The Fall of Downtown Gainesville
By the early 1960s is was clear downtown Gainesville was in trouble. People were moving west, and retail was leaving. The decisions the city made to reverse that trend set up the downtown we have toda
This is part 1 of a 3-part piece. Read “The Revitalization of Downtown Gainesville: the 1980’s” to hear how we got the first steps of picking up the pieces.
Downtown is the face of our city. It’s where who we are as a community shines through, and I’m incredibly proud of that shine we have. It’s a place where I can see great music any night of the week, where historic buildings surround me everywhere I go, a place that’s always changing and evolving. It’s where I met my wife, where our first date was, and where some of my fondest memories are.
Our city is engaging in the next steps of our downtown strategic plan, to figure out where downtown Gainesville goes from here. As with most policy decisions, I try to understand how we got to where we are to try and understand where we’re going. So over these past few weeks, I’ve been diving deep on the plans the City has had on downtown revitalization over the decades. What worked, what didn’t, why is it the way it is, and what could we have done differently?
What I found is fascinating, and I wanted to write it out on this blog, both so you all can see it and for my own edification. It’s a big story, so I’m breaking it into two parts: the fall and the rise of downtown Gainesville.
The Decline of Downtown
By the early 1960’s it was clear that downtown Gainesville was in trouble. Not that you’d be able to tell from the street just walking around downtown. Downtown Gainesville for over a century had grown out of “Courthouse Square”, in what is now the County Administration Building. From the square radiated blocks of shops, offices, and hotels, many of which still stand today. Downtown was the shopping center of North Central Florida.
In the 1960’s the large department stores still stood imposingly over the Courthouse Square. The hardware stores stood to its east, where Bo Diddley Plaza is today, with various little shops to the south and west, most of which are still standing. Woolsworth’s, Silverman’s, Wilson’s and Baird’s were stalwarts of downtown and still going. The banks that had grown to service these businesses still stood, and the public workers from City Hall and the courthouse still frequented the restaurants and shops nearby. Downtown was still, in 1963, the center of retail for all of North Central Florida.
Since the mid 1800’s families would come from far and wide to shop for clothes, hardware supplies, and jewelry. They would ride in on the train or, later, the bus, and spend all day with their families at the shops that were conveniently located within walking distance of one another. The roads were brick, the same brick you can see on SE 1st Street today, which slowed the horses and cars down as they drove through, making it feel comfortable and safe to cross University Ave and Main Street. The ample trees gave plenty of shade from the hot, swampy Florida weather.
But it was clear the tide was moving in the other direction for downtown. Downtowns across the United States were falling into disrepair as suburban sprawl and suburban shopping malls were taking over. Gainesville didn’t have these malls yet in the early 1960’s, but it was only a matter of time. The Gainesville Shopping Center opened on Main Street in 1958, and it was well known that the massive Gainesville Mall was set to open on NW 13th St. soon.
In response, the city planning department drafted the first plan for downtown revitalization in 1963. It was the first of many plans that would continue to today, and set the stage for downtown for the next 20 years.
The 1963 Downtown Gainesville Plan
Downtown Gainesville, if it wishes to retain its prosperity, must revitalize its economics, order, and aesthetic values to function effectively as the heart of business, government, and transportation.
The central business district has to make itself an area that can be easily reached with comfort and convenience in pleasing the citizen in every manner. The alternative for the citizen is either to go to downtown Gainesville with relative satisfaction or not go at all. This price to be paid for the decline of downtown Gainesville will, directly or indirectly, effect every individual in the future.
The downtown area has come to the threshhold in its history of either two directions --decline or renewal. Renewal or redevelopment means action, and effective action is only achieved when a cross section of community leaders and public officials work together with citizens' support toward a common goal.
So begins an incredible document from 1963 that outlines the problems and challenges of downtown Gainesville right at the start of its fall from grace. In it City staff are wide-eyed about the issues downtown Gainesville faces: the car changed the way people move through the city. The streets of downtown were designed for walking, not cars, and so the lack of parking and mobility caused serious issues. Retail is leaving downtown, and there is nothing to replace it. People were moving west, and with it business and vibrancy were going too.
While their analysis of the challenges for downtown were very insightful, the solutions they gave were terrible. It was a laughably bad mix of every bad planning idea from the 1960s, from urban renewal to highways to pedestrian malls.
Their plan was to bring “order” to the “chaos” of downtown. To speed up traffic through downtown, ensuring people can get through it as quickly as possible. While speeding through they’ll be able to find ample parking, which required demolishing large swaths of downtown for parking lots. The entire area will then be turned into a “shopping mall”, where only retail businesses will be allowed. The non-highway streets will become “pedestrian malls” that would become “superblocks”, similar to the shopping malls that were becoming popular across the United States, just in downtown Gainesville.
Because the downtown proper is relatively small, the shopping area will need to be expanded. So city staff called for “urban renewal” of Pleasant Street, to put arterial roads through this historically black neighborhood and turn their homes into more retail shops. In fact, nearly all of the African-American neighborhoods near downtown were slated to become “retail only”. Whiter and wealthier Duckpond was, of course, exempt from this. Those homes would stay single-family (map above).
While much of this plan didn’t happen, thank god, it did start a city-wide conversation in the mid-1960s about how to revitalize downtown. The Gainesville Sun ran a regular column through the 1960s on tactics and plans to revitalize the area, mostly through small-scale beautification projects. Unfortunately, those beautification plans never came to fruition, and by the end of the 1960’s Downtown was looking rough.
As you can see from the image above, in the 1930’s trees lined the downtown streets, and the area was dense with shops. By 1968 the trees were gone, the shops were barely standing, and in their place was a long line of surface-level parking lots. Even the modest plan in 1964 to plant 20 trees in downtown failed to materialize, and they were never planted. Downtown had lost its charm, and the worst was yet to come…
The Downtown Governmental Complex
In 1967 the Gainesville Mall opened on NW 13th St., where Lowes is today, putting the final nail in the coffin of downtown retail. Talking with people that grew up during this time they describe the amazement they had seeing the large escalator that went through the mall. They describe the excitement of walking through the much larger department stores that could stock more items than the relatively smaller ones downtown. The Gainesville Mall was the happening spot, and almost immediately shops like Belk’s and Zale’s Jewelry shut down their shops in downtown and moved to the larger spaces in the new Gainesville Mall.
Meanwhile, the population was moving west, with huge neighborhoods of single-family homes sprawling further and further toward the newly opened I-75.
By the mid-1970’s downtown Gainesville was blocks of empty buildings that could be bought for cheap. That fact, along with a much less restrictive “eminent domain” law than we have today, set up the next steps for downtown “revitalization”.
Even before the failed “downtown shopping mall” concept was unveiled, many were arguing for downtown Gainesville to become a “governmental complex” similar to Tallahassee. The first of this was in 1968, when on the site of an old church and food market the new city hall and library went in where it is today. University Ave. and Main St. were soon after given to the Florida Department of Transportation to become highways, and with it the brick roads became asphalt and on-street parking was removed. Cars could move through much faster, but walking around downtown became much harder.
In 1975 the area east of the old courthouse, on what is now Bo Diddley Plaza, was torn down by the city to create the great “judicial complex”, shutting down SE 2nd Street and creating a “superblock” that connected a new courthouse with a downtown plaza. Using eminent domain the city forced out dozens of small business owners, who protested the evictions but had no power to stop it.
The old brick buildings were torn down, and in their place, new, modern architecture went in. Both of these buildings were designed in a modern “brutalist style”1 that exists still today. Gainesville was moving forward, and modern architecture was going to sweep away the classical brick buildings of decades past.
These decisions turned what was a thriving downtown shopping area into a stolid, boring downtown of government buildings, attorneys, and banks. It was an area that mostly died as soon as 5:00 pm hit and the government workers clocked out. The nighttime in downtown, without any nightclubs, few restaurants, and sparse streetlights, was dark and dangerous. As later downtown developer Ken McGurn remembered at the time, “Even the muggers traveled in twos.”
The downtown plaza that was supposed to bring the community together instead became a hangout for muggers and the homeless. Its odd design, with random walls and dark places scattered about, made it scary and uninviting, and almost immediately upon its opening people were calling for it to be redesigned. Twenty years later it would, by future County Commissioner Robert “Hutch” Hutchinson, and later renamed to “Bo Diddley Plaza”.
Looking at photos from the 1970’s there were no trees to be seen for miles in any direction of downtown, a sharp contrast from the tree-lined boulevards it was just a few decades before.
And in a time where music and arts were thriving across Gainesville, cultivating some of the greatest musicians the world has ever known, downtown was completely left out. While Tom Petty and Don Felder would play at bars like Dub’s on NW 13th or Traders South on SW 13th, there was no real venue in downtown, save the “Great Southern Music Hall”. This is in stark contrast to what Gainesville would become in future decades, as the centerpiece of arts and music in the city.
This was because alcohol sales were effectively banned in downtown until 1975. Alachua County was a “dry” county until 1963, and that alcohol conservatism left a lot of arbitrary alcohol rules on the books. One was that alcohol couldn’t be served within 300 feet of a church, which downtown had four of. The result was that throughout most of downtown alcohol was banned, making any restaurant, music venue, or nightclub nearly impossible to sustain economically. For better or worse, music and theatre tend to happen in venues where people can buy drinks, so one of our most storied eras in Gainesville's musical legacy mostly skipped downtown.
The Downtown Parking Loop
Every plan and idea for downtown that came out from this time period began and ended with one focus: parking. In a way this made some sense: downtown was not built for cars, parking takes a lot of space (320 sq. ft. per parking space), and downtown was losing customers to the shopping malls that had islands of parking in front of them. But even as parking grew and grew over the next 20 years it remained the top, if not only, strategy the city employed to bring more people downtown.
Between 1965-1985 an incredible amount of land was razed to create parking lots in downtown. Any shred of greenspace that was available was covered in asphalt and striped for parking. During this time there was so much parking created that by 1984 a downtown report found that “36% of the developable land area in the CCD [downtown] is devoted to parking with that figure approaching 50% in the non-residential areas.”
Yet in spite of the incredible amount of parking available, lack of parking was still the number one complaint people had about downtown, according to multiple reports and the Gainesville Sun. People grew to expect a suburban-style parking arrangement: enormous fields of parking in front of strip malls, and downtown just couldn’t offer that with its layout. Parking in downtown was always a bit more of a hunt than at suburban shopping malls, even when there were ample amounts of it tucked around.
Much of this new parking was a direct investment by the City government, but the city also implemented “parking minimums” for new developments that forced a certain amount of parking for each new business in 1964. In most cases the amount of parking required exceeded the actual sq. footage of the building itself, making redevelopment in downtown, where land is scarce, nearly impossible.
This hyper-focus on parking resulted in one of the silliest yet most resilient ideas that came out of these downtown revitalization plans: “the Downtown Parking Loop”. The concept of the downtown parking loop was that people would be able to circle the central downtown area on four-lane roads where they could look for parking in every direction. The roads were 2nd Avenue to the north and south and 3rd Street to the east and west.
The goal was for people to be able to find parking easily and quickly2, but the implementation of that idea was ludicrous. The result was enormous four-lane roads leading nowhere that can still be seen today. NW 2nd Avenue in Pleasant Street is the best example: a 3-block stretch of absurdly oversized road, leading to basically nowhere, with parking lots on each side.
The same is true of SE 3rd Ave by the GRU administration building. Where Arlington Square Apartments stand today was parking, as was the current GRU lot.
The last mention I see of the “Downtown Parking Loop” was in 1981, where the Commission did a last-ditch $20,000 study on how to complete the loop, despite the commercial areas of downtown being over 50% parking. Then City Commissioner Mark Goldstein was a strong proponent, claiming the plan would create more parking and less traffic “thus bringing back life, joy and happiness to the area”, adding that “hundreds maybe thousands” of parking spaces would be created by the move. This was corrected by city staff, who forecasted only 50-75 spaces would be created in total. Parking takes up a lot of space.
A voice of reason and strong advocacy for downtown during this time was City Commissioner Gary Junior, who voted for the study as well, but had mixed feelings about it. As he pointed out in a 1982 article in the Gainesville Sun, the Downtown Parking Loop was the only idea the City Commission, downtown business owners, or city planning staff had for downtown. Even if it was a dumb idea (it was), it was the only thing available.
For nine years, Junior added, downtown businessmen have debated how to revitalize the area but have reached no major conclusions. Instead, he said, requests for things like more meter maids are the norm for the group.
The commissions $20,000 allocation for the study is perhaps “the last grasp at getting the city to participate” in helping downtown businessmen, Junior said. But if they want to leave things as they are, the commission will likely go along with them, Junior said.
Without any idea of what to do for a rapidly dying downtown, the Commission moved on to other priorities.
Darkest Before the Dawn
Things were only going to get worse from here. Butler Plaza opened in 1972, the Oaks Mall opened in 1979, and Haile Plantation in the early 1980s. Population would continue crawling west, and retail would continue to leave the downtown area and move toward big box stores and suburban-style malls to the west.
The 1980s were perhaps the absolute worst time in downtown history, but in that time the first steps of its revitalization in the 1990’s would come. This revitalization would be done less by top-down grand plans of urban planners, and instead by entrepreneurs, artists, and forward-thinking city officials. Instead of focusing solely on moving cars through, the city began focusing on making downtown a place people wanted to be.
The Commission improved walkability, allowed housing to be built, and created a downtown that is today a place where arts, culture and entertainment thrive. They got into the weeds with public-private partnerships and small-scale beautification projects. Essentially, they did the opposite of every mistake they made in the 20 years before that, and saw the fruits of their labor.
That is a story also worth telling, so I’ll tell it in the 2nd part of this series.
These buildings are incredibly ugly and I can’t imagine why anyone thought they were a good idea
I bike everywhere, but I don’t discount that people need parking when they come downtown. Getting ample, easy-to-find parking is something we should do for downtown, but it shouldn’t be our only/top priority.
I've lived through a lot of this, from 1970 until today. Nice synopsis, Bryan. It's always good to understand the past.
My grandfather's drugstore, Vidal Drug Co., stood on thc square where the old courthouse clock now sits until 1974 when the city took it by eminent domain. Good synopsis of some bad city planning.