Downtown Revitalization Pt 2: 1980's
The 1980’s story of revitalization is uniquely Gainesville: one where the arts, historic preservation, and partnerships came together to create something special. It was hard, controversial, and expen
As a regular of downtown Gainesville, a history lover, and a local policy nerd I’ve been spending some time digging through the decisions that led to downtown’s fall in the 1960’s-70’s and its revitalization in the 1980’s-90’s. I’ve spoken with a lot of the people who were a part of it, researched official city documents and newspaper articles from that time period to get a better understanding. It’s my belief that you have to understand your past if you want to direct the future, so I spend a lot of time on stuff like this.
My last article “The Fall of Downtown Gainesville” goes over the fall of downtown Gainesville in the 60’s-70’s as the retail center of North Central Florida, the city’s ambitious plans to bring it back as a government center, and how all of it failed, creating a downtown that was empty, crime-ridden, and stagnating.
The 1980’s story is a uniquely Gainesville story of revitalization: one where the arts, historic preservation, and public/private partnerships came together to make something unique and special, even if it didn’t quite reach the highs many hoped for at the time. Full “revitalization” of downtown Gainesville was still a decade away.
This revitalization of Downtown Gainesville was going to be an evolution from a retail downtown in the 1950’s; to an office downtown in the 1980’s; to an arts, restaurant, and nightlife downtown today. Getting there was messy, controversial, and expensive, but it worked. It wasn’t going be quick, it was going take twenty years of constant pushing, messy deals, controversy, and millions upon millions of dollars. But would, in the end, work.
Downtown In A Funk
They say it’s always darkest before the dawn, and that is certainly true of downtown Gainesville in the 1980’s. In 1982 downtown business owner Flake Parker came before the commission to criticize the Commission’s “Downtown Parking Loop” idea and proposed a different trajectory: kill downtown entirely, as reported in the Gainesville Sun.
In fact, the only way downtown will ever escape its problems of vacant buildings and through-traffic is to allow the business in the area to die away, which Parker said would lead to “some national firm” buying up the entire area.
“My solution is to let it all go to pot until someone can come in and buy the whole thing,” Parker said. The mechanism for speeding up that decline, he said, would be to keep raising property taxes until businesses can no longer afford to operate downtown.
“The fact that we survive on what business we get downtown is a marvel,” he said.
This was obviously absurd, the city wasn’t going to intentionally demolish downtown through high property taxes, but what other ideas were there? Downtown was boarded up, retail was leaving, and there was nothing to take its place.
A slew of studies in the early 1980’s showed the direness of the situation. A review of the condition of downtown buildings by the City’s “Department of Community Development” found that 40% of buildings were not structurally sound. In total, 175,000 sq ft of buildings were vacant:
Between 1970 and 1980 the population of Alachua County boomed, growing by 45% in a single decade. Downtown, by comparison, reduced in population by 27%. Downtown housed a mere .5% of the population in 1981, but was the source of 15.3% of the crime.
A Newfound Focus on Downtown
On the front page of the Gainesville Sun in October 1980 the lead headlines showed “Iran Sets Vote on Hostage Conditions” and “Both Carter, Reagan Hit Trail Again”. It was the end of one era and the start of another for the country.
Back on page 4B an ad also went out announcing a new contest to brand downtown: “Create a new name and logo for Downtown Gainesville and you could win $100!” it said, paid for in part by the newly created Downtown Redevelopment Agency and the City of Gainesville.
This contest went pretty much nowhere, the logo decided was a bicycle logo that I find no evidence was ever used and all the submitted names for downtown were rejected in favor of just calling it “Downtown Gainesville”. But it shows a city newly focused on downtown after the creation of their Downtown Redevelopment Agency.
The Downtown Redevelopment Agency was created in 1979 as a “tax increment” entity, meaning that all new tax money above what was assessed in 1979 in Downtown would be reinvested in downtown. This would be a turning point in downtown, everything that came after could only have been done thanks to the dedicated funding and staff this produced.
But before that could happen they needed ideas. First out of the gate was a slew of new studies on downtown that would form the backbone of what was to come. These included a historic preservation study, an “Urban Core Area” study, an “Economic Overview and Market Analysis”, a Parking Study, and a full “Downtown Redevelopment Plan”, all within a few year period.
What each of these studies make clear is a lot had changed since 1963, and not necessarily for the better. By 1984 land being utilized as commercial, meaning retail or restaurants, was cut in half from 27% in 1963 to 11% in 1984. In its place was primarily land used for government buildings.
The city had gotten what it wanted: Downtown was now the government center of Gainesville, and it was for the worse. Rows of businesses along SE 1st were torn down for the “Judicial Complex” now known as “Bo Diddley Plaza”, and everything south of that had been leveled with the hope of creating a Civic Center that was never created.
It was clear from these reports that the urban planners of the 1980’s were not the planners of the 1960’s. What their predecessors saw as “progress” they saw for what it was, the loss of the vibrancy that made downtown unique. From the 1984 Downtown Master Plan:
As the Barton-Aschman report suggests, each of these investments changed the character and vitality of the downtown by replacing intimate, small but deteriorating uses with larger single-purpose and self-contained facilities.
No longer was life spilling out onto sidewalks from little mom-and-pop retail shops or restaurants, it was “self-contained” to new, lifeless government buildings in brutalist and modernist architecture. It was single-use, closed-off office space that brought no life to a downtown that was teeming with it just fifteen years before.
Offices and Lawyers
The 1960’s bulldoze-and-rebuild approach to downtown was bad, plain and simple, but there were a handful of positives that came from it. The biggest benefit was the spillover effect of having the courts and local government all in one central area. Attorneys need easy access to the courts, so having their offices downtown near both the County and Federal Courthouses was convenient. In the late 1970’s two office spaces downtown were converted, including the “Main Street Legal Center” on 35 N Main Street.
Those lawyers needed a place to put their money, and bankers were always interested in being around where the deals were. Banks have always been in downtown, the third bank in Florida history was located in what’s now “The Bank Bar” in downtown, but financial services grew significantly over this time. In 1963 financial institutions only made up 1% of the downtown area, that increased to 7.3% by 1984. These clustered primarily north of University on Main Street like First National Bank in what’s now the Wells Fargo building. It grew so much so fast that the city even took to calling North Main Street the “financial district” for a brief time.
These industries then attracted more niche businesses to serve them. The best example of this transition from retail to office district to entertainment district is probably the Wooly on N Main Street. Originally it was the Woolworth’s a centerpiece of the shopping experience in downtown. They shut their downtown store down in 1982, and in moved Chesnut’s Office Supply Store who sold copies, paper, and office supplies to the attorneys and bankers in the area. That business closed in the mid-90’s and today it’s an event space and bar, an outgrowth of the indie nightlife empire the Top has built on North Main St. It’s the retail to office to entertainment evolution that many businesses in downtown followed over these decades.
This office-focused economic growth is great, but it’s a dead end. Unless you are in the niche industries of law, banking, or local government there was no reason to ever be in downtown. It was also fleeting: most of these industries were moving west like the whole town was. Downtown was getting a small sliver of this industry. Even worse, the whole downtown area shuts down at 5:00 pm at which point it was practically a dead zone.
Without any people around after business hours the night was not just boring, but dangerous. With no one around the only people out and about in downtown were, according to the 1984 downtown plan, the “vagrants”.
What was needed was a new approach, which these new reports hammered home. Instead of trying to bring back retail, which the economic reports point out is what every effort up to that time was focused on, they recommended making downtown “mixed-use” so it is utilized every time of the day. Instead of obsessing over the expansion of surface-level parking lots, which they point out made up 50% of the land in downtown, they proposed ways to redevelop them so they can be businesses and homes.
But more than the specifics was a change in focus. What made Downtown important was that it was "the city's only diversified pedestrian scale area.” Downtown needed to be designed for people. It needed more homes for people, more reasons for people to come to it.
But downtown Gainesville wasn’t a place people wanted to go, much less live near. People were moving further and further west away from downtown. What could this old, dingy downtown provide that would bring people down to it?
Arts + Culture Revitalize an Early Downtown
Gainesville is one of the United States’ great creative cities. We are the home of Tom Petty, Bernie Leadon, Against Me, Less Than Jake, Don Felder, Lauren Groff, John Moran, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and more talented people than I could ever put together here. Like a lot of college towns Austin, TX; Athens, GA; we punch way above our weight for arts and culture.
So naturally a part of town with cheap housing, walkability, and large warehouse space with inexpensive rent was going to be a draw for artists, and that’s exactly what happened.
In 1981 Randy Batista rented a dilapidated space known as “The Pontiac Building”, now known as Palomino’s, which was an old Pontiac dealership1. In it he opened his “Media Image Photography”. Another young visual artist, Eleanor Blaire, began renting space above Lillians Music Store in the early 80’s, before creating what is now the “Tench Building Artist Studios” around the corner. (Great article in the Sun about these folks here)
In 1981 Jim Evangelist opened “Reality Kitchen” as a “restaurant of the mind” where “anyone can display their work” in what’s now “Prum’s Kitchen”. Angela and Millard Pate opened the “Downtown Arts Studio” the same year.
This renaissance in downtown art happened organically, but also with a strong push by the City. In 1978 the old post office, with its gorgeous Greek columns in the heart of downtown, was a storage unit for the Alachua County School Board. In 1979 the City bought it from the School Board and leased the space at no cost to an avant-garde theater troupe named the “The Hippodrome Theatre”. This decision is still widely credited as the first real and critical step in downtown’s revitalization as a center of the arts.
Around the same time the City purchased the Star Garage was renovated as an arts and farmers market venue. It housed the “Acrosstown Repertory Theatre” as well as being leased to any artists or groups interested in using it.
Utilizing downtown tax increment funds the Downtown Owners and Tenants Association started an “Art Walk” in 1982 that would morph into the “Downtown Festival and Arts Show”. The Santa Fe Spring Arts Festival had already been going strong in downtown from its start as a small festival surrounding the then Santa Fe College owned Thomas Center. Over the years it grew and began encompassing a lot of downtown, helping to grow and spur more arts in downtown.
Music began to take hold in downtown as well. There are two great books on Gainesville’s music history: “Music Everywhere” by Marty Jourard and “Gainesville Punk” by Matt Walker. These two books conveniently take place over two different time periods: “Music Everywhere” begins at folk revival and ends right as the disco era begins, around 1978, and “Gainesville Punk” picks up right when disco ends and goes through the early 2000’s. One thing that’s striking about these books is that the hippie/folk/early rock era venues Marty Jourard points out are not located anywhere near downtown. By 1980 they begin to be, and by the 1990’s they are almost entirely located in or around downtown.
There’s a reason for that. Up until 1976 alcohol couldn’t really be served in the downtown area. A City ordinance that stated that alcohol couldn’t be sold within 300 ft. of a church meant that downtown, which held four churches in it, was essentially dry. In 1976 that ordinance was exempted from downtown, thanks to a recommendation from the newly formed “Downtown Advisory Board”. Within a month “Lillians Music Store” which previously sold musical instruments, shut down and reopened as a bar and sandwich shop catering to the “happy hour crowd”. Soon it grew beyond the happy hour crowd and was the raucous Lillians Bar we know today.
The McGurns Come Crashing In
As this was going on two newlyweds, a young Vietnam veteran named Ken McGurn and his wife Linda McGurn, were hunting for the cheapest properties in town and renovating them. They were broke, finishing up their PhD’s from the University of Florida, and found buildings in downtown were the only commercial space they could afford, so they bought them. Their first property in downtown was in 1980 at 108 and 110 S Main, where Main Street Billiards is today. It was, like most of downtown was, a former retail spot: a Sears which the McGurns hoped to renovate for Attorneys’ offices.
Ken McGurn doesn’t describe themselves to me as being particularly connected to any philanthropic vision of downtown revitalization at this time, they just needed cheap buildings, and cheap buildings were in downtown. In fact, they owned property all over North Central Florida, fixer-uppers from “motivated buyers” that could be bought cheaply.
Regardless of whether they were originally committed to the dream of a better downtown, Ken and Linda McGurn quickly threw themselves into the action. It was the right time to get in on the action and they became very effective at reading where the City was willing to invest and what would make sense financially for them.
In 1984 the Gainesville Sun was planning to donate their downtown building to the city for a tax write-off. In response, the city’s downtown plan called for focusing on that building as a first step in revitalizing downtown.
Redevelopment of that building was sorely needed: it was an eyesore right at the focal point of downtown surrounding the beautiful Greek Hippodrome Theatre.
Ken McGurn competed with Mike Warren of AMJ Properties2 for the bid and won. It was no wonder, what McGurn presented to the DRA was a jaw-droppingly ambitious plan to redevelop the Sun Building as a bricklined pedestrian walkway, complete with offices, retail, and restaurants in a classical brick design.
Not only that, but he pitched building a 4-level parking garage on Bethel Station property and 250 new apartments in downtown, as well as putting a restaurant into the Hippodrome building3. There had been nothing new built in downtown outside of government buildings in years. The ambition of the plan was matched only by Ken McGurn’s complete dedication and self-confidence, as well as the strategic mind of his wife, Linda.
“This is the beginning of what we’d like to do,” he said to the Downtown Redevelopment Association in 1983. If that statement sounds arrogant that’s because it is, but it was also correct. It was just the beginning.
In 1985 Ken McGurn received approval from the City Commission to move forward on this ambitious project that would become the Sun Center, the Parking garage, and Arlington Square Apartments. This would be done largely with government money through the “tax increment funding”, but also private loans and state and federal grants.
The years of 1985-1987 are head-spinning in the amount that was accomplished in Downtown. The Star Garage opens as an office building in 1986. The Sun Center opens as a mix of offices and restaurants shortly thereafter connected by a brick pedestrian plaza. The first structured parking garage in downtown opens across the street a few months later. The first new housing development in decades opens with Arlington Square apartments a few months later. The McGurns were simultaneously renovating the Florida Theatre into a modern and preeminent music venue. There was even an ambitious trolley car that ran between UF campus and downtown through RTS that was done for a few months in 1987 before it was deemed a failure and scrapped.
Star Garage and Bethel Station
The McGurn plan did more than just promise to improve the eyesore around the Hippodrome, it would solve the issues of downtown parking forever. A 400 parking spot, 4-story garage was set to be the first and only structured parking lot in downtown.
And the City had the perfect spot for it. Just north of the Sun Center and south of Bo Diddley Plaza were two vacant, dilapidated automotive buildings separated by a potholed road. The “Star Garage” and the “Bethel Gas Station” were uniquely bad eyesores in a downtown filled with eyesores.
The city owned both of these buildings with the Star Garage being rented out to local arts groups and community groups.
This period was the height of the historic preservation movement. Dozens of new buildings in Gainesville were preserved from the Bailey House to the Segal Building, along with Duckpond becoming a federally registered historic district. A lot of this newfound infatuation with historic preservation was a direct response to the bulldoze-and-rebuild mentality of city building from decades past mentioned in my last post.
Long story short, these buildings became a focal point of local opposition to the changes in downtown. Local historic preservationists began calling for the protection of Bethel Station to “preserve our automotive heritage” with the Gainesville Sun Editorial section supporting their calls.
The end result was that Bethel Station was to be moved to the newly renovated plaza just across the street. It still stands there today as a restaurant, previously Steamers/Munecas.
With a $2.2 million grant from the federal government the parking garage opened in early 1988. That potholed road of NE 2nd got whittled down to the tiny pedestrian alleyway we have today, just like it had been eliminated at Bo Diddley in the 1970’s and the City Hall complex in the 1960’s.
This 400-lot parking garage was the final touch of a whirlwind of activity that created market-rate apartments, increased parking, offices, and the brick-lined frame of the Hippodrome that has become emblematic of downtown.
But it wasn’t smooth. The controversies surrounding it sound a lot like the discussions today about development. In order to build Arlington Square apartments many low-income residents, mostly minority residents, were displaced from their affordable single-family homes. Millions of dollars in property taxes were diverted to a private developer to get the projects off the ground when that money could have been used for other investments. Downtown had fundamentally changed, and while many people cheered it, others complained that the new downtown lost something in it’s wake.
There’s plenty to argue about the means of getting there, but you can’t argue with the results. In a downtown where taxable property barely rose from 1963-1983, the value of everything in downtown doubled by 1990.
It was the start of a tremendous growth in downtown investment, but downtown hadn’t quite been “revitalized” yet. Ken McGurn was about to make that very clear soon enough…
The McGurns Are Out, And Then In Again
In January of 1990 Ken McGurn made a surprising announcement: he’s selling his downtown properties. When asked why by the Gainesville Sun he was unequivocal, “because local officials, he says, aren’t committed to ‘doing what’s necessary to the revitalization of the downtown area’.”
One reason was the decision by the commission to allow expansion of the St. Francis House and the homeless issues that he thought came with that, but talking to him now it was more than that. He felt the city hadn’t followed his guidance on the trolley car, which he wanted to see be successful. The City had moved too slow, put up too many roadblocks, created more headaches than was worth it4.
But despite the revitalization of downtown, no one was interested in buying. By May of 1990 Ken McGurn was back in downtown, not because of a change of heart, but because no one thought downtown was worth investing in. As reported by the Gainesville Sun:
He has divided the holdings in every conceivable way, he said, hoping to find someone who wanted just part of the property, and he’s been flexible with prices.
But he still hasn’t found any takers.
“Nobody’s really interested in downtown, so I’m stuck,” he said.
Despite all the momentum downtown wasn’t revitalized. The smart money was on the West side of town. Haile Plantation opened in the 1980’s, Oaks Mall picked up with stores in the 1980s, Butler Plaza was expanding.
Outside of one real estate investment couple and local elected officials, few had much hope for a thriving downtown. Large swaths of downtown were still vacant, the entire east side of 1st street was a parking lot. It wasn’t the downtown we know today, and wouldn’t be until the early 2000’s.
That story, the story of the 90’s, is one that created the Union Street Station, the Hardback Cafe, a storied rave scene, and began the process of creating what would now be called “Depot Park”. It created the modern downtown Gainesville, one that, in my humble opinion, is one of if not the great downtown’s in the south east. But that is for a future article…
Randy Batista deserves an enormous amount of credit for bringing the arts to downtown. He was the head of the Downtown Owners and Tenants Association and really led the charge in bringing an arts focus to downtown through events and investments.
Mike Warren is still heavily involved in downtown, most recently opening the Hyatt in downtown, the only new building in downtown since the Hampton Inn was built in 2009.
Obviously the restaurant at the Hippodrome never happened, but it might have been a cool addition to the building
As an aside, I worked for Ken McGurn as his campaign manager in his 2016 congressional campaign against Ted Yoho. The hard driving Ken McGurn I read about here completely jives with the Ken I worked for 30 years later. His personality is the opposite of what you’d see/want in a government official. Government in a democratic system is deliberate, cautious, and needs to be collaborative. Ken is a hard-driving, decisive man who seemingly never sleeps. His critique of the City of Gainesville not moving fast enough fits his personability, but I’m not sure it’s a fair criticism considering everything he and the city accomplished together in such a short time in the late 1980’s.
Any thought given to reviving the streetcar/trolley car? I’d totally use it
Excellent piece, thanks for the research!