Further proof that car-culture is a religion.

It doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to guess that one of the greatest concerns in retaining the viability of historic urban centers involves the accommodation of parking. Ask anyone what his or her opinion of X downtown is, and chances are excellent that the issue of where to put the car will arise within a few sentences. Planners, urban theorists, public administrators, and business leaders have all stood on the soapbox to assert their positions on the parking debate. And I’ve blogged about multiple times in the past—not yet ad nauseam (at least by my own standards), but let this be a warning: the topic provides such fertile ground for discussion that I have stashed away many other musings for well into the future.

During a recent visit to the picturesque town of Lewisburg, in southern West Virginia, I was taken by a sign that announced a collaboration which is disarmingly rare.

The local United Methodist church shares its parking lot with the City. It’s not large, as the photos below indicate:

But it remains the largest surface lot in this community of 3,600, and the partnership is undoubtedly a boon for the local chamber of commerce. Unlike the majority of American towns of this size, Lewisburg has discovered a means of reawakening its aging main street, with a large number of commercial buildings surviving to house restaurants, galleries, and specialty grocers.


By this point, the picture-perfect, historic small-town main street—nearly always filled with eclectic shopping that is of little day-to-day use—is almost as much of a cliché as the moribund town center that has witnessed the shifting of its commercial heart, over to the big boxes stores at the automobile-oriented periphery. But the fact remains that the empty main streets outnumber the eclectic ones by at least ten to one, and Lewisburg’s civic leadership is hardly complaining that the its town attracts artists, retirees, and wealthy tourists from larger cities such as Washington DC or Charlotte, many of whom stay at the Greenbrier resort nearby. Only a few other towns in the area can claim any outside attraction whatsoever. But the rare towns like Lewisburg will actually find themselves coming up short in terms of parking, if not for some off-street provision. Where do all these visitors put their cars?

It’s not hard to build a speculative narrative on the terms of the arrangement between the City of Lewisburg and United Methodist Church. In the past twenty years or so, the main street began to reawaken, no doubt in part because of the picturesque setting, coupled with a largely intact building stock. Entrepreneurs with an artistic flair found an optimal setting to ply their trades, thanks to commercial real estate that had faltered after the nearby Interstate 64 vacuumed all the conventional businesses away from Washington Street, the principal artery, and into strip malls and big boxes, at the juncture of U.S. Highway 219 and the aforementioned interstate (where chains such as Wal-Mart, Bob Evans, and Arby’s remain today). The Greenbrier golf resort provided a reliably moneyed clientele nearby, while the New River Community College and West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine contributed a captive student population that added to the town’s diverse client base, with a crowd that is more likely to demand certain businesses remaining open in the late evenings, after classes have ended. But Lewisburg’s success as a tourist center faced a growing threat through the scarcity of parking during the seasons when the town was most popular. Clearly no mass transit is likely to serve this rural area any time soon, so what could the town do? It would have been imprudent to sacrifice any more buildings in the National Register Historic District to transform into parking lots, and the most obvious space where traditional architecture had clearly already met its demise—in the photo below—seemed far more aesthetically lucrative as a pocket park than a parking lot.

(In a town such as Lewisburg, aesthetics could trump an obvious source of revenue like an off-street parking facility, because the character and physical appearance matter just as much.)


The solution? Lewisburg United Methodist came calling, and the City and Church forged an agreement. As I’ve mentioned before, churches are often an unfavored presence in a retail environment, not because they make bad neighbors, but because they keep odd hours: they generally fail to draw any patronage during the weekday 8 to 5 time frame that other businesses remain open. But this makes it even more perfect for the church to lease its parking lot to the City, because the parking needs of the congregation and visitors to the town rarely will rarely impinge upon one another. The relationship could hardly be more symbiotic: mainline Protestant churches such as United Methodist are often facing declining membership and could use the cash, and the agreement prevents the city from seeking costlier parking solutions through a purely private provider. It’s hard to charge for public parking in a town the size of Lewisburg in rural West Virginia; the goal of the City is not revenue through parking, but sustained tourism by letting the visitors get out of their cars.

Lewisburg United Method Church’s presence in the town has proven serendipitous. This parking agreement between the two entities should in no way violate the Establishment Clause since it has nothing to do with the exercise of religious faith; a church-state separation controversy would barely register on anyone’s radar. Such a solution may fall exclusively in the domain of small towns, since many urban churches in large cities lack parking lots altogether and parking demand is but one of many barriers to downtown desirability. But in niche markets such as this, the public/non-profit partnership offers humble means of addressing a problem that could help prolong the prosperity of both Lewisburg and its coterie of Methodists for many years to come.

E-flatulence.

I will likely be away from the blogosphere for a few days starting tomorrow, as I embark on a brief road trip across rural Appalachia. In anticipation of these travels (which will inevitably require me to visit a few gas stations), I offer this classic marquee in front of a station on the outskirts of Baton Rouge:


Surely the irony isn’t lost on the manager of this franchise. Or could it be owned and operated by another immigrant entrepreneur (as is often the case with gas stations), whose limited English allows him or her only to see promotional opportunity and not implied dyspepsia?

Speaking of promotional opportunities, it has recently occurred to me that my blog is ugly. I have experimented briefly in the past with changes in appearance, but I have never been satisfied with them and they usually had a blink-and-you-miss-it life span. Expect that within the next few weeks the page will be getting a more permanent face lift. The spirit and mission of the blog will remain unchanged.

And, as always, thanks so much for your responses. When all goes well, I get comments forwarded to my e-mail address immediately, so don’t think that if you respond to a much older post that I will overlook it. I sure try to catch everything, and will continue to do so as I begin to roll up the sleeves for some refinements on older blog post ideas, coupled with new ones.

Full parking lots, not-so-full pews.

The robust and always broadening cultural pluralism of this country almost guarantees that issues of faith will enter the public limelight on a regular basis. Scarcely a day passes where religious and political concerns don’t overlap, but that is the subject I will consciously avoid in this blog. I’m far more interested in exploring whether or not religion has any tacit bearing on in how people spatialize themselves, or how they maneuver within a larger settlement pattern, as guided by religious principles. Such an examination cannot help but investigate demographics, and, in doing this, will also inevitably reference sociological implications of certain religiously based demographic inquiries. But I hope to sidestep the relations between politics and religion—such a hydra is beyond my ability to wrestle, and hopefully my commenters will tell me how good a job I’m doing at eschewing political partisanship. The built environment offers enough interesting manifestations of religious faith on its own.

Just as the nation collectively will not and probably should not ever be able to divorce religious considerations from their bearing on self-governance, we also seem fixated with how religiosity continues to evolve. Whether it’s the introduction of a new faith through immigration, the creation of one by an influential guru, the dissolution of another, or an emotional schism within a single denomination, religious matters preoccupy us. Even a newspaper targeting a relatively secular part of the country—the New York Times comes to mind—still regularly offers a section on Religion and Belief, no doubt because it sells ad space and commands readers, at least as much as any major print media is finding an audience in this desperate time for the industry. I am certain that other organizations perform more probing macro-level studies of religion in America, but the most thorough of the widely known ones that I’m aware of is the Pew Charitable Trust, whose Religion and Public Life Forum aims to scrutinize issues of personal faith, with particular consideration to how they reflect on the distribution of the population.

I couldn’t help but ponder over my previous glances at Pew and other religious surveys when I noticed the parking lot of a mainline Protestant religious denomination in an outlying, suburban section of Indianapolis, shortly after the church’s services had ended:


I’m capturing about two-thirds of the parking lot through these photographs; it holds a little over forty spaces. Clearly not a big one. But the tight-knit congregation manages to fill it on most Sunday mornings (a few members had already left at the time these photos were taken). Yet on most given Sundays, the sanctuary remains only about 30% occupied. This discrepancy by no means intends to discredit the leadership of the church, or the members themselves. Many parishioners have been committed to the church for decades, and they come from a diverse array of professions, backgrounds, and ages. But one member made a critical observation to me, which I will paraphrase: “We get the same number of cars in the parking lot that we did twenty years ago. The only difference is those cars were full of four or five people, and now most of them hold only one or two.”

The conclusion one can draw is simple: large families of parents and children used to go the church, and now most of the kids have grown up and moved on. Many of them, no doubt, have left the area; Americans are famously predisposed to relocation. In his Restless Nation: Starting Over in America, James M. Jasper exalts the American thirst for self-actualization through routinely changing our domestic surroundings; we find a new home, on average, once every five years, and in a typical year, 20% of Americans move, far more than the Dutch or Germans (4%), the British (8%), French and Japanese (10%). Jasper asserts that “Geographic mobility has been a constant in American History” (p. 72). No doubt these numbers—the highest rates in the non-nomadic world—have lagged a bit in recent years due to the recession, but the 2010 long-form Census surveys that ask a householder’s place of residence five years ago will surely reveal similar trends.

That’s fine, and it should come to no surprise to anyone who has seen a dear friend or family member grow to adulthood. But how does that reflect our perpetually diversifying assortment of religious faiths? Did the aforementioned church in Indianapolis shrink solely because the kids moved away from home? What about the ones who stayed? According to the last year’s Pew study Faith in Flux, slightly under half of Americans change religious affiliation at least once in their lives. Of those 44% surveyed who do not currently belong to their childhood religion, the largest group (15%) were raised Protestant but have switched to a different Protestant faith. Other shifts, such as those raised Protestant and now unaffiliated (7%) and those raised Catholic and now Protestant (5%) clearly trail in influence. How does this play out in church memberships? The mainline Protestant denominations (such as the one featured in the above parking lot) and the Catholic Church are feeling the biggest pinch. A recent article by U.S. News and World Report reveals that the United Methodist Church has watched its membership drop one-fourth over the past few decades, and the percentage of Americans affiliated with Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and the United Church of Christ has dropped from 19% in 1990 to less than 13% today. Conversely, the nondenominational and unaffiliated Christian churches have grown astronomically over that same time frame, from 200,000 to over 8 million. This statistic suggests that the preponderance of the 15% who have switched from one Protestant faith to another did not move from Lutheran to Presbyterian, or Methodist to Episcopalian; they shifted away from those denominations altogether.

The growth of the megachurch deserves its own report, which I hope to engage in when I have accumulated better photographs and more research. But the spatial distribution of the mainline Protestant versus the nondenominational only requires a careful eye: overwhelmingly the older central cities host the Lutherans and Methodists—or the Catholics—and the low-density suburbs are home to the nondenominational, often Evangelical houses of worship. And, by and large, old central cities have a flat or declining population and the newest suburbs, particularly the exurbs, enjoy the bulk of a metro region’s population growth. A fair amount of a church’s vibrance may dependent on its bricks and mortar: the exurbs, with their affordability, relative homogeneity, and usually superior school systems (often a reflection of that homogeneity), attract the younger families, who left the roost for a home five miles away from where they grew up—that aging neighborhood where Mom and Dad might still live. It’s a match made in heaven (pun obviously intended) for Evangelical start-ups, because the land to host their spacious, often unadorned structures—and the parking for all those the full minivans—is much cheaper in the low density purlieus. Meanwhile, the mainline churches near downtown struggle to operate their aging, expensive-to-maintain facilities. And even though their attendance is plummeting, they still have parking problems—partly because they never had many spaces to begin with, but also because the number of cars is not shrinking. Vehicles going to the local Presbyterian church are just filled with middle aged and elderly folks in pairs or solo.

How does this Protestant shift play out in a city like Indianapolis? Drive around downtown, just as you would in Lower Manhattan or Tupelo Mississippi, and you’ll see the venerable, ivy-covered brick or stone tributes to European heritage in those Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches. Some of them are functioning quite capably: the Episcopal Christ Chruch Cathedral operates from an impeccably maintained structure sitting respectfully along Monument Circle, in the heart of the Indianapolis. Other mainline denominations have been less fortunate.


This French Gothic sentinel presides over Meridian Street just a few blocks north of the Circle. It housed the Methodist Episcopal Church when first constructed in 1906, but the church departed in 1947, long before the documented shrinkage of mainline Protestant denominations. In fact, the entire denomination succumbed to a merger with what eventually became the contemporary United Methodist Church. The church building housed Indiana Business College until spatial constraints required the college to seek a new campus in 2003. How has this Indiana limestone institution survived into the twenty-first century?


Condos. Developers removed the back quarter of the building and provided a fenestration reflective of the 27 units that Meridian Arch now contains. Other angles demonstrate the reuse more effectively:




The sign in front of the structure promoting the condos suggests a wide price range for the units, from the high $100,000s to $900,000s. My suspicion is that the priciest units enjoy the vaulted ceilings and arched windows with restored grillwork lintels. Cheaper ones are in the new section in the back. Orthodox preservationists may shake their head and dismiss this as a tacky façadectomy, but fellow blogger INarchitecture recognizes (in far more artful words than I could hope for) the respect that adaptive re-use architects Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf Inc conferred onto the original structure, echoing some of the design details without attempting an ersatz replication of the aesthetic. The magnitude of the alterations forfeited the structure’s eligibility for the National Register, but it remains a viable building, boosting downtown’s residential population and retaining more than 50% of the original structure. If the old Methodist Episcopal Church building had found new life as an office, a fitness center, another school, or (Lord willing) a church, it may be easier to wag one’s finger at the current reinvention. But the most likely alternative, if not for the adaptive re-use into condos, was for the building to suffer demolition.

One can hope that this other church just two blocks away will enjoy a similar resurrection.

Yet again, another mainline Protestant congregation, the First Lutheran Church. But this one has sat padlocked and vacant for at least a few years; I can find virtually no information on its history. A few years ago, several developers had eyed the property with the hope of echoing the Meridian Arch condo redevelopment, but nothing materialized as the economy tanked, and downtown owner-occupied housing suffered a particularly devastating blow. Its fate seemed murky until the past few weeks, when Halakar Real Estate placed the sign out front (visible in the photos), suggesting that the perceived market for some form of adaptive re-use may have improved.

In both of the above examples, the congregations that closed their doors could not find a new religious group to buy or lease the space. Are these two defunct downtown churches indicators of the reduced demand for houses of worship in central cities? Are they a bellwether of the decline in mainline Protestant denominations in general? Downtown Indianapolis is not particularly declining; its economic health and diversity of activities are more confident than they have been in over half a century. The U.S. News and World Report article suggests that Lutheran and Episcopal and Presbyterian leadership are seeking new ways to reinvent themselves to compete with the more relaxed, contemporary approach to praise and worship by which the large evangelical and non-denominational churches are flourishing.

But there’s a possibility these leaders could be neglecting the advantages that are percolating in their front yards. Here’s a broad-brush generalization, tiptoeing around politics as much as possible. These European-descended mainline churches may still resort to age-old Eucharistic services, antiquated hymns, and beautiful but drafty old buildings that, as a friend of mine said, “smell like the 1950s”. But their interpretation of Scripture is often notably worldly, and Pew surveys reveal that the mainline Protestants are far more open than most Evangelicals to the notion that other faiths can also lead to eternal life. The growing populations staking claims in urban condos such as Meridian Lofts tend to be well-educated, affluent, childless, and desirous of a culturally diverse community and classic urban environment, which they may prefer over low crime or superlative schools in the suburbs. These yuppies and empty nesters are willing to live blocks away from the soup kitchens and homeless shelters—the same ones that the mainline churches often operate. This by no means intends to criticize the nondenominational churches in the suburbs—quite frankly, the Evangelicals have done a far better job at assessing the confluence of demographics and theology and assigning it a place on the map. Meanwhile, the population base most likely to be attracted to the Weltanschauung of an Episcopal or Lutheran church is literally moving right next to these dusty old buildings, if their not staking claims on the ones that their church leaders have already abandoned!

All observations of America’s past suggest that we will continue to exhibit wanderlust and crises of faith well into the future. But only some religious groups will successfully move in tandem with our suitcases and choir robes. The great churches of yesteryear have a few choices: they may become showcases for adaptive reuse; mausoleums for extinct denominations; or laboratories for the resuscitation of spiritual practices that find their second life in a constituency that sees urban centers as fashionably modern and suburbs as old and stale. Hopefully the Episcopalians and Lutherans will find away to get these people, their own neighbors, into their net—they might not even have to offer them a free parking space.

Improving urban bikability amounts to more than just spinning wheels.

It’s not just for the Dutch anymore. The inclusion of infrastructure to accommodate bicycles has, at least in the US, finally entered the mainstream, most likely far later than in most other developed countries that are less dependent upon the automobile. While some large American cities introduced segregated bicycle facilities as early as the 1970s, it did not become a widespread urban infrastructure improvement practice until the 1990s. Today, nearly every large city has at least some form of bicycle accommodation, whether in the form of bike lanes, multi-user paths, grade-separated sidepaths, or another means of visually identifying a right-of-way in which bicycles achieve some recognition. It would not be particularly bold of me to assert that bicycle infrastructure has become a popular means of instilling a city with “progressive” cachet—a badge worn with pride by local boosters who can claim to recognize what was a fringe group thirty years ago, before bicycling enjoyed a widespread reawakening. Organizations like the Bicycle-Friendly Communities Campaign announce annual awards to a new league of cities each year, bestowing Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum to municipalities that have made a clear effort to make bicycling easier through public works investments.

The cynic in me suspects that some of these widely proliferating bicycle initiatives border on insincere kowtowing to a certain population in order to elicit the impression of urban coolness more than a genuine desire to make bicycling safer. Why? Because organizations like the League of American Bicyclists have certain numeric benchmarks that cities can strive to achieve in order to earn the coveted recognition without necessarily being particularly useful. Thus, a city’s public works department may install bike lanes along the margins of roads that otherwise remain neither desirable nor safe for bicyclists, such as the frontage roads around the Philadelphia International Airport that I mentioned months ago in my extensive post on Complete Streets. Cambridge, MA has resurrected Frankenstein’s monster through its bike network, stitching fragments of lanes and sidepaths wherever the road offers sufficient space, without bothering to make the lanes contiguous or responsive to demand. The result is an inconsistent patchwork of lanes that come and go, which may be more hazardous in some locations than leaving them out altogether. Indianapolis, meanwhile, has created a system of numbered routes marked by specialized signs (not the generic green and white ones), yet none of these “routes” correspond to any infrastructural improvements that might help bicyclists. The City thus spent a fair clump of money spent on cosmetic enhancements for roads that often remain quite dangerous for bicycles. Thus, in a desire to win accolades from the progressive bike advocacy community, city leaders dish out the dollars for improvements without necessarily contemplating whether they achieve the fundamental goal: improving safety and mobility for cyclists. My guess is the Bicycle-Friendly Communities Campaign and similar agencies have become more selective in recent years at bestowing honors to these ingratiating cities, but the fact remains that a great deal of bicycle infrastructure focuses more on looks than operationality.

But I hardly want to dwell on the negative here, especially when many communities are promulgating creative, workable solutions to the challenges of urban bikability. One subtle example recently came to my attention in the Capital Heights neighborhood of Baton Rouge. The signage on a quiet residential street is the first indication that something is out of the ordinary:

In the foreground to the right of the photo is a yellow caution sign indicating two-way bicycle travel, yet further to left and in the background, a stop sign indicates that the perpendicular street is one way to the left. How does this work? It’s as simple as it sounds.

Now sitting on Capitol Heights Avenue, the demarcation of the rights-of-way becomes clear: the margin with the white line travels with the traffic, while the margin with the yellow line travels against it. (The street section wouldn’t be complete without the universal “bike lane” sign in the grass to the right, a sign referenced earlier in this blog post.) This intervention on behalf of bicyclists is not particularly intrusive; it most likely did not require any road widening or eminent domain proceedings on the abutting property owners. Nor is it radical: I’ve seen it before in Burlington, Vermont, and I’m sure plenty of other communities have replicated the practice. What is particularly interesting to me is that the road seems the perfect width for two cartways, suggesting that, prior to the introduction of the bike lanes, Capitol Heights Avenue was a two-way street. The photo below approximates the perspective of a bicyclist travelling against the traffic flow.

The physical features of the surrounding neighborhood suggest that this simple striping and signage could have proven a greater challenge than it would appear. As is clear from the above photos, Capitol Heights’ housing is not new, but it is by all estimates a stable and safe neighborhood. Originally founded in 1909 as one of the city’s first true suburbs, the community is now engulfed by urbanization on all sides. Despite the absence of sidewalks and its exclusively residential character, Capitol Heights feels relatively urban thanks to the density of the housing, the proximity to storefronts on collector roads like Government Street, and the basic grid structure, as indicated by the map below, where Capitol Heights Drive (circled in red) comprises the clear east-west spine.

The challenge thus lies in winning the approval in the neighborhood for such a project. How difficult would it have been to convince the residents nearby to sacrifice bi-directional mobility in their cars, when that sacrifice exempts bicyclists from the one-way requirements? The very fact that this bike lane striping exists suggests to me that a preponderance of the community perceived of bike lanes as an amenity that outweigh the disadvantages. Perhaps, although Capital Heights lacks sidewalks, residents of the neighborhood recognize that their neighborhood offers a relatively urban milieu and that boosting the options for mobility will draw positive attention to the area, improving desirability and perhaps property values as well. It could prove a useful trajectory for people biking to and from work in downtown Baton Rouge (which lies less than two miles to the west) and endows the community with some of that “progressive” cachet that seems to be widely coveted among urban professionals.

Measured from these standards, the bike lane is a success if the appeal of this uncommon method of bike lane striping outweighs the negatives of eliminating eastbound travel. Beyond that perspective, any assessment of the overall utilitarianism of such striping results in a stalemate, in my opinion. It clearly demarcates a useful path for bicyclists that serves as an alternative to busier streets such as Government to the north (which offers high traffic volumes, often at higher speeds would be allowed in a more dense urban environment) or Claycut Road to the south (which essentially operates as a narrow, high-speed collector with no urban traffic calming whatsoever). But would Capitol Heights Avenue be dangerous for bicyclists otherwise? I’m not convinced that it would be. It is a residential street which speed limits rarely (if ever) above 25; many of the perpendicular roads require a complete four-way stop; and the straight-line trajectory in a grid configuration eliminates blind curves.

Thus, the striping of bike lanes on a generally bicycle friendly street while reducing automobile traffic to one-way only results in a net loss of mobility, with cars ending up as the losers—and, let’s face it, cars are far more likely to use this road on a daily bases than bicycles. A true urban advocate would rebut, “Who cares if cars lose some mobility? They’ve had they’re run of the land since they were invented!” I would concede, but in viewing this in terms of aggregate benefit it still would seem a negative, mitigated slightly by the sheer “sex appeal” of a clever bike lane plan which the City of Baton Rouge can brag about as it achieves new recognition as a bike friendly city. (It was awarded Bronze last year.)

The installation of this lane shows more careful scrutiny than the hit-or-miss lanes of Cambridge, or the signs marking bike routes in otherwise bike-unfriendly locations. But Baton Rouge is also filled with “sharrows”, a pavement graphic that emphasizes generalized road sharing between bicycles and vehicles. That’s great that the city again recognizes bikes, but unless these symbols correlate and contrast with other routes in the network where bicycles benefit from segregated lanes, what does the sharrow achieve other than a cosmetic acknowledgement that bicyclists exist? That very acknowledgement may distinguish Baton Rouge from some similarly sized communities, and I applaud them for that. But the planners and strategists in this steadily growing southern capital city may still let their bird’s-eye-view ambitions supersede the actual visible needs on the ground.

Baba ghanoush in a ketchup dispenser.

It is nearly impossible to engage in any extensive study on the built environment without exploring how widespread cultural practices or beliefs have shaped the visible results. The simplest and purest goal of this blog—to look at the world around us and ask “What does it mean?”—would crumble if I avoided any exploration of that versatile, vague term. But I’ve treaded lightly around “culture” as a direct label because its denotative inclusiveness is so subjective, and as of yet I’ve outwardly avoided including race or ethnicity into the mix; ethnicity is just too thick of a stew to provide a reasonable “taste” in a 1000-word essay. Even demographers for the US census have proven unable to categorize race or ethnicity decisively: over the past forty years, a new racial/ethnic category has entered the survey with each passing decade. (It’s seems hard to imagine now that the only two major racial categories employed in the US Census of 1970 were “White” and “Negro”.)

For my first blog post on culture as it pertains to race and ethnicity, I’ll address the topic gently. As is frequently the case, this narrative deserves to begin in the most unassuming setting: a roadside gas station in Baton Rouge.

But check the marquee underneath the price listings. The food options include the po-boy, the traditional Louisiana submarine sandwich on French bread—a standard of any sandwich vendor in this part of the country. The next option is a gyro, which is more surprising but hardly obscure these days; the Greek dish, usually served in the US as a pita sandwich, is widely available in mall food courts or downtown lunch carts throughout the country. The third option, chicken shawarma, is completely unexpected. Although a common menu item in fast-food Mediterranean restaurants as well, it usually warrants an accompanying explanation or picture. Vendors cannot assume that the broad customer base will know what it is, even though the shawarma preparation strongly resembles the gyro, particularly if lamb or beef replaces the chicken. But this ordinary gas station promotes it though the roadside signage, as though it might be a huge selling point.

Maybe it is. Virtually nothing else about the gas station will strike the visitor as remarkable.

It isn’t saturated with bold wall colors, vaulted ceilings, or broad, spacious aisles, the way most new gas station chains are. This station could be anywhere. The only thing that distinguishes it at this point is the menu.
The roadside marquee should have offered more than sufficient evidence, but the interior menu reinforces it: the restaurant portion of this store is a pastiche of conventional gas station concessions, local culinary preferences, and the cultural heritage of the store’s proprietor.
By now it is largely visible (and often casually discussed) how certain ethnic groups often find entrepreneurial niches in the US in which they singularly thrive: Poles/Russians in plumbing, Irish in law enforcement, Koreans in dry cleaners, Vietnamese in nail salons, Ethiopians in taxicab fleets. And a recent USA Today article quotes the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, which estimates that persons of Indian descent own 43% of hotels and motels in the country. And gas stations? Visibly dominated by Arab-Americans, as the additional food offerings of this establishment in Baton Rouge suggest.

But compare this to the other visible ethnic occupational niches. Rarely do they overtly integrate their cultural heritage into the goods or services they provide. Nail salons don’t usually reveal a particularly Vietnamese flair, Ethiopian taxicabs would not likely play indigenous music, and most Indian-owned hotels in the US try to blend in with every other. (The exception is rare roadside hotel with an attached Indian restaurant, though that inclusion most likely intends to attract traveling truckers of Punjabi Sikh descent, another growing ethnic occupational niche.) Thus, the proprietor of Acadian Groceries is taking a bit of a gamble, incorporating an unfamiliar food such as chicken shawarma into the gas station menu. If he were anticipating a large consumer base that shared his ethnic background, this might make sense. But none of my research indicates that Baton Rouge has a particularly large Lebanese-descended community (though the conspicuousness of Lebanese restaurants does suggest that the Lebanese population is certainly higher than the national norm). Perhaps the proprietor of Acadian Groceries is hoping that chicken shawarma will catch on to the same degree of its widely familiar cousin the gyro. It is probably not difficult at all for him to prepare, and he may get a discount on the ingredients from some of the local Lebanese/Middle Eastern restaurateurs. At any rate, this is the most overt gesture revealing the national origin of a gas station proprietor that I have seen. In an era of escalated suspicion of Arab Americans, the owner of this store has essentially announced his Middle Eastern background—to those aware the cuisine—on his largest sign.

Will people buy the shawarma ? He may never have analyzed this to such a degree (clearly I’m the one with the knack for over-analyzing), but I think it’s a smart gesture. How did other formerly ethnic foods—the burrito, the pizza, the gyro—achieve American ubiquity? Certainly not through a catered event for high-powered New York socialites or Washington bureaucrats in an elite hotel. The best way for a heretofore foreign meme to proliferate, and thereby to dilute its foreign-ness, is through banal exchanges: kielbasa at a food cart in the city park; strip mall Chinese restaurants in any town over 1,000 people; some new deep-fat fried concoction sitting under the heat lamp at a gas station. One may argue that, if a cultural item has “trickled down” to that level, it must already be omnipresent. But foreign-born business owners have often found fewer barriers to entry in smaller communities, where cost is less prohibitive. Movies such as Mississippi Masala (1991) reveal the widely established foothold Indian hoteliers have long established in the Deep South. And the Louisiana po-boy owes much of its origin to the dissemination of affordable shrimp and oyster sandwiches among the working classes.

These Middle Eastern menu offerings effectively distinguish Acadian Groceries from its dozens of cousins across the Baton Rouge metro, even if only to a few discerning customers each day. A single new sandwich is often all it takes, and it certainly proves cheaper than an elaborately decorated interior. I know this a bold assertion on my part, but this unremarkable entrepreneurial gesture may foreshadow a more sweeping cultural change, in which gas stations and convenience stores become so wedded to the Arab American identity that it’s like getting a hot dog at a baseball game. Fortunately for the owner of Acadian Groceries, mudbug-devouring Louisianans have a propensity for trying foods that much of the rest of the country might shun at first. And all the better if he can enrich the cultural palette of that enduring symbol of mundane Americana: the roadside gas station.

From silos to steeples—painting the town green.

In less than a decade, the color/adjective in this blog entry’s title has infiltrated common parlance so effectively that practically anyone who regularly tunes in to a national media source is well aware of the word’s ascension to a widespread lifestyle choice. Long the dominion of ideologically driven crusaders who often saw ecological insensitivity as a direct consequence of the moral laxity embedded in free market forces—a negative externality writ large—“going green” has become almost ubiquitous because its strongest advocates have in large degree dexterously tiptoed around overt partisanship. Green might still be political, but it’s not just referring to a Party aligned with skeptics of capitalism that consistently captures less than three percent of the vote. Though some will undoubtedly disagree with me, I believe the green movement has been tamed—perhaps even domesticated—by shifting its aims to attract the milquetoast moderates. Most reformist campaigns suffer some dilution in order to reach the mainstream, often sacrificing their most ardent supporters in the process. This is often the price that such a movement must pay in order for its ambitions to permeate society enough to effect measurable change. Whether its previous guises were too radical, too Rousseauan, or too removed from a supportive financial base, environmentalism shows increasing evidence of ecumenicalism that broadens its impact as it loses the bite of moral imperative.

Have I unfairly conflated the contemporary green movement with other ecological initiatives? Probably. But the non-discriminating public at large typically ingests transformative intellectual endeavors through broad gestures, and since I am trying to examine this phenomenon at an extreme macro level, it is only reasonable that I make similarly facile associations to substantiate my examples. With those glittering generalities said, I will introduce one of the best case studies that suggested to me that the current green movement has staying power. The town of Greensburg, Kansas suffered a catastrophic tornado (measuring 5 on the Enhanced Fujita scale) on May 4, 2007. The photos below, taken by Kevin Snyder, demonstrate exactly what it looked like from a worm’s-eye-view just days after the storm.




Meanwhile, this Wikipedia photo provides an elevated view, showing the magnitude of the devastation. Outside of the street grid, anything resembling a town—just about everything protruding from the ground—was annihilated. With the exception of the courthouse and a few commercial structures, every building was damaged beyond repair. Many of the town’s 1,500 residents demonstrated their commitment to the region by immediately filing insurance claims for repairing their homes. However, a number of citizens recognized that the community, mired in a continued population decline, could not retain its young population, and that it should seize upon this disaster as an opportunity for reinvention. With the help of a design firm from Kansas City, Greensburg’s leaders devised a proposal for making the city as environmentally sustainable. The comprehensive plan, detailed through the site of the respective nonprofit Greensburg Green Town, culminated in the council’s resolution to make all new construction certified LEED Platinum, which is the highest standard of environmentally sustainable building technology as measured by the US Green Building Council.

Whether it involves a John Deere factory powered by wind turbines, or a courthouse that harvests and recycles rainwater, the goal that Greensburg’s leadership intends to achieve is to become the nation’s first fully ecologically sustainable town—an ambition that has earned the community attention in a Discovery Channel documentary and countless private and non-profit supporters who may have otherwise overlooked the community’s plight. A conversation with Mayor Bob Dixson revealed to me that while not every Greensburg inhabitant clearly bought on to the idea, a significant number in this conservative agrarian community realized that many green lifestyle choices are in themselves fundamentally conservative: frugality with natural resources; saving to purchase higher quality products that will have a greater longevity; encouraging self-sufficiency by working with materials close at hand. These are practices that the citizens of Greensburg widely embraced long before the storm. And thus Greensburg has prepared itself to re-emerge stronger, more attractive to investors, and greener than it was before.

Clearly the Greensburg story captures one particularly remarkable—and extreme—example of the proliferating visibility of the green movement. And LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) as a standard for judging green buildings is undeniably fashionable at the moment. But it doesn’t take much effort to find humbler examples that suggest that going green is to An Inconvenient Truth what Facebook is to MySpace: kindred outlets that have expanded the clientele in support of the original idea. You can guess which one of each pair has proven its resiliency by skirting controversy. The new wave of penury which Americans have confronted in this Great Recession only helps to reinforce the notion that mainstream ecological sensitivity is here for the foreseeable future.

Of course it behooves the private sector to follow this trend—like most fads, it easily equates to a new source of revenue. For the public sector, it can equal more than simple cost savings: it could translate to a growing voter base. But what about when a non-profit or faith-based institution jumps on board?


The First Mennonite Church on the near-north side of Indianapolis has engaged in several initiatives that have dramatically altered the congregation’s stewardship of its large property, as well as its physical appearance. The ten-acre parcel rests in the almost exclusively residential Crooked Creek neighborhood, generally suburban in appearance and character, yet conveniently only about four miles from the city’s downtown, as seen in the Google map below:

For decades, the church has endured the cost of maintaining its grounds through five hours a week of mowing labor, only to see the turf grass sit unused the vast majority of the time. In the summer, the lawn routinely floods, no doubt exacerbated by the impervious parking lot and rooflines nearby, as well as the fact that the Miami silt loam likely has hydric soil inclusions—in short, part of it was probably originally a wetland. A few years ago, the congregation at First Mennonite determined that the church’s grounds were offering little community or ecological benefit, while unnecessarily depleting maintenance and operation funds. With the help of a grant from the Indianapolis Center for Congregations, FMC teamed with local architecture firm Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf Inc to develop a multi-phase master landscape plan and site design, currently underway. The project began in the spring of 2008, with the planting of a combination of trees and shrubs which will serve as a riparian buffer to protect a proposed bioswale leading from the existing detention pond in the front of the property (near Knollton Road to the west) to the larger, planned retention pond for wetland mitigation purposes in the back of the property (to the east).

I offer my deepest regrets that I learned about this remarkable church during such inclement weather; most of my photos shroud the impressive work under a thick layer of snow. But you can still make out the young plantings in the photo below:

And the unlandscaped portion to the left of this photo below is the evident retention pond at the front of the property.

Below is the obvious eventual trajectory of the bioswale connecting the two ponds:

Later in 2008, the church planted a variety of prairie grasses and wildflowers on the 3 or 4 acres between the retention pond and forested wetland on the east end of the property and the bioswale and detention pond on the west end.

The untamed forest at the far eastern edge of the property can be seen in the photo below.

I hope to revisit the site in the summer, when the landscaping will be much more plainly visible, and the long-term plan undoubtedly will show further progress.

Meanwhile, the aerial photo below best illustrates the final stormwater management goal, with two large ponds connected by a bioswale, which carries the overflow through a dry planted ditch. The young trees and shrubs thus provide the riparian buffer.

Future landscape design goals include a pervious, crushed gravel walking path (already partially in place in the front of the property), a shelter house, a memory garden, and community vegetable garden plots. Ideally, the entire site will serve as a demonstration project to encourage other communities to follow this example.

The First Mennonite Church articulated its goals through these improvements: 1) enhance the overall church mission through increased use of the grounds and by encouraging community participation in healthy activities; 2) limit the ecological footprint of the church by improving the natural habitat and reducing on-site consumption of energy; 3) minimizing maintenance by eliminating the need to mow much of the property and reducing likelihood of vandalism or littering by fostering a park-like setting of collective stewardship. Certain elements of these objectives may clash with other faith-based organizations, who find their religious teachings do not harmonize with green politics or the open invitation of the surrounding community to use their property for recreation. However, few churches would object to a new method of saving money.

Whether mowing the lawn regularly or unnecessarily watering the turf in the summertime (which of course necessitates more frequent mowing of the lawn), groundskeeping can prove inordinately expensive for an organization that relies upon donations to sustain its operations. The First Mennonite Church has embraced the idea that a manicured property is not necessarily more aesthetic, it certainly isn’t as ecologically sensitive, and all too often it costs more. The return on investment for an aggressively maintained lawn is always difficult to assess but may equate to whatever recreational opportunities it affords. This Mennonite Church in Indianapolis is gambling on the idea that an unspoiled wetland/forest may offer more to the congregation and neighboring community than mere grassy playing fields. Based on the numerous scattered examples across the country, their gamble may prove right. Going green is hardly a revolution (and how many revolutions have ever successfully met their initial goals?)—it’s the accrual of modest gestures over time that, with patience, offers a true impact. Conservation is the component of the green movement that is the quietest but also the most “sustainable” (another emerging buzzword). But why should it fall purely under the domain of liberal politics when the root of the word is “to conserve”? Like the citizens of Greensburg, the First Mennonite Church of Indianapolis is investing more now with the understanding that it will save money and offer quantifiable benefit in the long-term; it is a message that transcends political parties in this time of prolonged economic strain.

Rethinking the Behemoth, Preserving the Banal, Part III: Mundane microbuildings have a place in contemporary urban life.

This post concludes a three-part series on a high-profile new development in the southern Indiana city of Evansville. The city’s Mayor and Council have approved (and now completed) the demolition of a block of century-old commercial buildings on the historic Main Street to make way from a new sports arena, after negotiations floundered for buying out a car dealership nearby. I explored the background behind this decision—an obvious attempt at revitalizing the city’s long stagnant downtown—in Part I of this series. Though the D-Patrick Ford Dealership was originally the preferred site, Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel announced that the site where the historic buildings stand (or stood) is ultimately better because the arena will now front Evansville’s Main Street, allowing the activity generated from major sporting events to spill onto the neighboring blocks, thereby helping to revive the long-slumping retail activity on this commercial corridor. The rendering below, available on the Evansville Courier-Press website, reveals the configuration.



I have outlined Main Street in red, while the blue square traces the footprints of the old commercial buildings that the City has sacrificed to build the arena. As demonstrated by the rending, this region captures where the front of the arena will soon stand. And the green square represents the faded Executive Inn, half of which is being demolished for the back side of the arena, while the other portion that I have outlined will be repurposed, ideally into a major national chain hotel. An older Google Streetview shows that the old commercial buildings (in the red outlined square) look like this:

Those buildings outlined in orange in the photo above no longer exist, and soon the arena below will replace them:

The rendering shows the new Main Street frontage. I commend Populous, the architectural firm, for providing windows and natural light to side that will face Evansville’s historic commercial street, but I remain unconvinced that this was still the best decision for locating this arena. It’s a great site for the sake of integrating the arena with downtown, but not so great in terms of what has been lost in Evansville’s older built environment. But the decision seems predicated upon the assumption that a giant sports venue—and all the foot traffic it creates for its events—will help breathe life into the other blocks of Evansville’s old commercial corridor. That’s false assumption number one, which I analyzed at length in Part II of this three-part post. The City had to sacrifice one full block of the older architecture to free up the space for the arena, and this economic development strategy rests on the second and final false assumption: that small historic commercial buildings are stranded without a purpose or niche unless visually integrated with a larger attraction upon which they depend, almost parasitically.

If Memphis and New Orleans—the two cities mentioned in the previous post—are any indication, the Evansville arena will have a limited impact on other downtown development. While it won’t likely hurt the downtown’s activity level, it also won’t contribute the catalyzing effect that the city leaders desire. As far as the scale and pace of downtowns go, it’s an oddity. It doesn’t really fit in with the rhythms of commuting workers, servers at the lunch counters, or the few who claim downtown as their home. It operates on a different scale and schedule completely. So do the city’s other main attractions, such as the casino and its cluster of hotels/restaurants that sit on the opposite end of Main Street, along the Ohio River. Let’s review one of those other mega-destinations briefly.

Casino Aztar has graced the city’s waterfront for over a decade, yet it’s largely an entertainment compound, divorced from the city. People come for an evening of gaming, food, drinks, maybe spend the night at the hotel—they have everything they need crammed within a 1000 foot radius. It has induced little to no tenant activity in the old commercial corridor of the city’s downtown. What’s to say this arena will be any different? Clearly the more traditional buildings do not automatically thrive when a hot attraction enters the downtown landscape—neither the Casino Aztar, nor a children’s museum or convention center had much of an impact in Evansville. Even though Casino Aztar has the ability to draw patrons from well outside the Evansville metro, it has done little to improve the heart of downtown.

So what works? What will help bring businesses back to the old commercial buildings along Main Street? More often than not, those same aging structures will find tenants organically, regardless of public intervention. The solution and the problem are one and the same. Let’s look at one of the historic other blocks along Main Street which, to this day (at least to my knowledge) remains intact:
This stretch of Main Street between 5th and 6th doesn’t show a lot of retail life, if this Google Street View screenshot is any indication. I have often heard quoted about old urban architecture that “it has good bones.” Clearly these bones on Evansville’s Main Street could use some meat, but that’s the essence of the concern here—the existing physical form is solid. When it comes to the adaptive re-use of old architecture, it’s not a matter of form following function; out of necessity, function follows form. This is a static, immobile object awaiting an individual who can find a purpose for its dimension and configuration, which fell out of favor long ago but still holds promise for a reawakening.

But instead seeking a means to breathe new life those buildings in the first Main Street photo (outlined in orange), the City tears them down. From the perspective of bolstering tax revenue through leisure and tourism expenditures, this makes sense: the economic activity generated by an arena no doubt far surpasses that row of old buildings, most of which were vacant. But an arena could have generated revenue in a number of other locations that wouldn’t have required demolition of existing structures. Does the smallness of those existing buildings on Main Street make them seem expendable? Would there be more of a protest if they were six or seven stories, thus having a higher floor-area-ratio and the potential for a greater return on the investment?

The fact remains that “microbuildings” such as those have a far more versatile array of potential uses, even if they're blighted or vacant now. Historic preservationists have long known this, but their arguments have not always convinced the greater public, especially when the structures lack any empirically obvious architectural merit. A truly compelling case for preservation requires a worm’s-eye analysis of the structures and their relation to the streetscape—an intensive level of scrutiny I most recently applied to a struggling strip mall on the southside of Indianapolis.

Fundamentally, these sort of humble structures are most amenable to pioneering urban retail. On a row of seemingly puny 1- to 3-story buildings on Evansville’s Main Street, the rents are cheap, gross leasable area is small, and tenants will often have heavy bargaining rights if a landlord thinks he/she can secure a lease. Thus, the low cost allows those equity-starved entrepreneurs the opportunity to experiment, offering exactly the sort of distinctive, non-chain specialty goods or services that city leaders are looking for when promoting their downtown as "revitalized". Think of where those hip coffeehouses go, the eclectic new restaurant, the vintage/antique shops, or a quirky used record store. These small buildings may have heavy turnaround, with businesses coming and going every 6-9 months at first, but they are still the stuff that a good retail corridor is made of. Through an accretion-based change in occupancy—moving from 20% to 30% to 50% to 75% occupancy over the course of several years—a commercial corridor such as Main Street can improve the image of downtown far more than arena will. And while big-ticket attraction can bring attention to the smaller urban architecture in the vicinity, the microbuildings hardly depend on mega-destinations for their prosperity: after all, as I indicated in Part II of this post, Beale Street in Memphis re-awakened long before the construction of the giant stadia nearby. It doesn’t always depend on the arena as an impetus.

But investors don’t open their wallets as willingly to a long-term, incremental benefit. Arenas equal results, and a much higher wow factor: just look those sleek renderings! (From Evansville arena project website )

And the interior suites! (From the Populous website)

It’s a shame this blog post is built on a retrospective development decision: on “what could have been” rather than “what could be”. But, of course, this still offers an opportunity to learn from mistakes, so that these ideally will not occur again in the future, and Evansville can be the best city possible with the resources it still has. The City needs to be patient with the surviving commercial buildings or nudge them forward by treating it more like an isolated business incubator program—it does not need to tear any more of them down.

Conclusion: A New Rationale for Site Selection

By no means is the City of Evansville’s decision to build a downtown arena a mistake. But all of the arena’s spin-off development (parking garages, tailgating lots) is hostile to pedestrians. Across the country, when making decisions for the location of mega-destinations, leadership should spend less energy on site selection in terms of how it relates to the buildings around it, and more should be spent on the architectural value and long-term utility of the structures that might otherwise be sacrificed.

Populous Architects (designers of the arena) and the City’s leaders did some of the right research in making an arena that at least will have basic streetfront appeal.

How wise of them to include windows along Main Street, considering the alternatives. Many arenas built in the 1980s were solid, blank concrete walls on all four sides—sterile and uninviting to pedestrians. But how much interest does an arena have when a game or event is not in session? During the 70-80% of the time that nothing will be going on in that arena, people aren't going to peer in those windows the same way they would with a retail storefront. If anything, sports arenas have one distinctive value in smaller cities that have long suffered from moribund downtowns: they are a guaranteed draw for their events, and they might get people walking around the downtown area (for the first time in years for some Evansvillians) precisely to discover those other long forgotten two-story buildings that are worth taking a risk for some small business. But in this case, the City already destroyed eight of the structures that that could spur a truly sustainable downtown revitalization. Those buildings have stood over a century; how long will the arena last?

The arena will draw crowds on event days regardless of where it's located...at least until it becomes dated or old-fashioned in 20 years. Main Street Evansville will wake up on its own terms, and it will happen through the accretion induced by small buildings such as those in the photo. To conclude, I will make a series of highly unrealistic “ideal world” recommended alternatives for what the City should have done, in order of desirability. At the very least, even if none of these recommendations are feasible in this case, they can serve as the heuristics for any future site selection decisions. Let’s use another graphic—the master plan featured on the website to help make these recommendations more vivid:


1) Reconfigure the site of the arena to the D-Patrick Ford site (circled in blue). This should have been the premier location, and for many months, it was. The D-Patrick Ford car dealership was the original top choice, recommended by Populous and preferred by the City, largely because it was only a block away from downtown. If the dealership seemed good to the decision makers from an activity standpoint, I can almost guarantee it was also better from a building expendability standpoint. It would have been cheap to demolish. But the owners of the Ford dealership were unwilling to sell at $4.1 million and are committed to downtown. Too bad. Car dealerships have generally shown a strong locational elasticity of demand—not too different from arenas, actually. It’s rare that a dealership has had to close simply because it wasn’t in the right neighborhood. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans had a Saab dealership on Tulane Avenue, one of the most economically downtrodden corridors in the city. People still bought cars there, even if the ‘hood was bad. The one thing dealerships depend on is large quantities of developable land, and if it’s cheap, that’s even better, which explains their ability to survive in otherwise unlucrative parts of town. It’s more a testament to the depressed economy of downtown Evansville and the cheapness of its real estate that a car dealership would choose to remain there. Should the city center ever become a vibrant place again, I have no doubt D-Patrick would be happy to sell. The owners are probably hoping the arena will improve downtown’s image, giving them the opportunity ask for a far higher price than $4.1 million in several years. But it’s too late now. The deal is settled, and less than two blocks away from the arena, the city’s visitors get this site:


2) Purchase those aging commercial buildings on Main Street, save them, and ride out the economic downturn until a private buyer comes along. Sacrifice the Executive Inn at the back of the arena site instead. Since the City has already put the kibosh on Plan 1, we move to this option—also an impossibility by now. Again, what a shame. But I remain confident that it is a matter of only a few years (maybe only months) before those structures would have aroused enough curiosity from entrepreneurs who would give them a try. Given their current low level of desirability, the eminent domain costs could have been relatively cheap. It would have comprised a sort of “land banking” in an urban setting that I observed in an earlier post. The rendering below, complete with my chicken scratches, illustrates what should have happened:

Basically just shift the structure. Instead of demolishing the main street frontage (what would have been where the blue outline stood), the leaders should have sacrificed the tired, low-end Executive Inn (outlined in green and pictured below).

The fact that most of the inn will be spared the wrecking ball, to be transformed to a new major-chain hotel, undoubtedly constitutes a portion of a larger deal which the City has not broadly disclosed to the public. But of all the structures listed above, which is most worthy of saving? A squat car dealership, a struggling mid-century hotel, or what we see below—

--the historic buildings on the city’s original commercial street. Even saving just the façades for later use (perhaps as a hotel) would have been preferable. Clearly I’m biased, but the latter buildings offer the best opportunity for the lively pedestrian atmosphere that virtually every city, large and small, would kill to have. Too late—those buildings are gone. For the City’s sake, I hope the deal with a major hotel chain works out; they’ve lost a lot of other buildings and pinned a lot of hopes on such a deal materializing.

3) Renovate the Roberts Stadium. The original stadium in Evansville was built in 1956 in an area about 3 miles east of downtown.

(From the Roberts Stadium website)
It’s quite a testament to the city’s resiliency that the stadium has endured this long; many contemporary stadia survive little more than 20 years. (Indianapolis’ Hoosier/RCA Dome and Market Square Arena offer proof of their brief life spans.) Roberts’ last extensive renovation was in 1990; it is no doubt due for another if it wants to remain a viable sporting and entertainment venue. What makes the new Evansville Arena decision a bit more baffling is the fact that it will actually be smaller than Roberts: only 11,000 seats, compared to Roberts’ 12,700. No doubt the new arena will hold more amenities, such as the much-coveted executive suites. But it’s a lot for a City to ask its taxpayers to fund a new stadium that will actually have a reduced capacity. And no word is out yet as to what will happen to Roberts Stadium once the new arena is complete. Renovation is a political near-impossibility amidst a culture that seeks shiny new attractions in a revitalized downtown; Roberts’ decommissioning is inevitable. Let’s hope the civic leaders come up with something better than the sorry fate of Indianapolis’ shuttered Bush Stadium, which the Parks Department now leases for a junkyard.

4) Find a site elsewhere in metro Evansville that will be less destructive to historic architecture. This could involve one of the other five or six sites originally under consideration; it could be just about anywhere. A depressed older neighborhood with high amounts of vacant land could use the infusion of construction jobs. A brownfield site could elicit federal grants for remediation. The Ohio riverfront might benefit from another attraction. Put it out the suburbs to guarantee the population won’t be turned off by narrow streets or the scarcity of easy parking. Anything. Just don’t let the allure of something new and shiny cloud the ability to perceive a future for something old and irreplaceable.

I hope the Evansville arena succeeds and helps foment the long-term prosperity of this picturesque, often overlooked river city. But I remain confident that there will be at least a brief moment where the leaders will kick themselves for having sacrificed part of the historic foundation that helped launch the city’s riparian commerce. Although older than Indianapolis, Evansville has remained a slow-and-steady growth region for decades, which to a certain degree has helped stall a lot of the hasty development, demolition, and re-development proposals that have annihilated much of Indianapolis’ historic downtown. My suspicion is a city such as Evansville, which isn't trying to attract or retain the big-ticket sports teams, will get to see its arena last quite a bit longer than a city like Indy. But, as fellow blogger Dig-B said, “All the more reason to make this one perfect!”