The heart of a state, encased in stone.

The average well-traveled person who looks at the remarkably uniform street wall below will likely draw a conclusion that the photo comes from Washington DC. After all, with the alabaster facades, the prosaic fenestration, and—most tellingly—the uniform height of all the structures, the photo could capture a typical avenue in the sprawling central business district (the “Golden Triangle”) of the nation’s capital.

But it doesn’t. The first hint that the photo derives from another city should be the complete absence of pedestrians in this streetscape; Washington would be full of people during daylight hours. The second clue should be the blog itself, which—as some readers are aware—has shifted its original focus, as I have moved for the time being to the Deep South. This photo comes from Baton Rouge, at the southern boundary of the Louisiana State Capitol Complex.


The map above demonstrates this to a certain degree. North Street, circled in red, forms the edge between the central business district and the large city park that hosts the Louisiana State Capitol and the many other associated government buildings. But the key word here is “edge”, which is clearly what the city’s designers have crafted and no doubt hope to cultivate further.

How do I know this is an edge? Just take a look at the buildings that front North Street. Here again is the north side with the Capitol Complex:
And here is the south side:
None of the architectural uniformity, no consistent height, no discernible design standards to speak of. Obviously this isn’t a coincidence: the developers and builders of structures on the south side of North Street clearly receive a much wider berth for designs, heights, building materials, and so forth. But why? Did the city planners zone the area specifically to encourage different architectural styles along the two sides of North Street? According to the zoning map, the classification applies to both sides of North Street: C5, for Central Business District. And according to the Unified Development Code, the specifications for this classification are remarkably simple: “This district allows office and commercial uses within the Downtown Development District without setback and parking requirements. There may be any uses in the preceding sections including restaurants, which involve the sale or serving of alcoholic beverages for consumption on premises.” Surface parking is a conditional use.

So why did the developers on the north side choose to build such similar looking structures? My quick visit to the Louisiana Tax Commission for a glance at the parish tax rolls reveals that no property on the north side of North Street from the riverfront to the 700 block falls under the assessor’s purview, suggesting that this is all tax-exempt public property. Since all other land to the north of these structures falls within the Capital Complex, it is safe to assume (without having spotted signage from my visit) that these pearly white buildings belong to the State of Louisiana. If I have chosen the tedious, clinical method of determining ownership, the typical passers-by can most likely come to the same conclusion without having to dig through several websites. They can just use their eyes.


It doesn’t require a great deal of scrutiny to conclude that these properties fall under one owner, and, as evidenced by this street wall, the persons at the State responsible for development have decided to emphasize that singularity of ownership through a purity and uniformity in design. The buildings don’t appear widely variable in age, further suggesting that they collectively fall under a broader master plan for the campus-like Capitol Region just north of downtown. And the fact that they look so different from the other side of the street helps to emphasize the bifurcation of uses, between commercial to the south and civic/governmental to the north. These urban design gestures are not subtle, but they don’t need to be. The planners and the state government have heralded from the highest office that North Street is an edge, visually embodied through the Capitol that protrudes in the distance.


I have featured this remarkable building before, one of the few high-rise statehouses and an enduring symbol of Louisiana, ranking up there with its state bird, the pelican, which famously wounds herself to feed her hungry young on the distinctive state flag. (Contrast this with the fleur-de-lis, which usually holds far greater cogency in French-descended south Louisiana.) The building seems to embody populist Governor Huey Long’s desire for Louisiana’s reinvention, as its construction under his term replaced the old “Louisiana Castle” that still sits as a museum on the other side of downtown, just south of the city center. Governor Long’s most enduring edifice remains the tallest state capital in the country, and it presides over the aforementioned complex, which includes gardens, an old Spanish fort, a lake, and, of course, these many ancillary government buildings. The photo below demonstrates how the structures along North Street form an architectural gateway, when viewed along the perpendicular Fourth Street, which terminates at the tower:

I generally shy away from design criticism, because, in terms of knowledge and experience, I’m hardly the best equipped to do so. So rather than focusing on the aesthetic details, I will at least speculate how well this edge (particularly embodied in the definition of “edge” from Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City) operates as a means of navigating and interpreting the visual cues that the built environment elicits. At the beginning of this post I remarked how much this row of buildings reminded me of Washington DC, where the strict design controls have promoted a certain architectural unity. Use Google Streetview to find a few examples in the downtown of the nation’s capital, or take these two examples, also seen below:


Washington has clearly enforced height limitations, so that nothing within the District can surpass the 555 feet of the Washington Monument. The law has imposed constraints on development—both public and private—unlike anything else in the country: the demand for real estate in the central business district of Washington is extreme, and most developers would undoubtedly hope to maximize their Floor-Area Ratio (FAR) by building up as highly as possible. But height restrictions prevent it, so a developer is likely to seek the only alternative by building out as much as possible, achieving the highest possible FAR through minimal setbacks as it extrudes a building’s massing through the original floorplate, which most likely coincides with the parcel lines. What does this mean in normal English? Buildings look thick and bulky—like the ones in the photo.

And how does this enhance the “readability” of Washington’s urbanism? Well, by many people’s perspectives (including my own), it doesn’t. Throughout downtown Washington, the visitor encounters one street after another with buildings of almost identical height and massing. Few structures have recesses—a developer cannot afford to sacrifice leasable space when land values are so high—so the buildings have nearly the same height and general cubic shape. This homogeneity makes it difficult to distinguish one block from the next. Navigating and familiarizing one’s self with the streetscape becomes particularly challenging and far less rewarding because fewer individual landmarks or design features will jump out. And, as anyone who has visited the city beyond a touristic tryst can tell you, DC’s central business district is unending. The inheritors of Pierre l’Enfant’s legacy—those who conceived and have continued to enforce height limitations—have created their own urban design challenge through these restrictions, which creative architects zealously confront, compensating for the monotony through embellished façades.

These deliberate photos I have taken of the north side of North Street in Baton Rouge may seem monotonous when divorced from their context, but I think this strategy of architectural homogeneity in Louisiana’s capital city may work a bit better. It is likely that some portion of the Unified Development Code requires that no building surpass the State Capitol in height, but beyond that, architects in Baton Rouge suffer few of the constraints imposed by high demand and ultra-valuable real estate. Setbacks and recesses are an option. The design parameters of North Street also do not apply across the downtown, or the city, or the region. Thus, the change in architectural character creates a powerful delineation, signaling to visitors that they are entering a new district, as seen in the earlier photo with the Capitol building in the background. The view from the opposite direction, at the foot of the stairs of the Capitol and looking onto the government buildings (or the downtown just beyond it) reinforces the visibility of the implicit edge.
It may improve over time as well, as downtown Baton Rouge continues to build upward, stretching above the structures to which the State has constrained their height.

The biggest negative, in my opinion, is the way this effort at monumentality weakens the overall street vitality. Unlike DC, pedestrians rarely crowd the sidewalks. The government district is divorced from the business district, while only the latter has restaurants, retail or most daily services. Thus, one major employment hub (the commercial/retail downtown) fails to earn any full advantage from the other employment hub (the State). The Capitol Complex is too sprawling to encourage many government workers to walk southward for lunch; Huey Long’s statehouse is so far away that I’m certain it must have a built-in cafeteria, or else its staffers would have little choice but to bring their own lunch. Baton Rouge downtown is thus a separation of uses writ large. It has a few lively blocks of restaurants, but with no thanks to the government workers, who would most likely only patronize the downtown stores after hopping in their cars. And who wants to deal with downtown parking during the weekdays at noon?

The scale and positioning of Baton Rouge’s most important civic buildings may help the city achieve a level of monumentalism that surpasses most other state capitols. These gestures certainly make the visitor aware of its importance within the state. The bold simplicity employed by the architects of the Capitol Complex, coupled with the sheer size of the surrounding green space, endow this part of city with an unmistakable centrality. But why would it boast such an elevated position in a nation famously suspicious of government? The grounds around the Louisiana capitol are hardly Versailles, but they do convey a power uncharacteristic of the citizens’ aspirations, many of which credibly align with a smaller, limited government intended to serve and represent the people rather than preside over them. (Incidentally, it appeared that a local rally for the Tea Party Movement was winding down at the time that I took the last picture.)

Both Baton Rouge and Washington (and many other capitals) have attempted to reconcile two somewhat contradictory forces: the urge to instill prestige in the sub-region that most clearly signifies the district governed; and the recognition that a grandiose display of plazas, gardens, and monumental buildings must still humbly preserve and embody democratic ideals. The National Mall of Washington DC is the United States’ front yard, and it remains the enduring image used to represent the country as nation-state with a clearly definable system of governance. The Capitol Complex achieves much the same purpose for Louisiana. As Baton Rouge fills some of its remaining vacant lots with new structures or civic uses—and as downtown DC becomes even denser with stout edifices packed along the broad avenues—the design of these cities will continue to evolve, with both agreed-upon successes and specious remedies to mistakes from the past. Most critical is that the urban design leadership continues to aspire to that balance between monumental grandeur and ecumenical representation.

When urban revitalization is nothing more than a façade.

Among the more controversial results of arbitration during urban redevelopment is the retention of a building façade, while demolishing everything that comes behind it because, presumably, the layout, traditional use, and possibly even the entire floorplate fail to meet contemporary needs. The growing practice of façadectomy has entered the general development parlance, though the closet etymologist in me hates this; after all, isn’t that word implying that it is the façade that is being removed?

Putting the incorrect suffix aside, historic preservationists have amplified their criticism in recent years of this practice. As Michael Lewis put it in a 2002 New York Times article:

“It is no coincidence that this innovation, which treats a building as graphic art, appeared in the heyday of Pop Art. But in its blithe indifference to the real essence of architecture, which is the poetic shaping of space, such a flaying is scarcely preferable to demolition. It leaves the image of the building, but not the building itself. They are to real buildings as dentures are to teeth.” By the same token, other theorists—generally from a more pro-development vantage point—assert that façadectomies assume no more or less of a cavalier attitude to design than the individuals who originally conceived these structures, since the office buildings of the turn of the 20^th century (which often now face threat of the wrecking ball) were little more than warehouses for commerce with a carefully conceived, meretricious exterior.

Inevitably, this process, which both developers and historians originally may have perceived as a last resort, has become a facile solution and sometimes even a knee-jerk response. It may easily satisfy the grassroots citizenry who want a great old building to survive, so that the only ones left wagging their fingers are professional preservationists—alas, never a group given the respect they often deserve in a nation whose prerogative often leans more toward continued redefinition by building anew. When the neighbors are happy because the essence of the building survives (as embodied by the façade) it gives the developers free reign to take liberties with the remaining 99% of the structure, resulting in some ungainly liberties with massing, scale, building material, and details. This proposed façadectomy of the original St. Vincent’s hospital in Indianapolis was announced just a few days ago and has drawn its fair share of ire on the blogosphere. I withhold further discussion of this proposed façadectomy because it is still just germinating, though I suspect it won’t be the last time this particular blog mentions it.

Instead, I show two particularly idiosyncratic—one might say cynical—examples of what appear to be façadectomies. The one below is at Washington DC’s Penn Quarter, midway in the 8^th Street NW block between E Street and D Street NW. Penn Quarter is a widely publicized revitalization effort at the far east end of downtown Washington that has included offices, theatres, restaurants, nightclubs, and residences, as well as the Verizon Center arena. It is also blocks away from the relatively new Walter E. Washington Convention Center, so many of the uses in this redevelopment cater to tourists and convention-goers seeking evening entertainment. 7^th Street in particular is a major entertainment destination. The example below appeared to be the loading dock for a large office building that fronts 9^th Street NW.

The picture dates from July of 2008. Hopefully a DCist who lived there longer than I did can tell me if this portion of the building has evolved beyond this stage, though it showed no evidence of a stalled project: the entrance on 9^th Street is clearly up and running. This effort looks to me as though, after the initial façade preservation, the builders surrounded the remaining structure with a molding and filled it with plaster of Paris, then used draftsman’s tools to trace the remaining missing features: window treatments, doorways, transoms. And they painted the space above the spartan Romanesque structure a soft blue—the sky, apparently. It almost makes the viewer forget that the only real doors are service gates for unloading merchandise, and the only other real apertures are the vents at the far left and far right of the picture. It looks like a work in progress, and unless the architect or developer was trying to making a witty postmodernist statement on the delicate temporality of urban reinvention, the message connoted here is unclear without being tantalizingly nebulous. Most passersby scarcely notice it; it has the same effect of one of the many street-level blank walls in redeveloped urban environments all across the country.

This façadectomy in the heart of one of Washington’s most emerging districts suggests to me the developer’s contempt for historic preservation as a discipline. No doubt preservationists have often earned a reputation as “no”-men and women, stymieing redevelopment efforts by drawing attention to projects whose demonstrable historic value could only be tucked away in a dusty vertical file. But such an interpretation casts a negative sheen on an artistic and scientific practice that helped salvage New Orleans’ French Quarter from an urban freeway and protected Philadelphia’s City Hall from devolving to a traffic circle. Their continued labors have brought awareness to what Americans have lost—painful victims of the wrecking ball such as New York City’s original Penn Station—and they have consequently helped promulgate an ideological platform under which laypersons can also more effectively organize and advocate to save treasured structures and sites. So it seems all the more tragic that the time spent around the negotiation table for the Penn Quarter redevelopment would lead to this. Is this really the best they could come up with? The most flattering thing that could be said is that it perceives preservation as a continuous streetwall with minor accents. But it’s far more likely to suggest far worse, such as “Here are the remnants of the more interesting buildings that used to stand here before we built a big plaster box.” It effectively relegates this block of 8^th Street to a service road, and that’s the level of ambiance it is likely to convey to pedestrians, who could—and probably will—just as easily opt for the next block down to reach their destination.

Memphis has taken an altogether different approach to façadectomy on what clearly is not intended to be an ancillary or service road. Beale Street is the music and entertainment main street of the city, effectively preserving its blues heritage for general tourist consumption. (My suspicion is that the “real” blues haunts frequented by locals or visitors who are more than dilettantes are scattered elsewhere throughout the city. But my familiarity with Memphis does not extend this far.) At any rate, a handful of buildings haven’t simply undergone a façade preservation treatment within their redevelopment; they received a façade preservation in lieu of a redevelopment.

All that stands are the façades, with girders holding them upright under which the less superstitious pedestrians stroll along. Behind at least one is a patio seating and a small stage for live music.

Stepping back a bit, one can see effectively the result of a more intact main street through the retention of the façade, though the girders are more than a minor distraction:

Lacking the development insight of an insider and unable to find verifiable data on what actually happened (only hearsay), I can only infer (the real point of this blog, actually). Perhaps it was a redevelopment effort that stalled, where the façadectomy was part of the plan but financing fell through. Maybe. But someone had the money to shell out for the interior patio—chump change compared to an actual building, I know, but financing shouldn’t be difficult on the most pedestrian-rich street in Memphis. Most developers would scramble for site control along Beale Street. Maybe internecine squabbling between preservation advocates and developers or landowners led to a stalemate, and this was the result. Something had to be preserved, and the streetwall is more critical from a main street aesthetics point of view. Maybe—and this is my own strongest guess—this area of Memphis, long an African American enclave, suffered greatly after 1967 race riots, the assassination of Martin Luther King , and black flight from the neighborhood as anti-segregation civil rights laws opened their opportunities to move in other areas of the city. Despite being declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966, Beale Street was depressed and largely abandoned until the 1980s, when a music-based revitalization campaign gathered full steam. The discerning eye can easily spot which buildings simply could not survive the disinvestment period—my suspicion was these façades were preserved only because they were the only salvageable element remaining, and landowners realized they could still earn potential preservation tax credits or other financial incentives if they held onto something. Witness this effort elsewhere on Beale Street:

Clearly the building to the right involves some degree of façadectomy: it would be impossible to fit a flight of stairs and a usable space on what survives of the third floor. The landowner retained the façade and took complete artistic license with everything behind it. Perhaps this is a noble effort when placed into the context of the building’s neighbors, which are either infill because the original structures were demolished, or the façades have been altered to such an extent from their 19^th century origins that they no longer bear any passing resemblance to the three-story façade still standing.

To its credit, Beale Street in Memphis manages to achieve the essence of a vintage commercial Main Street, which is less than can be said about the redevelopment of those Penn Quarter structures in Washington DC. The linearity and largely contiguous string of storefronts survive to cultivate a pedestrian oriented entertainment district. The scars of Memphis’ turbulent history remain visible along Beale and are glaringly obvious if one ventures even a block away from it, since shiny new sports arenas (and their requisite parking garages) flank this street—a total rupture from the urban fabric that might have stood at the time when the city genuinely served as the incubator for American musical legends. Beale Street is an artery of life surrounded on either side by what are two dead zones, unless a major sport event takes place.

Several blocks away, a façadectomy stands that may actually achieve a multi-dimensional expressive content that most other attempts lack: the National Civil Rights Museum retains part of the Lorraine Motel façade, including the balcony where Dr. King was assassinated. Lacking any largely agreed upon architectural merit, the motel’s earned its historic import solely as the site of this tragic event.

The majority of the motel was demolished for a total redevelopment into the museum, giving the visitor the chance to see a replica of King’s hotel room, and to view out upon the balcony where the assassination took place. This façadectomy injected literal semantic content for educational purposes—some may argue it sensationalizes or even trivializes the event by integrating it into a museum which ultimately serves as a major tourist attraction, but it shows an understanding of the employment of façadectomy for memorializing purposes, and it avoids merely embalming and petrifying a certain vague character. Although the doors and windows of the museum do not typically align with the original openings in the Lorraine Motel, the communicative intent of this museum/hotel façade combination is precise.

A defense attorney would likely have a field day with this argument I have made, because the evidence I have provided against façadectomies at Penn Quarter and Beale Street are outliers, scarcely representative of the more sincere efforts performed elsewhere. But I conclude with a defense of façadectomy, even if flies against the reasoning employed in the photographs. Rather than looking at the nature of preservation integrity, negotiators should focus on the full implications of a compromise—how do we quantify the sacredness of a building such that it cannot be altered. Many historic structures and sites remain so vigilantly preserved that disabled people cannot access them—preservationists determined that the slightest addition of a wheelchair ramp or lift will damage the integrity of the site in question. This hardly promotes the idea of democratizing truly sacred spaces by making them universally accessible. Many structures undergo ADA compliance with handicapped ramps, installing them as sensitively as possible in order to protect the historic character. Such solicitousness cannot be applied uniformly to all structures—arguments of historic importance are simply more compelling in some cases than others. It remains to be seen if a façadectomy of the St. Vincent’s Hospital (neither a National Historic Landmark nor on the National Register) in Indianapolis—if approved—will at least respect the integrity of the building’s face to the point that the front door provides an entry and windows actually offer a two-way view. But, if a fight begins for this and other structures, one can only anticipate that it will require an extensive documentation of the project’s historic merits before a façadectomy will seem—as it often does—to the slightly more disinterested general public as a perfectly reasonable compromise.

Retail failure: defying the patterns.

I recently had the chance to explore dying shopping centers in out-of-state locations that disprove the trends I observed at Lafayette Square and Washington Square Mall. In many regards, the retail decline at these two locations has advanced much further than the aforementioned two, and yet they remain open due to a resilient flicker of life in both.

The first, Summit Place Mall in Waterford Township, Michigan, benefits from several lengthy descriptions of its history on Deadmalls.com and Labelscar.com. The mall apparently originated in 1962 as a much smaller shopping plaza and then grew in phases over the years, until it began to decline in the late 1990s with the opening of Great Lakes Crossing nearby. I ran into no concerns with security during my visit to Summit Place in July of 2009. The inefficient, serpentine shape suggests the mall enjoyed abundance of space for developers to expand without any need for careful planning: even though it was devoid of crowds at the time of my visit, it still took me over ten minutes to get from one end to the other. In-line stores are over 95% vacant, and yet the winding corridors remain completely open. Mall management has, up to this point, made no effort to consolidate the remaining tenants to a specific location, so the few survivors are scattered. But the majority of the halls look more like this:

The few remaining open in-line stores that I saw contained a barber shop, an insurance agency, and a community theatre with an up-to-date schedule:

The only national retailers I saw were Kids Foot Locker and Deb, a discount fashion store targeting young women. What is remarkable about the Summit Place Mall—and what distinguishes it from the two struggling malls in Indianapolis—is that it still had, as of July 2009, three of its five anchor tenants:

Despite the fact that the mall is almost completely empty, these department stores have remained. (Kohl’s apparently only left in the spring of this year.) These are not third-tier or second-tier tenants, either: Macy’s, J.C. Penney, and Sears are all conventional department stores that typically inhabit perfectly desirable malls in middle-class areas. All three have direct access to the exterior parking lot (which is almost always the case), and though I saw few cars on the day of my visit, sales volume at these three stores is ostensibly good enough for them to remain open amidst otherwise catastrophic retail failure. The physical condition of the mall still appears strong. For example, this courtyard, though surrounded by vacant stores, remains competently if cheaply furnished:

It puzzles me how management would be able to continue operating this mall without hemorrhaging money, but a closer scrutiny reveals signs of cost-cutting: lighting is minimal except around active stores, the parking lot is pockmarked with holes and worn cement, and the moribund, 90s-era food court provides the only evidence of a security officer who admitted to me she had nothing to do:

But since malls usually earn little or no revenue from anchor stores while depending on the rent from in-line stores, how—and why—is this mall able to stay in business even this long? Unlike Lafayette and Washington Square in Indianapolis, the transformation of Summit Place Mall is inevitable, and apparently NAMCO Capital Group, the mall’s current owners, have asked the remaining in-line tenants to move to stores with exterior entrances, while the non-profits are vacating completely to make way for a major tenant retailer.

Whether or not the proposals of the mall’s general management come into fruition, it appears that these three major department stores are committed to their location. What about the existing socioeconomics of the area would explain why these tenants are not relocating or closing up shop altogether? My guess is that the source of the anomaly is the location within the broader metro area of Detroit. Summit Place Mall rests north of America’s most consistently depressed major city, away from Detroit’s troubles in the wealthy suburbs of Oakland County. While Detroit continuously ranks among the poorest and most crime-ridden of major cities, the suburbs in Oakland County remain consistently prosperous. However, metro Detroit has struggled far worse than the average urban region during this prolonged recession, largely due to the automobile industry’s woes, but also because the city may have been coasting on a particularly misleading real estate bubble, at least partially induced by the artificially inflated wages of jobs at the Big Three auto companies that were surviving as unreasonably leveraged corporate entities for far too long. While Detroit has scarcely enjoyed the prosperity of a peer city such as Chicago, for many years the home values were comparable; the most recent downsizing of the auto industry elicited an unpleasant recalibration of real estate to meet actual demand, and prices plummeted. Oakland County can coast on its comparative wealth, but Summit Place Mall, in affluent Waterford, also abuts the city of Pontiac (the municipal boundary is directly across the street on the east side of Telegraph Road). Pontiac is perhaps the oldest, most industrial, and most economically depressed town in an otherwise stable part of the metro area. Concurrently, Oakland County radiates a misleading prosperity because it is the wealthiest portion of a region that is continuing to implode, shrinking in population as job losses continue unabated.

My suspicion is that the radical, almost violent juxtaposition of wealth and deprivation culminates in a place like Summit Place Mall, where mall traffic and sales volume estimates don’t allow any reasonable conclusions that coincide with national retail study models. Therefore, these department stores perform deceptively well in an area which the retail otherwise shows every indication of being in steep decline. In short, the current life cycle of Summit Place Mall can be explained accordingly: metro Detroit is shrinking in population. If metro Detroit were growing, no doubt an enterprising developer riding the wave of easy credit would have built a new shopping plaza prior to the bust of 2007. This didn’t happen in Detroit because it’s been hurting for while, and these three anchors—Sears, Penney’s, and Macy’s—aren’t leaving Summit Place, which is close to both rich and poor areas, because there are no new locations for them to move to. Thus, they remain. Whether or not they survive another year at the mall—especially if it fails to redevelop in a major way—will largely determine whether my hypothesis is correct.

I have even less of an idea of what to make of L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, DC. An anchorless underground mall at the L’Enfant Plaza stop on the DC Metro subway system, its gold-plated interior suggests a period of prosperity far older than that of Summit Place Mall:

My visit may not fairly convey the real nature of this lifeless retail space, because the few visibly occupied shops were closed on the Sunday evening I was passing through. The preponderance of lunch places (the only notable chain is Au Bon Pain) suggests that the shopping place appeals to the lunchtime business crowd in the area only, a space flanked by such major federal government branches as Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Education. The density of office workers traveling through the area each day is formidable. More importantly, L’Enfant Plaza rests atop the convergence of four of the five principal subway lines running through Washington. Considering these factors, shouldn’t the plaza benefit from heavy pedestrian traffic that would transform these storefronts into prime retail space?

Clearly this is not the case, making this another deviation from the rules of good retail: location, location, location. By all estimates the location here should be terrific, but apparently most workers or subway commuters find alternatives when it comes to lunchtime shopping. It could be that the proximity of the Metro station almost makes it too easy to find shinier shopping plazas nearby; any similar shopping center in the Golden Triangle (the heart of DC’s central business district) offers a more eclectic variety in a setting that has been updated to meet contemporary standards of attractive retail. Daytime workers could hop on the subway and be at a much better location for shopping in just a few minutes. Thus, the problem at L’Enfant may derive from poor urban design choices in the 1970s era in which most of it seems to have been constructed: the area around L’Enfant Plaza is no more inviting at the street level than it is underground. The massing of these large institutional structures in southwest DC do not easily accommodate a recreational, white collar shopping/eating experience, since the roads are wide, distances between buildings are great, and a typical streetscape offers a monotony of office windows rather than expansive, retail-oriented fenestration. A facelift may be all it takes to revitalize L’Enfant Plaza as a shopping or lunchtime destination, but I suspect it would achieve little, because the built environment above these underground retail halls fails to harmonize with any of the flurry of activity that occurs below.

Summit Place and L’Enfant Plaza may challenge from the standards of mall decline put forth in earlier blog entries, but they reinforce the notion that retail is highly sensitive to seemingly infinitesimal shifts in people, structures, and the way the two engage with one another. Both spaces are screaming for redevelopment, but unless the person/place dichotomy shows the right level of calibration (or finds the right designer who can work to make them harmonize), they will continue to flounder in retail limbo.