Who knew that the City That Never Sleeps had a narcoleptic neighbor?

As I prepare for some upcoming significant changes to my blog, I provide a sort of “placeholder” article as make the final modifications, which I will soon publicize.  The placeholder motif extends to the content of this blog entry, where a window sign serves much the same purpose within its respective storefront.

It’s simply announcing a lunch special.  The restaurant itself?  As indicated at the top of the sign, it’s Bertucci’s, an Italian chain common in the northeastern US.  Though the restaurant’s target market is consistently suburban middle class, it seems as though Bertucci’s restaurants routinely occupy urban settings, in storefronts that directly face the street, rather than a sizable parking lot.  Such is the case with this location.

The sign itself isn’t really remarkable on its own terms.  The only thing that distinguishes it is a condition that these photographs could not begin to capture: the day of the week.  The advertisement for this lunch special is taking place on a Saturday morning, and it’s a good deal: good enough to suggest that this Bertucci’s is struggling to get people in the door on a quintessential weekend day without some real incentive.

Is there something wrong with this Bertucci’s?  Probably not, at least in terms of management and menu—after all, it’s a chain, and if chains lose their consistency for too long, they croak.  So why is this one deserted?  It might have something to do with its surroundings.

The translucent sheen of the contemporary buildings that flank this Bertucci’s comprises one of the busiest commercial centers in Jersey City, New Jersey—just a stone’s throw across the river from New York City.  The Garden State’s second largest city (just behind Newark), it’s also old, settled as a garrisoned Dutch village in the middle of the 17^th century. Yet you’d hardly be able to tell from looking at its coruscating skyscrapers in the Newport neighborhood, seen here in the photos, as well as Exchange Place, directly south of Newport along the waterfront.  It all looks like it could have been built last week.

But the focus for this blog is the larger Newport neighborhood.

Constructed across 600 acres on the old Erie Lackawanna Railway yards, Newport helped galvanize Jersey’s City’s resurgence after its 1986 groundbreaking.  Built as a master-planned, mixed-use community, the intent of its creator, Samuel J. LeFrak of The LeFrak Organization, was to intermingle high-rise residences with office, retail, and entertainment facilities.  The site capitalizes on its pivotal location, adjacent to the Holland Tunnel (with direct vehicular access to Manhattan), as well as I-78 and, not so far away, the New Jersey Turnpike. Newport is also easily accessible by the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, PATH, New Jersey Transit bus routes, and a ferry service across the Hudson River.

In other words, this is prime grade real estate.  And, by most metrics, it has transformed into a successful locus of commerce, while over a dozen apartment towers house the neighborhood’s approximately 15,000 residents.  By the 25^th anniversary of Newport’s establishment, the high density community also boasted a marina, waterfront parks (one with a beach), two hotels, schools,  and the Newport Centre Mall, a regional shopping center whose retail mix ostensibly caters to a broad and diverse socioeconomic base, spread across over 1.1 million square feet and three floors.  This Simon-managed mall also sits squarely within Jersey City’s Urban Enterprise Zone, thereby halving the sales tax rate on goods (only 3.5% instead of 7%) and waiving it altogether for clothing, which no doubt has helped cushion it from the steep decline so many malls across the country have faced.

But for all its amenities, Newport does not seem to have yet mastered the art of fostering a vibrant streetscape.

Sure, there are some people out.  And more people might have been impelled to stroll Washington Boulevard if it weren’t for the blustery conditions on an otherwise mild April morning.  But the fact remains that Newport has metamorphosed into a district with a high concentration of activity in an already active city (Jersey City’s density is well over 15,000 people per square mile, ranking it among the 30 most dense American municipalities).  Nonetheless, this Bertucci’s, sitting right on the neighborhood’s main arterial has to devise special sales to attract visitors to a weekend lunch.  This restaurant’s valiant effort to lure customers only serves to reaffirm what empirical evidence already suggests: that Newport is only lively from 8a to 6pm on Monday for Friday.  Then it hibernates.

The two sons of the late developer Samuel LeFrak strive to continue to his legacy through the family business, but they also hope to improve upon some of the past architectural missteps.  Visual evidence confirms that, aside from the spectacular views of Manhattan from the waterfront, Newport is generally not a terribly desirable setting for people to get out and walk around.  It doesn’t help that ungainly, austere parking garages sit between the occasional storefronts.

Or, for that matter, that one of the primary hotels fronting Washington Boulevard includes a big enough setback to allow for considerable vehicle loading/unloading, as well as some spaces for off street parking.

Obviously, the majority of American hotels—including those in our city centers—include these exact same driver-friendly features.  But the vast majority of American cities cannot boast the sort of multi-modal or mass transit access of Jersey City.  Such a configuration would be virtually unthinkable in Manhattan, and, to this day, even many smaller American cities—often with significantly weaker transit systems—would still include zoning stipulations that vociferously discourage off-street parking lots for hotels within the central business district.

Perhaps, however, the biggest hindrance to Newport ever succeeding as a round-the-clock active urban district is the land use just two blocks away from this photo series.

As Washington Boulevard continues northward of Newport Parkway (the road that rests directly above the Holland Tunnel to Manhattan), the vista changes completely.

Gone are the highrises, replaced by a series of suburban-oriented big box stores (Target, Staples, Best Buy) and replete with off-street parking lots.  The map below shows that this area in Jersey City offers a host of shopping options that one would just as easily expect to see in an automobile-oriented suburb.

Incidentally, this cluster of big box retail sits just south of a huge rail yard, easily visible on the map.  And north of the rail yard is the border for Hoboken, another densely populated waterfront suburb, but one with a vibrant commercial main street, filled with retail and pedestrians at all times of day.

(And, somewhat ironically, Hoboken’s thriving commercial corridor is called Washington Street—a contrast from Jerseys City’s inert Washington Boulevard.)

To be fair, Newport is hardly the alpha and the omega when it comes Jersey City’s retail centers.  The historic downtown to the west of the waterfront consists primarily of two to four-story 19^th century buildings, with numerous street-level storefronts along Grove Street and Newark Avenue.  Many blocks in the older, “real” downtown of Jersey City boast an activity level on par with Hoboken.

If anything, the uninspiring streetscapes of Newport most likely reflect the mindset driving development during the time of the district’s founding.  Back in 1986, when the LeFrak family’s vision first started to take root, much of Jersey City was down on its luck, having left the doldrums of the 1970s in its wake—a time when the city lost a staggering 14% of its population.  At that point, this inner-ring suburb of New York City had been shrinking ever since the Great Depression.  Though a far cry from its 315,000 peak, it has posted an increase in population for the last three decades.  But no one could have anticipated that in the 1980s, when The LeFrak Organization took a chance by purchasing land in a district of dilapidated warehouses amidst a field of creaky, neglected railroads.  At a time when even Manhattan’s future appeared murky, suburban living still seemed like the solution, so it comes as no surprise that the land uses surrounding LeFrak’s bold move still reflect the demands of a mostly suburban clientele.  The mall, the bargain department stores, the wide streets, the visible parking lots—all of these in the 1980s seemed like essential gestures to attract a population seemingly incorrigibly averse to urbanism.

The times are changing, but the remaining boxy Staples and Best Buy, monolithic amidst their generous parking lots, feel more like the final unpainted portions of a canvas, rather than a byproduct of lackadaisical urban design.  By this point, Jersey City’s escalating land values promise a higher and better use in the near future, particularly for a struggling national chain like Staples.  If the chain folds, it’s a matter of time before a savvy builder puts something with a higher Floor-Area Ratio in its place—that is, a taller building that yields a higher rate of return.

In the meantime, until the stronger economy forces developers to strategize on their urban design, Newport will continue to limp along.  It’s still a killer place for an office, and I have no doubt that Bertucci’s can fill its tables during a Thursday lunch.  But this abundance of youthful skyscrapers in an environment that remains steadfastly car-centered looks less like a satellite of New York City and more akin to Dubai.  (Or, at least, everything except the historic center of Dubai, which still remains pretty pedestrian friendly.)  No matter how great the density of jobs and residents, no matter how robust the mass transit, the fundamental character of the buildings and streetscape in Newport does not lend itself well to pedestrianism.  What it does yield, however, is a perfectly extreme application of urban transect modeling, in which the form skips several typological layers, going directly from an urban core zone (in the heart of Newport) to a suburban zone north of Newport Parkway, where the Staples first appears.  But Newport’s atypical renaissance places it at odds with most theories on urban form, even if the results are less than meets the eye.  If the developers make sharper decisions as they continue to invest in the area, maybe sometime they’ll be able to promote a level of energy to the streetscape that will convince people to walk around.  And Bertucci’s won’t have to deploy placeholder signage to make up for the sluggish weekend business.

The state house makes the laws; the state takes it for granted.

I’ve observed in the past how, almost instinctively, we come to expect a certain degree of monumentality in major seats of government, usually the prominent display of a central building that hosts those administrative offices.  In the typical Midwestern county seat, the courthouse provides that landmark—an elaborate masonry building resting in the center of a park-like square, often with a clock tower at its highest point.  Opposite the square on all four sides rest commercial and office buildings that date from the town’s original founding.  My earlier essay noted that Muncie, Indiana has essentially undercut its monumentality because it demolished the historic courthouse, replacing it with a brutalist-influenced concrete structure that offers no embedded landmarks or ornamental features to attract the eye.  As a result, Muncie has lost much of its “centered-ness” in its downtown, because no single remaining building offers a compensatory visual prominence.

But Muncie is a simply the political center for Delaware County, a mere one out of 91 other counties in the State of Indiana.  What if the visitor is looking for the most prominent landmark in a state capital—a higher tier of governance for a much larger, more populous body politic?  If a sightseer searches for a clear visual center in Trenton, New Jersey, this capital of the Garden State (with a 2010 population 8.8 million) is not likely to impress.

Despite several decades of population loss, Trenton is hardly a small city: it has stabilized in recent decades, down from its 1950 peak of 128,000 but generally locked at around 85,000 since 1990.  It is the state’s 10^th largest municipality and the hub of the Trenton-Ewing Metropolitan Statistical area, which includes all of Mercer County (with a 2010 population of over 360,000).  Trenton sits in an unusual position nearly mid-way between the teeming metropolises of New York and Philadelphia.  Up to the 2000 Census, Trenton belonged to the Philadelphia Consolidated MSA.  However, after determining that a preponderance of commuters linked Trenton and Mercer County more heavily to the New York City CMSA, the US Census Bureau shifted its alignment.  Now Trenton identifies as the southwestern arm of the nation’s largest metropolitan area, even though it is still geographically closer to Philly and belongs to the Philadelphia media market.  Perhaps most importantly, it is the seat of government of the nation’s 11^th most populous state and one that, by most measurements, ranks among the three wealthiest.

Nonetheless, Trenton assumes a low profile among national capitols.  Even most New Jerseyans will claim they have connection to the city unless the State employs them.  Perhaps it is no surprise that the New Jersey Statehouse does not immediately catch the eye.  But did it have to be quite so unobtrusive?

It sits quietly on West State Street, along the middle of the block, as evidenced by the Google Map below.

Unlike most statehouses in the country, it does not boast an expansive lawn or a bold processional; the setback from the street might be slightly more than usual, but it is still so modest that a motorist could drive right past the building without even noticing it.  (That’s what I did the first time I visited Trenton.)  The central cupola, a feature most capitol buildings in the US share, glitters on a sunny day, thanks to its gold finish.  But it’s not particularly tall and is situated far enough in the center of the massive building that it isn’t easy to see it from the State Street address.  It certainly doesn’t assert itself as a visual landmark.

At the very least, the opposite side of the street could offer some visual cues: a long boulevard or another state building of elevated visual prominence.  But it really doesn’t.

The handsome 18^th and 19^th century buildings (about two-thirds of which are in good condition) hardly suggest that the seat of the state’s government sits squarely across the street.  In fact, they conspicuously recall a conventional post-revolutionary residential neighborhood.

In Trenton’s defense, the space directly across the street from the cupola does host a modest plaza with a war memorial.

This opening ostensibly provides some decent views of the statehouse, but as this Panaramio photo indicates, the viewshed still isn’t great enough to see more than a portion of the sprawling edifice—one that grew in subsequent years after multiple expansions.  And this little plaza appears to be contemporary installation, evidenced by the blank walls on the buildings that sandwich it.

The impressions of the structures that previously abutted the centuries-old residences on either side of the plaza recall what used to stand there: similar residential structures that subsequent generations of Trentonians allowed to fall into neglect.  In time, demolition seemed like the best option.  Thus, this war memorial plaza is an afterthought—an insertion to fill a gap in the old building stock.  And it offers a modest view, but hardly an expansive one.  Even the winter’s denuding influence does little to enhance the views of the New Jersey State Capitol; this recent photo of State Street a bit to the east only reinforces how unobtrusive the building is.

A pedestrian can barely see that gold cupola.  Meanwhile, a back-seat view of the state house, from Lafayette Street to the southeast, is hardly better.

Sure, the cupola pokes out a little bit from behind the Revolution-era Hessian encampment in the foreground to the right, but the view is still widely obscured.  In fact, the only unobstructed view of the entire New Jersey State House is from the south looking northward, across the Delaware River, from the town of Morrisville, Pennsylvania.

I admit that I cheated in my first photograph in this essay, which also shows the Trenton skyline, but panned at a different angle that deliberately blocked the statehouse.  But even in the rare perspective when the structure features prominently, the photographer’s vantage point obviously requires quite a distance.  This photo took some effort on my part: it sits on a quiet residential street in Morristown, and I had to climb up a levee to get the photo.

And pivoting to see the levee, as well as the houses on the Pennsylvania side, which enjoy little real view of Trenton or the river from their front doors:

As capital cities go—both in the United States and throughout the world—Trenton is the antithesis of self-referential ostentation.  Founded in the first two decades of the 18^th century, this New Jersey city predates the nation’s capital by nearly one hundred years.  In his book Representing the State: Capital City Planning in the Early Twentieth Century, Wolfgang Sonne recognizes that George Washington famously commissioned the military engineer Charles Pierre l’Enfant to plan a centrally located capital for the young nation, along the banks of the Potomac River.  The French-born ally of American Revolutionists believed that the scale of such a city should parallel the political greatness of the state, so he modeled it after the Baroque details of Versailles.  After designing a hilltop government center, l’Enfant organized the remainder of Washington DC along a comprehensive grid system, punctuated with radial streets that emanate from the two principal centers: the U.S. Capitol and the White House.

Despite his devotion to a clearly articulated vision, L’Enfant died in relative obscurity, though his legacy enjoyed a resurrection a century later, when James McMillan, chair of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, proposed the comprehensive revitalization of Washington DC using European capitals as inspiration.  Jon A. Peterson, in The Birth of City Planning in the US – 1840-1917, identifies the overriding political purpose of the McMillan Plan: it transformed the city into a place of national identification, and he convinced President Theodore Roosevelt to adopt it.  This time around, the reinforcement of a political center inspired a number of other American cities to introduce a similar degree of monumentality to their downtowns, even though many of them weren’t even state capitals.  In the years following the McMillan Plan, the contagion of the “City Beautiful” manifested itself through smaller civic center proposals in Cleveland, St. Louis, Buffalo and (most famously) Chicago, as well as state capitals such as Hartford, St. Paul, Indianapolis and Providence.  The prevailing view at the time seemed to be that sweeping diagonals rebelled against the monotony of the gridiron, which was the street configuration to which the majority of American cities already adhered.  In addition, the insertion of a processional or a mall-like passageway offered lengthy vistas that would typically terminate at a site of manifest importance.

But Trenton has none of these.  When it became the state capital in 1790, it was already a mature hub of industry—not a preconceived political center, as is characteristic of Washington DC and a fair number of capitals to the west.  It is also the second oldest state house in continuous legislative use, a fact no doubt abetted by the fact that New Jersey is one of the thirteen original colonies (Annapolis, Maryland hosts the oldest house).  So is this humility characteristic of the colonial states, most of which already hosted a number of industrial centers at the time of US independence?  To an extent, it is.  Look at the New Hampshire state house in Concord:

The lawn over which it presides lends a certain majesty that elevates it in comparison to the New Jersey equivalent, but the structure itself is modest in size, and it mimics the town green commonplace in just about every New England city.

Attractive but conventional commercial buildings frame the other corners of the state house plaza:

But nothing about Concord as a state government center would strike the average visitor as sublime.

Concord and Trenton surely owe part of their restraint—their workaday industrial character—to a deliberate capitalist gesture borne out of anti-imperialist sentiment in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War.  Virtually every major European capital, though presumably organically conceived (rather than overtly planned like Washington DC), remains saturated with references to its monarchic heritage.  Particularly in western Europe, the majesty that totalitarian leaders imbued in their capitals contributes generously to their aesthetic appeal in this day and age—just as it obviously did for James McMillan a century ago, or Pierre L’Enfant another century prior.  The malls and plazas and palaces may evoke centuries of virtual despotism, but it was all done in such good taste that we overlook the subjugation upon which these magnificent vistas depend.  Scrolling across the US in search of its variegated state capitols, one can discern our collective conflicted relationship toward political power and urban design.

We probably never will sort this relationship out, as both political monumentality and references to the City Beautiful movement poke their heads up at random locations from time to time, through sundry downtown revitalization initiatives.  And while little Trenton may not ever hold its statehouse aloft, at least another landmark has more than helped the city retain some notoriety.  Just a hundred yards from the Delaware River levee is the US Route 1 bridge, and from that bridge is an uninhibited view of the neighboring “Trenton Takes” bridge, with the city skyline in the background.

The nighttime view, in which these letters (dating originally from 1935) glow a fierce orange, provides one of the most signature entrances to any city in the country and has won Trenton a ticket to immortality through features in numerous TV shows and movies.  Trenton itself may not seem to embrace the spirit of its parent Garden State—it is, after all, one of only two capitals that physically borders another state—but it cynically tips its hat to its industrial past and post-industrial grit with aplomb and (dare I say it) Jersey attitude.

Barricading a downtown...forever.

About two years ago on this blog, I glossed over the unusual skyline of Frankfort, Kentucky’s pretty, parochial capital city.   

As capitals go, it’s an oddity: one of the least populated out of all 50 (only Vermont, South Dakota, and Maine are smaller); it’s also located less than 60 miles from either of the two largest cities, Louisville and Lexington.  Though its role as the seat of the commonwealth’s government would require Frankfort to host a number of important public sector jobs, it has never attracted any other industries, which has kept its population firmly lodged at around 25,000 for the last forty years or so.  Prior civic leaders could have encouraged these commuters to move to the town permanently, but to its credit, Frankford has no need to be bigger: the population base to fill those government jobs is close enough either to the east or west at the two large “L” cities.  Lexington is only 25 miles away.  As Kentucky state employees have described to me, “Frankfort doubles or even triples in population during the work week, empties out promptly at 5 pm every weekday, and tumbleweeds blow across the downtown on the weekends.” It is the perfect embodiment of the US Office of Management and Budget’s neologism of a micropolitan area, referring to an urban cluster with a population between 10,000 and 49,000 that shares many of the characteristics of a larger metropolitan area, particularly in its enviable ability to attract commuters from a particularly broad radius.

Considering its role as the engine of the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s government, it should come as no surprise that Frankfort’s downtown shows evidence of a considerable amount of investment.  The remarkably intact commercial center has scarcely any old buildings that are vacant or in disrepair; a careful inspection suggests that very few have even faced the wrecking ball.

The old center of Frankfort comprises little more than 10 blocks, but the overwhelming majority of these blocks seem well-preserved.  Lacking any major private industry, Frankfort doesn’t have so much to worry about during a severe recession.  While the number of government employees may expand and recede in relation to the Commonwealth’s budget (or the dominant political party) the chances of it leaving the city altogether are virtually nil—thus, the city’s reason for being has kept it relatively stable and prosperous, unlike many similarly sized cities in the Rust Belt, whose fortunes collapsed in the last 50 years with the departure of a principal manufacturing employer.  And Frankfort offers a stark contrast to the rural landscape just 50 miles to the east (just beyond Lexington), in which the lumpy Appalachians hug economically devastated, ramshackle old mining villages or the impoverished clusters of trailer parks in the unincorporated wilderness that surrounds them.  Frankfort looks fantastic by comparison, and the emblem of Frankfort’s continued prosperity presides on a hillside several blocks southward, on the opposite side of the Kentucky River from Main Street:

The cupola of the Statehouse asserts itself confidently from a lookout point along a western drive down into the valley that hosts the oldest part of the city.

With an excellent stock of 19^th century buildings in a compact little downtown bisected by the lazy Kentucky River and surrounded on all sides by bluffs or cliffs of limestone, Frankfort could muster up as much cachet as Santa Fe, another modestly populated capital.  But Santa Fe punches above its weight class, attracting hordes of tourists not just from in state but from across the nation and globe.  Despite its beauty, Frankfort is almost completely unknown among even the neighboring states, and the average Kentuckian’s most likely first (and only) encounter with the city is on an elementary school field trip to the Center for Kentucky History—if they even get that.  Even the surrounding Franklin County has only grown in single digit percentages in the intervals between the last three decennial censuses.  In short, Frankfort has the aesthetic potential to be a bucolic artist colony or a premier weekend getaway, but it resigns itself to an epicenter of drab bureaucracy.  Downtown isn’t completely dead—it has a few attractive bistros, some bars, a chocolate shop, and more law/accounting offices than you can shake a stick at.  Obviously the thousands of government workers need some places to eat and run the most routine of errands.  But aside from those conventional 40 hours in a week, the heart of Frankfort is dead on the weekends.  The pictures below provide evidence:

Not a lot of people out for the closing hours of a weekday.

Most of the old buildings look cared for, but curtains are often drawn to hide service-oriented jobs that don’t depend on window displays the way retail does.

St. Clair Street, the most impeccably maintained block in the entire downtown, boasts a smartly improved and manicured streetscape, as well as an active old motion picture palace.  But elsewhere on the block, the whitewashing can only conceal the high vacancy levels up to a point.

And even a city that never saw its major industries close—it never had any—still shows evidence of a commercial center that is struggling to remain viable.

Somehow, in the life cycle of this town, a rupture has emerged.  A modest, well-maintained, economically stable community nestled in a verdant Appalachian valley has achieved to the unthinkable: near perfect banality.  This small city, though idiosyncratic in so many ways, is likely to strike most visitors as completely average—as unremarkable as a dinner at Bob Evans Restaurant. Frankfort’s shortcomings show no indication of a failure to invest, or even a failure to think big: the problem has nothing to do with the historic commercial center depicted in the photos above. It’s just fine.  The problem, implied in my previous Frankfort blog but expounded upon this time, becomes far more evident in some of the views of the city from a farther distance.

Approaching Frankfort from the north, a lone skyscraper obtrudes from the Kentucky River Valley more confidently than the limestone bluffs that flank it.  It is the Capital Plaza Office Tower—at 28 stories, it is the tallest public building in Kentucky and was the tallest structure outside of Louisville from 1963 until a building in Lexington surpassed it in 1987.

Even from a distance, a structure this tall seems anomalous in a city this modest, and it is no less jarring when up close.  At the time of its construction, the utopic “towers in the park” paradigm espoused by influential architect Le Corbusier had taken hold of urban America; many city governments supported the construction of towering structures surrounded by a landscaped plaza, most notoriously as the large-scale public housing aftermath of urban renewal.  But here in Frankfort, the Capital Plaza Office Tower houses employees of the commonwealth’s government, ultimately dwarfing the classically inspired Statehouse with this austere verticality.  And, though the Tower manages to eschew the criticism of “concentrating the poor” that has dogged most high-rise housing projects, it certainly is no better than Chicago’s now demolished Robert Taylor Homes at connecting with the surrounding landscape.  Both have been lifeless.  Walking the Tower’s grounds confirms any further suspicions, and I took these photos during the noon lunch hour on a working weekday.

If you think it’s busy in these photos, you ought to see it in the early afternoon on a Saturday.

From an organizational behavior standpoint, the Capital Plaza Office Tower is probably efficient: it concentrates a variety of loosely related government agencies and fosters easy interaction among them.  Commuters coming from homes in Louisville and Lexington can wend their way past the historic center of Frankfort into the underground parking of this tower and then hop right from the car to the elevator, in order to reach the floor they need.  At lunch they can partake in the building’s cafeteria—since it hosts so many people, dining options should be considerable.  It offers a fair amount of service-oriented shopping as well.  No need to leave the building.  The average commonwealth employee can thus navigate through a full week in Frankfort—or two, or three—without ever directly experiencing it.  From the perspective of civic leaders, that might be a good thing.  But it certainly doesn’t help to foster connectivity between government workers and the proprietors of downtown businesses.  Skyscrapers may help concentrate people, but if the urban design doesn’t allow for an occasional “discharge” of economic activity in the world outside their four elongated walls, they might as well be standing in the middle of the Gobi Desert.

A much more recently constructed government building next door suggests that the architects and developers have learned a bit from those earlier mistakes…at least slightly.

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet may hulk over everything else except the neighboring tower, but at least the structure feels a bit more inviting.  Glass walls convey openness and hospitality, and building nearly hugs the lot line—no moribund parks and plazas surrounding it.  The few pockets of open space seem to encourage a certain level of association with the rest of Frankford, even if it amounts to watching traffic pass by while sitting at a shaded table during lunch.

Nonetheless, the building dwarfs and presides over everything else, leaving little room for integration between the old and new.  It might not be as uninviting as the Capital Plaza Office Tower, but it sure seems out of scale for a community of this size.  The safe “corporatecture” and the absence of any real mixture of uses makes the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet building appear (at least to me) like a prototype for a convention center.  But no, Frankfort already has one of those, just across Mero Street from the other structures.

It’s as discouraging as just about every other windowless convention center from this time period, and it seems to be keeping with the notion I blogged about earlier ,that convention centers seem speciously designed under the fallacious assumption that just bringing lots of people into a shared space is good enough to energize a downtown.  Wrong again.

Thus, poor Frankfort has three massive publicly funded structures within a stone’s throw from one another, placed on the other side of the tracks from downtown, thereby ensuring the relationship between the two as almost adversarial.  (Even the Statehouse is quite removed from everything else.)  Though my earlier Frankfort blog post acknowledgedthat architect consultants have recommended demolishing the Capital Tower, but it doesn’t appear that the idea has gained much traction.  Aside from the taxpayer cost of demolishing a building that remains in good condition, the relocation possibilities raise a number of questions.  Where would these workers go?  Do the second floors of all those pretty downtown buildings have enough vacant space to hold everybody in the Tower?  Is it even a good idea to decentralize from an efficiency standpoint?

Thanks to the violent dichotomy between old central Frankfort’s handsome array of commercial buildings and the massive institutional structures nearby, Frankfort’s skyline is nothing if not weird.

(The Kentucky State Capitol building would be just to the right of the photo, but the panorama function on my cheap camera doesn’t work so well.)  Unfortunately, none of the planners, architects and civic leaders have been able to elevate the city’s weirdness to something bigger than the individual parts; they have failed to mythologize it.  Perhaps these successive urban design misjudgments will forever relegate Frankfort to its humdrum status as a provincial capital that meets but never exceeds its potential.  But such an assertion makes implicit use of words like “always” and “never”; I’m not so fond of those.  Frankfort may someday ally with an ambitious leader who sees a creative and translatable opportunity amid the city’s disjointed parts.  However, with a track record for building itself out of the doldrums as poor as this one, it may be wise to keep architects, engineers, and designers in general as far as possible from an economic development team.