiles in the skyline, but that they have nothing to say at street level.
The blank wall, or the plain concrete arcade, or the window that offers nothing but a view of stockbrokers huddled over a computer screen, are city-killers all. They suck life out of the street and bore pedestrians silly. The architects and their clients were interested only in expressing power by thrusting huge concrete-and-glass shafts into the sky. Thus they abandoned a fundamental principle of urban design: The first eight or ten feet of the building are always the most important.
For a downtown to work as a pedestrian environment, there must be an enormous number of sensory goings-on at street level--everything from engaging architectural details and public sculpture to live music and sidewalk cafes. Unless architects and planners create spaces for these things to happen, the city is sterile.
THE ROUSE PEOPLE decided to move on Phoenix in 1987, which, to anyone not connected with it, seemed to have the whiff of a long shot. Phoenix by then had the most cadaverous urban core of any major American city. There was no geographic attraction downtown, such as a waterfront, that had helped prime Rouse's downtown rejuvenation projects in cities such as Baltimore. There was no stunning historic building, like Washington, D.C.'s 1907 Beaux-Arts Union Station, that could be hollowed out and turned into a mall.
What Rouse did see, Conlin says, was an emerging freeway system that could reintroduce suburbanites to downtown, and a convention center a block away that already drew more than a million people a year--people who had nowhere to party after a day of boring meetings.
"We all know," Conlin says, "that the real business of a convention is not transacted in a high-ceilinged meeting room, sitting on folding chairs, drinking diet Coke and listening to a lecture by Tom Peters. The real business is done later, in restaurants and bars. We saw that as an opportunity."
Conlin estimates that Arizona Center drew 250,000 people the first four days it was open. Hooters, Lombardi's, and Sam's Cafe, all chain restaurants, have told him their first few weeks in Phoenix have generated more business than any of their previous openings. Conlin says he isn't surprised; Phoenix was just waiting for something like this to happen.
"When I first started making presentations on this, people would always say, `Why do you want to spend all this money in downtown Phoenix?' I'd ask them a question in return: When you have out-of-town guests, where do you take them? Most people could come up with no more than three destinations in the Valley--typically the Heard Museum, the Scottsdale shops and Biltmore Fashion Park--before they'd say `Sedona.'"
THE NOTION THAT an urban area of two million people has just three compelling attractions, two of which are shopping centers, is an interesting problem in itself--but it'll have to wait. The more immediate question is whether Arizona Center offers enough to make the short list. And will it help transform downtown Phoenix into a destination?
First impression: No. This from fifteen or twenty blocks away, where all you see of Arizona Center are its two tedious twenty-story towers, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. 'Dum, a hexagon with a polished pink-granite skin, was designed by HKS of Dallas in the sealed-container-as-architecture style. 'Dee, a product of the Phoenix firm of HNTB, is slightly better for its pinkish rough aggregate skin and inset windows; it is at least a building that you might want to touch.
At street level, neither has anything to offer except windows looking into mausoleumlike lobbies. And finally, 'Dum's wide body blocks most of the view into the center from Van Buren Street. Glimpsed quickly, through a windshield, Arizona Center appears to be nothing more than business as usual in downtown Phoenix.
It's hard to understand why Rouse didn't engage an architect who would have given Arizona Center a signature in the city's skyline, a "Jeez--let's go look at that!" office tower that would have burned an image of the whole development into everyone's brain. As it is, these are just two more anonymous hulks in business suits, and the Luhrs Tower, built in the early years of Herbert Hoover's presidency, remains Phoenix's only interesting downtown high-rise.
The nonoffice parts of Arizona Center fell into more capable hands. These are pleasant environments that reward a close look, because the details are handled so deftly.
Most of the shops and some of the restaurants are stacked into a two-story, L-shaped building designed by ELS/Elbassani-Logan of Berkeley, California. Communication Arts of Boulder, Colorado, brainstormed many of the intriguing doodads, such as the flying-scallop sunscreens that swoop over the walkways. It's interesting that it took designers from foggy Berkeley and frosty Boulder to show Phoenix not only how to provide shade, but also how to celebrate it.
The "L" building puts its arms around a C-shaped building housing, so far, a dozen restaurants and pushcarts selling Santa Fe tiles and delicately naughty tee shirts. Upstairs, the fast-food court (termed "express dining" in an Arizona Republic advertising supplement) is designed better than the bland food deserves.
The floors and ceilings are hardwood, daylight streams through a train of zigzagging skylights, and a vast window wall overlooks the palm court, fountains and gardens outside. It's a fast-food court that doesn't look like it was made to be hosed down. The irony is that you could get better fast food from an Armenian selling grilled kebabs off a pushcart--precisely the kind of thing for which there is no provision at Arizona Center.
Three expensive acres of terraced gardens (designed by SWA of Sausalito, California) fill the outdoor space between the shops and office towers. More than the architecture, these gardens are Arizona Center's prime attraction, the substitute for the harbor or riverfront we don't have.
If these gardens had been installed in downtown Tucson, howls of outrage (and maybe midnight showers of Agent Orange) would have greeted them. They're very formal, they demand a heap of water, and they have nothing to say about the Sonoran Desert--which means only that SWA's designer, Bill Callaway, captured the spirit of Phoenix perfectly in the microcosm of these gardens.
This probably was a smart commercial decision: A desert garden, however lovely, might have confused and annoyed Phoenix. On the other hand, doesn't it seem both reasonable and symbolically important for the largest desert metropolis on the continent to have something downtown to remind people where they live?
Three delightful and whimsical copper frog sculptures (by Henry Beer of Communication Arts) face the garden. In one, a leaping frog, easily five feet long, appears to be impaled on a tulip leaf. In all three, mist generators swaddle the sculptures in imitation swamp steam. Again, hardly a Sonoran Desert diorama, but for anyone craving a howling coyote, there are plenty to choose from in the shops a few steps away.
Look at a plan or model of how all these elements are arranged, and it all seems to make perfect sense. The restaurant area seems to flow out into the gardens, which then gently rises up to greet office workers pouring out of the towers. But in real life it doesn't work that neatly.
A young Phoenix woman, wandering in fascination among the greenery and copper frogs one recent afternoon, complained that she had come to an opening celebration one November night, spent three hours, and never knew the gardens were there. (And they're enchantingly illuminated at night, a real attraction.) The gardens would serve better if all the shops and restaurants were gathered around them, and the towers engaged by some other landscape.
There's one design problem that darkens your experience here, literally. That colossal tower on the south side--One Arizona Center, or Tweedledum--is planted so that it casts its dismal shadow over most of the gardens and outdoor restaurant tables precisely when sunlight would be most appreciated: all winter, between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon. In summer, when shade would be appreciated, it's no help, of course, shading only the sidewalks to the east and west. This is dumb site planning.
And there's a warning of future trouble in the form of a model outside Conlin's office overlooking those very shady gardens. Less than half of Rouse's 18.5-acre site has been developed so far, and four more high-rises are to be built when the market catches up. They haven't been designed yet, but the concept in the model suggests they'll be as bland as the two towers already built. And the gardens squeezed in between will grow darker, and less and less visible from perimeter streets.
CROSS VAN BUREN STREET to the Mercado, and you understand how fragile the commercial ecosystem of downtown Phoenix is.
At two in the afternoon on the Tuesday two weeks before Christmas, nobody's there. With all the eye-searing colors and stone Mayan dogs and iguanas lounging around the stairways, you feel like you've stumbled across the scene of a party that ended days ago, but nobody took down the decorations.
When nosing around a failed project, an architecture critic's first impulse, logically, is to blame the architect--who in this case is Neal Norman of Cornoyer Hedrick in Phoenix.
Cornoyer Hedrick's original design, developed seven years ago, looked a lot like something that had been lifted from Scottsdale Road--taco deco, in other words. It featured two U-shaped buildings enclosing a large pedestrian courtyard. According to Norman, the Mercado's New York lenders didn't like it because there wasn't any parking inside the project, and they didn't think anybody in Phoenix would walk more than a few feet from car to store.
The lenders' assumption was silly, but it probably was good that it forced a redesign. As Norman explains now, "We realized we shouldn't be doing something like Scottsdale Road anyway. Why would people come downtown if they could have the same thing two blocks from home?"
What emerged was a three-dimensional cartoon based on a couple of Spanish Colonial mining towns in central Mexico, Guanajuato and San Miguel de Allende. It's certainly vivacious--imagine Mary Hart on her fifth margarita, and you have some idea of its mood. The problem is that all the festivity is only a few microns deep, the depth of a coat of paint. Beneath all the contrived color, there's not much architecture going on here.
Contrast the Mercado with Sedona's enormously successful Tlaquepaque: The Mercado looks like it was built for a World's Fair and intended to be demolished and forgotten a year later. Tlaquepaque, though not devoid of cliches, seems to have existed for centuries.
"Part of the reason Tlaquepaque is such a success is it had that wonderful site, with all those large sycamore trees," Norman says. "And Sedona is such a restive place. I thought downtown Phoenix needed more vital, entertaining spaces. Still does. Our goal with the Mercado was not to make sophisticated architecture, but a fun place to go."
There's little fun to be had in the Mercado these days, and part of it is the architect's miscalculation. If architecture is to attract anyone back for a second look, it needs to be both sophisticated and fun. Arizona Center is. Think what a complementary attraction the Mercado could have been if the architect had been, say, Mexico's Luis Barragan, whose work probes rather more deeply than Cornoyer Hedrick's into the Hispanic soul.
However, good architecture alone can't save a bad commercial game plan. The Mercado should have been almost fully leased when it opened (as Arizona Center was). And it should have carried out the Hispanic theme that it promised--it should have been the Valley's primero place to buy things from Spanish-speaking countries and to dig Hispanic culture. It needed--still needs--a mix of Mexican, Peruvian, Cuban, and Spanish restaurants. Not Chinese, which currently occupies the most prominent corner in the project.
Want to demonstrate against the gringos' puppet government in Panama? The Mercado ought to be the place for it--except, with that architecture as a stage setting, it's hard to know whether anyone would take you seriously.
IT OUGHT TO BE clear to everyone that Andy Conlin, who's no fool, is not about to let some red-eyed Bible-thumper roam the garden outside Hooters and harangue paying customers on the evils of booze and waitress-lust. Nor will anything very strange be allowed to happen across the street at the Mercado, nor up at Washington and Central, if Square One ("a dining, retail and entertainment experience") materializes.
Downtown Phoenix appears on its way toward becoming a checkerboard of self-contained "entertainment experiences," which means that each square will have an Events Coordinator and a carefully filtered roster of lite-rock bands, KTAR on-location broadcasts and approved charities ringing bells at Christmas. The effect will have been to make downtown safe and attractive, at last, to the middle and upper classes.
Architectural design is an important piece of this process. Consider the Mercado on another level: by cartooning Mexican history, one renders it understandable and nonthreatening to Anglos.
ASU's Meunier, who serves on the Central City Board of Architectural Review, has spent his furrowed-brow time pondering downtown Phoenix's future. Despite the colossal projects of the last three years, he still worries. A real urban center, he says, can't be just a collection of malls.
"I think the goal of the urban experience is to make life rich and meaningful," he says.
"The difference is between going through the Grand Canyon on a rubber raft and going on a ride in Disneyland. In the Grand Canyon, you always know there's a slight chance that you might get killed. No designer orchestrated that ride. In Disneyland, you get only a sanitized version of that experience. There's almost no chance of being killed. The point is that the ultimate satisfactions are different. We ought to be prepared to expose ourselves to the full range of human experience."
And that full range is rather more than the sixty flavors of daiquiris merrily whirling behind the bar at Fat Tuesday's. A great downtown needs hole-in-the-wall cafes where nobody speaks English. It needs street musicians who haven't been hired or authorized by anyone, some of them Rastafarians and some of them ASU music majors playing Mozart violin and viola duets. It needs art galleries that'll show Mapplethorpe and keep the county attorney up late trying to devise a way to bust them. It needs panhandlers, mimes, religious fanatics, hustlers, whores and old men playing shuffleboard. It needs a Woolworth's more than it needs Victoria's Secret, but a great downtown will have both.
The irony of developments such as Arizona Center, the Mercado, and Square One is that if they're successful, they tend to choke out all these other things. Property around them grows more expensive, and that means that it gets used for still more downtown malls or office towers--not low-rent galleries or Cambodian restaurants.
Meunier, however, is cautiously optimistic. What downtown Phoenix may have to be in the early Nineties is an "intermediate step" to bring people back downtown to check out the action. "For a while, we probably need some of these protected environments for the suburbanite who's lost his street smarts and doesn't know how to handle a panhandler," he says.
And what then? Well, says Meunier, the America West Arena, which will be just six blocks south of Arizona Center, is going to bring all kinds of people downtown--some with Suns season tickets in hand, some to watch tractor pulls. The Solar Oasis and Museum of Science and Technology will draw kids, families and tourists. If the stew of humanity becomes dense enough and heterogeneous enough, then a real downtown will be born.
What, meanwhile, might architecture do to help?
You can see one good idea struggling to burst out of the nonsense at the Mercado: check out those street lamps, which feature cast-iron winged gargoyles spitting out light globes. They weren't even designed for the project--they came from a factory in Guadalajara--but they provide the kind of eye-level richness that a good pedestrian environment needs.
Another inspiration is that old Luhrs Tower. Its tiny body is lost in today's skyline, but look how its filigreed cornices, terra-cotta garlands and the sixteenth-century Spanish fandango around its portal snap Jefferson Street to life. If the Board of Architectural Review were doing its job, it would hold every proposed new downtown tower to this standard. We need to think retro--not in style, but in spirit.
And it would be nice, finally, if more architects showed more guts. We can all keep heaping ridicule on Patriots Square--and peals of laughter are the only possible response to its newest feature, that pipsqueak laser beam--but the fact is that Ted Alexander's park design has helped to juice up downtown Phoenix. It's provided unprogrammed spaces for people to gather and has generated priceless publicity, however rude, for downtown. The lesson for architects is simple: better to provoke fistfights than make polite background buildings that nobody remembers. Downtown Phoenix needs no more of the latter.
The year-old Mercado today attracts fewer browsers than Chernobyl.
"You talk about the plague of crack now--in the nineteenth-century city, there was smallpox, typhoid and cholera."
Arizona Center drew 250,000 people the first four days it was open. From fifteen or twenty blocks away, all you see of Arizona Center are its two tedious twenty-story towers, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
If these gardens had been installed in downtown Tucson, howls of outrage (and maybe midnight showers of Agent Orange) would have greeted them. Downtown Phoenix appears on its way toward becoming a checkerboard of self-contained "entertainment experiences."
A great downtown needs panhandlers, mimes, religious fanatics, hustlers, whores and old men playing shuffleboard.
