I’ll make this short.
For years now, the City and Paetec, a major corporation here, have been wrangling with each other. Paetec has wanted to build a new headquarters, and the City has wanted to woo Paetec downtown, to the site of a former enclosed, and failed, mall called Midtown Plaza (worth much further discussion, but I am quite sure you can grasp the basic story line of a failed downtown enclosed mall).
Midtown is now being demolished to make way for new development. The site is what was once the 100% location in downtown – Main and Clinton. Today Main and Clinton, but for the hordes of buses, is pretty much a ghost town.
Main and Clinton, 1925.
Yesterday the Mayor and the CEO of Paetec held a news conference. Paetec is moving downtown: about 1,000 employees, bringing the number of jobs downtown to about 56,000 or so. Even though the City has handed Paetec an almost unbelievably sweet deal (somehow at the last minute the City managed to avoid meeting the Paetec demand for free parking for all employees, but they are kicking in something over $80 million: for themselves, Paetec will spend $55 million, but only $5 million of that is their own money), this is good. I mean having more souls downtown is good. Expensive, but good.
Now comes the bad and the ugly.
An office building that is straight out of the 1970s. I know – we’re supposed to be grateful for the greenery on top and such. There will be shops at street level, thankfully, but that won’t overcome the truly pedestrian architecture. An alert reader sent me a more recent elevation of the building, featured in the press conference yesterday, and it has developed somewhat, but it still looks like something that belongs in the suburbs, not in a bustling and robust downtown.
Nothing said about the rich tradition of wonderful buildings on Main Street, the big arch notwithstanding (you can browse through A Town Square and see dozens). Nothing said about sustainability – as in not a word, but for what is being called a rooftop garden. No discussion of building a building that is truly of mixed use, but for a few shops on the street. Oh, and maybe a police station (!). Paetec will give us a huge picture window into their operations center – oh boy. The only real public discussion has been about – you got it – cars.
One bright idea did surface yesterday – the idea of putting very large electronic screens on the building – ala Times Square they say. I wish I could feel good about this – here’s a recent view of the site kitty corner at Main and Clinton. Why am I not excited about the rich possibilities? I guess we’ll have endless Kodak moments flashing at us 24/7. Just what we need.
Oh, and Paetec did spend time telling us who they don’t want to have as neighbors – no students (students have been essential and key to the revival of Chicago’s Loop, I note), no clinic patients, no surface parking (how did that get in there?), no casinos. Ah Paetec – the corporation with the big heart.
Rochester, like every cash-strapped, shrinking, frightened city in the US, is dealing with a very, very tough question here. The City will spend 16 times more than the corporation, and in the end we stand to get 1,000 jobs.
But will downtown be better for all this? The building itself belongs in an office park, not our downtown. We get a few shops at the street, and a chance to look at Paetec employees engaged in the edgy drama of their work in electronic communications. We get giant LED screens blaring images at poor Main and Clinton. We may or may not get a building that represents a zero carbon footprint, or is even LEED rated.
Time will tell if any of this can be redeemed. Let us pray.
That’s the floor plan for the top (half) floor, not the ground floor. The ground floor is to have retail and a big picture window into their Network Operations Center on the corner of Main & Clinton. In the press conference, Chesonis mentioned having outdoor displays akin to Times Square and customizable lighting (to turn the building green on St. Patrick’s Day, etc.). Here’s an updated rendering of the PAETEC building from the press conference: http://plixi.com/p/66209958
Elliot, thank you. You saved me from a few serious errors, and I much appreciate your help. I immediately went back to rewrite to get the story straightened out.
But in the end, my errors in fact notwithstanding, I still think the project stinks. The deal is way out of whack – Paetec barely has anything in the game. The building is, and more clearly in its more developed state, banal at the very best. The flashing screens sound just awful, and the big picture window into Paetec operations is a singular piece of egotism.
I know, I know it’s about 1,000 or so jobs. I get the picture. And as I said, this is a very tough question, and Rochester is not the only city looking for an answer.
I may just sound like a whiner, or a crank. I accept that. It’s just that when I look at this project, and think about what we need to do to build the next Rochester, I am stunned by the gaping divide between what we are about to get, and what it is we really need.
Perhaps patience will be rewarded – they won’t start building for a while yet.
You are not a whiner or a crank. I agree with all you have said. I have spent almost 2 hours now typing and retyping trying to write this comment. The problem? I don’t know where to start with all I have to say. To me, the city has no vision, no plan and thinks that building something, anything, is good.
There needs to be a complete shift of thinking in almost every area in both the city and county governments. The assets and resources of the area are being way under-utilized.
Paul, thank you for your words. And I agree with all of what you have said.
One of the arguments that I make frequently here is that we do, indeed, need to teach ourselves a totally different way of thinking about our city, and what it needs to become. And I often speculate here about what it will take to change Rochesterian’s minds about what counts.
I try to do this thinking and writing and speculating with zeal, because I really do like this place. I especially like learning about what this place once was – it was once an amazing, amazing city – because it helps me to believe that a terrific next Rochester is indeed possible. It is easy to see what has gone wrong, and even easy to say why. What is hard is figuring out how to fix things.
And as you imply, one of the things that puzzles me most is the lack of leadership, whether in the city or at the county, leadership that understands what we need to do to refashion this place so that we can increasingly survive on our own resources.
So I will keep writing, I will keep being cranky about things going badly, and I will keep encouraging all my neighbors to speak up, loudly and often, in order to make these issues, which are critical to our future, a much more central part of our urban dialogue. Let’s all crank up the crankiness!
Howard:
This project has been a mess since Day 1, and as Paetec’s aspirations for the site have shrunk (at one point, there were renderings floating around for a 30 plus story building), at least we can be grateful that one of the Midtown buildings is being preserved and rebuilt. Do I think that moving 800 employees (and hopefully hiring 700 more over the next several years, not that I’m holding my breath based on the typical Empire Zone success rate) three towns over worth the $80 million investment? Probably not, especially with the cut rate parking, bad public schools, and ease of access into downtown limiting the possibility of Paetec employees purchasing homes in the city. But I hope for the best, and hope that when the economy turns, the city is in a better position to capitalize than it was 5 years ago.
Hey, Chris – happy new year.
As I said earlier, this is a tough question. Is it good urban economics to seed jobs at a cost of something like $100,000 apiece? Probably not. How long will it take to recoup this investment? Quite a while, I suspect, the City’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. And of course building a 3 story suburban office building in the midst of downtown is really not going to help adjust our urbanism in favor of the right course. If you look closely at the ground floor plan, the rentable spaces are quite wee, and the Paetec operations and command center, with its sidewalk level picture window, is a silly gimmick.
There is so much here that is bogus. And the deal sets a dangerous precedent – how many new downtown developments can the City seed at $100k a pop per job?
I am not, thankfully, an urban economist. But having more people downtown does bring some new forces to bear – demand for retail, for instance. Now it is true that the retail these workers will most likely favor will be food, and it is further true that not many will decide to both live and work downtown. Still, more folks downtown is a simple good. More is more.
And is it possible that this development plus a few other new ones can create sufficient inertia to begin to turn things around? Possible. Not quickly – in fact slowly – but possible.
I remember when downtown Chicago started to turn around. It was slow at first – a few universities with downtown campuses. But it did pick up speed pretty quickly, and in the space of a decade or so, downtown Chicago had changed radically.
So I have concluded that this is the wrong kind of urbanism, the wrong kind of architecture, that there doesn’t seem to be some larger vision for getting downtown back on its feet, no one seems to be thinking about how to capture this energy and convert it into progress, the City has made a dangerous deal that could backfire, this could be a massive missed opportunity, and the greedy folks at Paetec know very little about cities and downtowns. In general, this whole thing is a giant mess.
But more folks is more folks. As I said, a head scratcher.
I might have linked this here before. http://archives.buffalorising.com/story/tearing_down_the_future It is a story I did at Buffalorising.com about the Midtown Plaza at about the time of the original Peatec announcement. At that time the plan was to also eliminate the Midtown tower which I think is actually an interesting mid-century building but will probably be re-clad into oblivion. The story also has an interesting link to a video on the midtown plaza.
The proposed Peatec building causes me to be embarrassed for my architectural profession. But in reality it is not the architect’s fault. It is the fault of a society which has devalued aesthetic and art education and no longer appreciates the creation of high quality public space. There are many who think simply pasting on poorly executed replications of historic forms makes architecture good. This thing with its cardboard looking walls and goofy arches may not be worth the 1000 employees and massive subsidies. Perhaps the public money could have been better spent nurturing 15 new companies who might some day each have 1000 employees.
Too many times poor leadership leads to this kind of thinking. Rochester had the upper hand when they offered this company a new building for virtually no money. The least they could have demanded was a quality addition to the built environment
And by the way Paetec. Students make for some very nice cities. Just ask Ann Arbor, Madison, and Cambridge. Why you don’t want students around is an odd request.
And greetings to you, Mr. Steele.
Yes, you have sent me the link previously. And I have seen the video of Midtown, from 1961, many times. I recommend it to our readers – it is a vintage piece of homerism from a pretty nasty moment in our history. My favorite quote, about suburban malls and why they were beloved: because “most of all they offer a place to park.”
As someone who got to know the inside of Midtown when it had become a ghost town, I note that when I first saw it some years aso (maybe 10 or more) it was so vile, so nasty, that it’s a wonder that it survived as long as it did.
A total fail from the first, I think. There is an academic thesis written about the Mall that notes that the place was in trouble by the 70s. Doomed.
As to who to blame for the Paetec proposal, it’s bad enough to spread the vinegar around liberally. The architect, his cultural ethos, our larger society in forgetting what cities can be and should be, bad leadership at almost every level – take your pick.
But what interests me – in a Smugtown kind of way – is how easy it is to find folks who really dislike the proposal, and can say why with some acuity. If everybody really thinks this is a stinker, then why so little outcry? Ahhh, Rochester, city of silence. This project does not pass the laugh test, and the commentary? Pfft.
Come on people – speak up!!
I just moved back to the Rochester area having lived in Pittsburgh for the last 12 years and thought I’d provide maybe a little different perspective.
I’m at a loss regarding Paetec’s issue with students, you mention Chicago, but the student population of downtown Pittsburgh has increased from 4% to 13% in the past 7 years. This is seen as a benefit. Here is an article that just came out about how much the dynamics of downtown Pittsburgh has changed in the past 7 years.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11004/1115408-53.stm
Pittsburgh had struggled with their own failures, tearing down historically important buildings and replacing them with parking lots or ill fated attempts at bringing retail stores when the same stores where available with free parking at the closest suburban mall.
The focus then shifted corporate businesses into downtown, and developing downtown housing. They’ve also focused on the arts with a nice cultural district that brings people into town as well.
The riverfront has been redeveloped and has been made into a destination. One of the things my wife said she will miss about Pittsburgh was just going downtown to walk around by the rivers, take the dog for a walk, ride out bikes on the bike paths etc. Nothing downtown is inviting to do that. The public market is awesome and unique but not downtown. You go there, then leave.
As for the actual project, from what I’ve seen in Pittsburgh, they are missing a huge opportunity to do something to bring back a little pride into downtown. Even keeping the same mundane plans could bring a lot more to the party if there was talk of LEED Platinum certification. The general public might overlook (maybe the will anyway) the aesthetic shortcomings and point to this as a step in the right direction Right now it just seems like a desperate corporate handout that will benefit the company with little benefit to the public.
Feeling proud of the area you live in may seem like a something small and not really quantitative, it is something sorely missing in Rochester (and western New York as a whole). I’ve seen it grow and develop in just the 12 years I was in Pittsburgh. Don’t ask me to quantify any of this but the success of the region and having the people believe in and feel a sense of pride of that region feed off each other. I think Rochester has the potential for it to happen as well.
So take it for what it’s worth, probably nothing, I’m just a casual observer who believes the success of a region comes from the strength of the downtown core. And it is nice to see something happening, but just doing something while the potential to do something great is always disappointing.
Sounds like a good time to talk about collaborative planning.
We have a master plan for downtown, which includes the Midtown parcel. It was created in a collaborative process – a charrette. According to Wikipedia, a charrette “typically involves intense and possibly multi-day meetings, involving municipal officials, developers, and residents. A successful charrette promotes joint ownership of solutions and attempts to defuse typical confrontational attitudes between residents and developers.” (Compare to “Urban Renewal” at OldSchool.com)
So what happened with Midtown? Where’s the disconnect between the plan, the design and cutting the deal? What needs to happen to change the paradigm? How do we overcome the institutional momentum of political office, of the corporate boardroom, of – I don’t know, call it public perception? Is it even realistic to expect a city of Rochester’s size and resources to adopt a collaborative planning model and reap its benefits?
Imagine sitting at a charrette table with Paetec senior management, architects, planners, residents – and Arunas Chesonis lays down his parking demands, or expressway access requirements. A discussion ensues, right? All parties are there at the table, we draw with colored markers, discuss transit patterns and good urbanism, cite references, statistics, corporate P&L arithmetic. We argue over competing visions for the future city. In the end, we compromise on a design that accomodates the now, anticipates the future, pleases left and right brain, is efficient, interactive, affordable.
Motherhood.
Rochester’s collaborative shortcomings are no strangers to this audience. But why isn’t it working? What’s the next step? Or, as Joni Monroe once put it, “If everybody knows it’s a problem, why is it still a problem?”
Bill, thanks for the news of Pittsburgh. We have family there, so we know the city pretty well – good to hear it’s improving. We have especially enjoyed the riverfront ourselves in recent visits. Here in Rochester, as Pogo says, our riverfront is a place of insurmountable opportunity, but for Corn Hill Landing.
And yes, of course a healthy downtown we can be proud of would add immensely to our sense that we live in a great and worthwhile place. But we have arranged our lives, and our region, to avoid downtown, to bypass downtown, to flee downtown. It will take a while to change these attitudes. And it will take corporate and institutional presence, as well as an increase in residents and retail, to provide evidence that downtown is the place we should focus our attention, and our activities.
Which brings me to Jim. As ever, thanks for your contributions to the discussion.
Downtown is still a problem, even though many of us can see this quite vividly, because many others of our neighbors just don’t or cannot see it as a problem. It’s one thing to ask professional urbanists, or committed urbanophiles, about downtown. It’s another thing altogether to get the support of those who live in Greece or Penfield or Webster or Gates to take action in favor of a central city.
We can have a charrette a week, but until our regional neighbors can see, and feel, the value of density and a rich mix of uses and walkability and diversity and all the other attributes of urban living, not much will happen. Our leadership is certainly not being inundated with anxious communiques about these matters.
And what will it take to get these neighbors of ours to want to remake the central city? I have asked that question here, over and over and over. Here’s my version of an answer: scarcity.
Scarcity. Of money – New York State is broke after all – of services (which we can’t pay for anymore), of resources. Though our leadership should be aiming us at increasing our regional self-sufficiency, and thus addressing increasingly compelling problems of scarcity, they are not. And so as issues of scarcity become more and more acute, more and more folks will “get it.”
Unfortunately arriving at a plan of action as a result of the threat of various scarcities will be much more painful than simply realizing what lies ahead and taking action. But that appears to me to be the only way that enough of us will see “the problem” that we can as a population alter our course.
Wish I could think of some shortcut. Don’t think there is one.
D Steele
The other towns that you speak of that encourage students are focused on college students. Rochester hasn’t done too bad of a job with this, particularly in the neighborhoods centered around the Eastman School, just east of downtown. The student issue that is brought up again and again is that because of a badly designed regional transit system, Main Street serves as the transfer point for most east-west buses in the region and by having the city school district farm out student busing to RTS, hundreds of high school students with too much time on their hands congregate on a downtown with little to do but creating their own entertainment between 2:30 and 4 or so every week day. This creates a perception of danger for passersby that even though most of what happens is by people that know one another, to an outsider, this scares them off.
Oh, I assumed college students but I do understand the issue with inner city high school students.
…oh How…
So much good discussion happening here. But I’ll limit my comment to what I feel is Paetec’s less-than-noble reason for wanting to limit students near their building. The only college talking about locating or expanding downtown at present is Monroe Community College. My cynical side thinks Paetec would not want MCC students near their building because these are the “wrong” kind of students.
Hmm…. Wrong kind of students. I wonder who he thinks are the right kind of students.
I guess he would prefer a local outpost from MIT or equal.
To return briefly to Chicago, the one institution that really has grown, and now has a very big presence in downtown, is Columbia College. Once they were seen as a kind of inferior institution, but no longer. Their contribution to the cityscape is huge, and they have grown so many, many times over from their original footprint that their whole locale in the South Loop has been transformed.
Maybe we need a junket.