Planting Shrubs to Fix a Foundation

If I had began this blog several years before I actually started it, I would posted many blog entries critiquing and discussing the relatively new area of Victory Park.

Let me compress what could be several posts into the rest of this paragraph. Victory Park is a well-intentioned idea of mixing uses, but was executed so poorly that retail can not survive and the "streets" are empty of people, even when there is an event at the anchor of the area, the American Airlines Center (AAC). The basic premise is that instead of focusing the energy towards the main streets like Houston and Victory Avenue, they made those streets function like alleys and made a central "street", Victory Park Lane, the main retail spine when it should be the alley. Street design made Victory and Houston huge one-ways for transporting large amounts of cars and minimizing the pedestrian experience. The retail is destined to fail exactly because Victory Park Lane is isolated, and it was so by design. The intentions were to give the pedestrian a pleasant walk. But, by ignoring connectivity with the rest of the development AND neighborhood, even pedestrians don't go there, making retail foot traffic sparse if non-existent.

Victory Park Lane, complete with no people out and about.

All that to say this, according to Steve Brown, the Dallas Morning News' Real Estate Editor, Estein and Associates, the property manager of Victory, have hired Trademark Property to revamp the shopping area. From the article:

Critics of the project have lambasted the layout of the retail space and its original focus on high-end merchants and restaurants.

Trademark will immediately begin work on plans to remodel Victory Park’s storefronts along Victory Park Lane. 

The developer also will be looking at how to use undeveloped land in the project for additional retail.

About 130,000 square feet of retail space is contained in the lower floors of buildings in the 75-acre Victory Park project.

Preliminary plans call for a total redesign of the streetscape throughout the project.

...

Fair said with the economy turning the corner and retail sales picking up, the timing is right to redo Victory Park’s retail.

“We are getting more calls from prospective tenants and have been looking for the right retail partner,” he said. “There has to be some momentum for the retailers to get excited.

“We are going to try and make a great retail street where people will want to hang out.

...

Trademark Property has experience with both new projects and redeveloping old ones.

It built the popular Watters Creek shopping and apartment project in Allen. And Trademark is developing the Alliance Town Center regional shopping center in North Fort Worth.

Trademark also has redeveloped shopping malls in Corpus Christi, Santa Fe and Michigan.

I still lambast the layout. Without fixing this, the very fundamental flaw, everything else is lipstick. Until the docks for the buildings line Victory Park Lane and the retail fronts Houston, Victory Avenue, Lamar or Olive, no amount of revamp will be successful. It already hurts Victory enough that the office buildings, which are relatively full, are self-contained. You park inside the building, go up the elevator, work, go down the elevator and leave the building. In downtown, there is decent transit access and many workers who do drive have to park off-site, which at least facilitates some amount of pedestrian activity. That is not the case here.

Unless a total redesign of the streetscape means this fundamental swap from the interior lined by Victory Park Lane to the outside streets, then any other effort is going to fall short.

Finally, looking at the credentials of Trademark, I wonder if they are the right group to even understand what Victory needs. The last two paragraphs list their body of works, but none are in even semi-urban areas. All are suburban, and many of Victory's flaws originate in trying to combine elements of suburban design into the urban realm. The result is that you get neither. The positives of both are negated and the negatives standout. 

Here's an example of what I mean. Victory tried to take a suburban positive, ease of car use, and incorporate that into the development. To accomplish this, they made Houston Street four lanes, one-way with wide lanes, approached Victory Avenue, Lamar Street and Olive Street the same and built garages in every building. But, from an auto user standpoint, it still has the negative of a dense district. Drivers thrive in low density surroundings, while they feel uneasy in denser areas. Also, garages are not convenient, especially compared to on-street and surface parking. This means car-based users avoid Victory because of the hassle.

Also, in an attempt to keep the design on Houston, the original developers fought DART from running the first phase of the current Green Line along Houston. This pushed it on the edge of the neighborhood, where it currently is. What should have been an urban positive instead is now a negative, since the distance is inconvenient to anyone but event goers, as the AAC is the closest building. From downtown, some parts of Victory can be reached faster from the West End Station! This means pedestrians and transit-users avoid Victory because of the hassle.

The Rail Station serving Victory. Note in the distance the AAC.

If drivers don't go and transit users don't go, only those who have to be there go. That means only people who have to go (see workers and residents) are the ones that are there. Neither have sufficient mass to support the level of retail, especially if it is high end. Add in the fact that office is designed to be isolated and self-sufficient, it is easy to see why Victory has empty streets.

I hope an future development addresses the issue, but I don't believe the existing Victory area's street level will achieve any measure of vitality until a first-floor redo is completed. Some infrastructure improvements along the major streets would be beneficial too, but not as critically as the first.

The sad thing is, this is typical Dallas development in its core. You see this on Lower McKinney, parts of Downtown, the Design District and the Cedars. Until developers recognize the benefits of the urban area and work to maximize that, Victory results will continue to be repeated.

People will walk. Main Street and Deep Ellum are examples. Developers can get it right. West Village, One Arts Plaza and Third Rail are examples. But until the city requires this, rather than hope for the best, Victory will be the norm, not West Village.

Christmas wish list

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all! In the spirit of the season, I am going to throw my downtown wish list out there. Perhaps some important people are watching.

10. More daycare's downtown. There are three church-sponsored and two private daycare's. Granted it is selfish, but downtown would be better off with more kids. When one considers that 130,000 people work downtown, there is a severe shortage of places to put their kids.

9. Fill the empty office space. Before we consider adding more office space, let's see some pre-recession filling of existing office space levels.

8. Renovate each the fortress office tower's lobbies. They don't need to have a half-block to block sized lobby that contains nothing but empty space and mostly unused chairs. Converting these spaces into other uses like retail or at least a pedestrian-friendly design would encourage greater pedestrian activity and therefore greater vitality.

7. More West-Village-type developments. An increase in residential and good urban designed streetscapes are a must if downtown is going to see any increase in vibrancy and vitality. There are lots of solid street-to-street urban blocks that are nothing but surface parking lots and would accommodate these in the proper places, only a couple of blocks from already good areas.


It would be a lovely gift to see a surface parking lot turn into this.

6.  Build out of the streetcar lines. A line down Main connecting downtown with Deep Ellum and Fair Park, a line on Lamar connecting downtown with Victory and the Cedars and a line on Harwood/Olive connecting the Farmers Market with the Main Street District, Arts District and Uptown would let you get near anywhere in the urban core easily.

5. Redo parking. Increase the on-street parking, reform pricing to more of a market approach, lower the number of surface parking towards developments would increase the attractiveness of parking downtown.

4. The addition of the 2nd downtown rail line. My preferred option would be Commerce Subway. It goes under one of the densest parts of downtown and is nearest the most residential units, commercial office square feet, hotel rooms (that is even taken into the new 1,001 room convention center hotel), retail, and park space than any other option. If those are all sold out, I'd even take the Young or City Hall option.

I think this line would carry the most passengers of the four options.

3. Get rid of the one-way street system. For many reasons they have to go: confusion, auto over pedestrian, increased accidents and diminished on-street parking.

2. Removal of the freeway loop around downtown. If I lived in a perfect world, the freeways would run as originally intended, and stop at the city's edge, or in the case, I'd say I-635 or Loop-12. If that isn't enough, I'd settle for the removal of Woodall Rogers and I-345, the strip of freeway between Woodall and I-30 that divides downtown and Deep Ellum and East Dallas.

1. Get rid of the tunnel and skywalk system. I have waxed on and on and on about this, so I'll spare you the repetitiveness.

Santa, any help would be appreciated.