At 11:30, Richard Brovitz is just finishing dinner with
his grown daughter and girlfriend. They've been eating outside Big City, an
upscale restaurant/bar on Clematis. After dinner, they will head to the Liquid
Room and dance to cutting-edge electronic music.
They're on vacation, down from Rochester, N.Y. They have planned to visit
West Palm, Fort Lauderdale, Delray Beach and Miami, expressly because each of
those cities has an entertainment district.
They have no plans to visit Jacksonville. They say they'll come to
Jacksonville when it gets an entertainment district. They say every city should
have one.
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Clematis:
By the numbers
The Clematis Street District, which is five blocks long and four blocks wide,
provides an urban center for retail, residential and entertainment facilities.
It features:
54 restaurants, bars and nightclubs.
250,000 square feet of retail space.
2.16 million square feet of office space.
More than 1,600 residential units, with 450 more under construction.
--------------------------------------------------
Just 10 years ago, downtown West Palm was the opposite of a tourist
destination. Abandoned in the suburban boom of the '60s and '70s, the
neighborhood around Clematis Street had become, in the words of 17-year West
Palm resident John Spoto, "a demilitarized zone."
The old Clematis district was a place to fear, an area characterized by guns
and gangs, crime and crack houses. Then, in 1991, a fresh-faced mayor named
Nancy Graham began a series of dramatic measures that turned it into a radiant
model of urbanity.
She spun downtown around so fast that today, one block off Clematis, John
Spoto owns Spoto's Oyster Bar, anair oasis that pulled in $2 million its
first year in existence.
"To me, none of this would have happened without Nancy Graham, her vision and
her determination," Spoto said. "I'll tell you how much I'm a believer: Now I'm
living downtown. I used to live in the 'burbs, but I decided I want to be where
people are. ...[Now] it's all at my front door. It's almost too good to be
true."
Spoto's restaurant exemplifies the booming downtown West Palm economy. Since
1993, downtown tax revenues have increased 51 percent. And from the dog days of
1984 to the glory days of 2001, the property value of downtown West Palm Beach
increased $358 million.
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THE FACE
BEHIND THE FORCE: Former West Palm Beach mayor Nancy Graham kicked off the
Clematis Street revitalization in 1991 with the $2 million, city-funded
Centennial Fountain. -- Rick
Wilson/Staff--------------------------------------------------
That figure seems destined to climb even higher, thanks to spirited
development throughout downtown.
The Renaissance Partners group, for example, moved from Chicago to West Palm
in 1993 with the express intent of revitalizing downtown West Palm Beach through
development. When the group formed, yearly rents on Clematis Street were $6 a
square foot, according to partner David Frisbie. Now, rents hover around $50 a
square foot.
Today Renaissance Partners owns 1 million square feet of commercial,
residential and office space. The group has invested $100 million in downtown.
West Palm's overall revitalization project, including both private and public
investments, totals $1 billion.
Escaping from a busy afternoon at work, 86-year-old George Greenberg sits in
his office at Pioneer Bath and Linen, a Clematis Street business. He assumed
ownership in 1955. His father founded the business in 1912.
--------------------------------------------------
ENTERTAINING AN
IDEA
Destination created from 'demilitarized zone'
West Palm: Mayor's vision
revitalizes downtown
Reversing the flow of negative perceptions
Plenty to
do, all within walking distance
--------------------------------------------------
Greenberg remembers the bad times, the '70s and '80s, when shoppers migrated
to the malls even though he had the best products in the city. His clients
overseas thought he had the best products in the world.
But for years a man with customers in Saudi Arabia couldn't get people in his
own city to visit his store. They were afraid of downtown.
They are afraid no more. Once again, Pioneer has other stores surrounding it,
creating foot traffic and walk-up business. And once again, Pioneer sells to
people in the neighborhood. With all the downtown apartments popping up nearby,
Greenberg has plenty of new customers.
The revitalization process started with Graham's $2 million city-funded
Centennial Fountain at the foot of Clematis Street, which provided a centralized
gathering place.
To beautify the surrounding area, Graham and the city spent $12 million on
street and building improvements. Soon the area began to look safe, and a
high-profile police presence actually made it safe.
To reintroduce West Palm residents to their downtown, Graham and Renaissance
Partners initiated Clematis By Night, a weekly street party that became a wild
success with families and singles alike, inspiring Jacksonville's own Friday
Fest in Hemming Plaza.
--------------------------------------------------
SOMETHING
FOR EVERYONE: (Clockwise from upper left) Herb and Valia Maeolek of Milwaukee
hit the dance floor at the Liquid Room in West Palm Beach. -- Rick
Wilson/Staff--------------------------------------------------
To stimulate the downtown economy andthe shuttered storefronts, Graham
and the Downtown Development Authority endlessly courted unique retailers,
restaurateurs and nightclub visionaries, inviting them downtown to give
suburbanites options they didn't have at the mall.
To create a fine arts district just four blocks from Clematis, various
benefactors financed a string of new art galleries, a $30 million expansion of
the Norton Museum of Art and a $56 million, 1,500-seat opera house, which is
separate from (but close to) the $68 million Kravis Center for the Performing
Arts.
To create a critical mass of people near all the new retail and
entertainment, developers created and redeveloped urban apartments and
condominiums, as well as a forthcoming boutique hotel.
Finally, to direct even more interest downtown, Graham welcomed construction
of the privately financed CityPlace, a $550 million, 55-acre retail and
residential community three blocks from Clematis Street.
Graham figured that competition from the high-end marketplace would
ultimately help, not hurt, the businesses on and around Clematis, and she was
right. The synergy between Clematis and CityPlace capped off a spectacular
nine-year renaissance that established downtown West Palm Beach as a destination
for visitors from a 100-mile radius.
Although she had plenty of help, Graham embodies the new downtown more than
anyone else. Listening to the locals talk today, you'd think she could walk on
the water streaming from the Centennial Fountain that started it all.
Jessica Thornton, a 19-year-old West Palm resident, summed up public opinion
nicely, saying, "She's Superwoman."
Maksim Baron is a newcomer to West Palm, a transplant from Chicago. "I don't
drive," he says on a breezy South Florida night. "I'm a city guy."
At 21, he's also the prototypical young urban professional. He works for Bang
& Olufsen, the high-end stereo company that justd a CityPlace store
within steps of his apartment. West Palm's walkable, vibrant downtown was a
major factor in his decision to move.
"It's my six blocks, that's the key," he says. "Everything is here."
Baron goes to Clematis Street when he wants to party, and he never has to
worry about drinking and driving.
"I take my cab over there, and I go from one club to another," he says. "I
meet my friends over there. I can take my business clients there . . . it's
fantastic."
For personal reasons, Graham didn't seek reelection in 1999, although she's
considering a run against her less-popular successor, Joel Daves.
In the meantime, Graham works as a consultant for Urban Principles, a company
that helps other communities revitalize their downtowns, and she has some
thoughts on how city planners and developers are running Jacksonville.
"I do think they've done a good job in the last few years of positioning
[Jacksonville] to jump," she said. "And I know they're doing a lot of stuff
around the baseball stadium and that whole area. But my only concern is that
once again you're taking away from the urban core of your downtown, and then
everything sucks over there."
Graham, who lived in Jacksonville from 1966 to 1977, advocates urban renewal
using the existing street grid, starting in the core of the city and building
out from there.
She and other New Urbanists think pre-fab complexes like The Jacksonville
Landing (which literally backs up to the city), siphon street energy into an
inward-focusing structure -- just like malls do in the suburbs. The Landing also
perpetuates a mall mentality by leasing to overexposed national chains (Hooters,
Sam Goody, B Dalton) that are available elsewhere in the city.
New Urbanists would rather concentrate one-of-a-kind storefronts and edgy
entertainment venues into a few city blocks, making the district a unique
destination for suburbanites. Then they could turn upstairs space into
residential property, which would help the area become a desirable ground zero
for urban dwellers.
This, plus the roughly 65,000 people who already work downtown, might start
Jacksonville's heart beating again.
"I think some people think that people won't come downtown in Jacksonville,
that somehow Jacksonville is different," Graham said. "But I think they're
already proving it in other places that people will come back downtown. They're
coming back downtown in places that nobody would have believed. They wouldn't
have believed it here."
To be fair, the revitalized Clematis has some costs. It gets loud at night;
cleanup crews and police officers are expensive; and Daves, the present mayor,
has complained about pedestrian traffic clogging sidewalks and streets.
Still, Clematis Street entrepreneurs generally find bar crowds better than
crack dealers. And to merchants, a little extra trash indicates that people are
buying more, suggesting a healthy local economy. Indeed, most West Palm
residents seem to think crowds and trash are comparatively good problems to
have.
As Graham spoke in front of her fountain, a pedestrian ambled by and, without
breaking stride, called over to his former mayor, "Nancy, run against Joel,
dammit! Give us a break!"
Pleased but not flustered, Graham thanked the supporter and returned to her
conversation.
"We've proven," she later said, "in an area that was not great, that people
will come back if there's something to come back to."
