When going about trying to understand the parking dynamics downtown ‘broad-view’ metrics don’t reveal the reality on the scene! A planner would need to drill down much, much more, as I have done.
I went in to every shop, about 3 years ago, just before I started this blog. I asked if there were any issues about downtown. At first I was a little shy about asking, but then, invariably, I would be talking to a sales assistant and suddenly they would open up into a horror story about parking, usually the same story.
That is why I was aghast and taken aback when some months ago, during the Gunn debate, the Bedford Square people said they asked around the different stores and nobody cared that the proposal called for the removal of 22 prime municipal parking spots.
I guess it’s all in how you frame the question. This is the answer I received on more than fifty occasions, without even asking about parking:
“If you arrive to work after nine a.m. all the long term spots are taken, you have to park in what would normally be considered a customer spot, and then you have to move every hour to avoid getting tickets.”
There are 1100 employees and 500 long term spots. And get this, 300 of the long term spots are in the Imperial Avenue lot. No doubt there are 1900 spots. I don’t have the latest numbers, but the numbers don’t matter, just talk to the girls who work in those stores, the people who actually work downtown. Or for that matter the people who actually own the buildings(other than Waldman).
So far — with all of Waldman’s renovations on Church Lane he has only removed parking spots, conveniently a sign has been posted at the corner of Elm Street and Church Lane directing people wanting to go to the new Church Lane restaurants to park in the municipal spots at Baldwin, meaning all of Waldman’s customers are using town owned land to park. When Bedford Square is completed they are providing 100 new underground spots. How fast can we discount those as being helpful. First; the 22 best spots are being taken away by the moving of the Gunn house, Waldman proposed that he will give 22 spots in his new lot to make up for the loss. Second; there will be some number of residential units that gets spots, let’s just say 20. Third; the employees at the new Bedford Square? My guess is about 50. That leaves 8 spots for customers, underground.
All the talk about the Y traffic leaving is total bullshit. People aren’t at the Y during shopping hours, they are usually there early in the morning or after they get off work. I can guarantee that Waldman will have more than twice the number of employees than the Y has now at his new Bedford Square complex of retail, office and residential. No doubt he will tell them all to park on town owned land. And there by forcing customers to park in his underground lot, with elevators to his stores, but all the other stores on Main Street get screwed, making the problem worse. But what does he care, he will be flipping all buildings to new owners, and his price only goes up because he now has exclusive access to parking downtown. Further, with the Gunn house where it will be he is assured that he will never have any competition for his Bedford Square. We have been duped.
This is how it goes down: She’s a beautiful young woman, she needs to get to work at the shop on Main Street(or her children will starve — she doesn’t live in Westport), all the spots are taken, she circles around, “oh, wouldn’t you know it” the spot right in front of her store is open. Now – she knows as she’s parking right in front of her store that she is taking a spot where a customer might just drive on by if they can’t park right out front, and that she will get a ticket in one hour – everybody loses because there aren’t enough long term spots. But the new long term spots need to be in friendly places for the employees.
It’s a cultural thing:
People don’t want to walk to or from the Imperial Ave lot when they get off work, or to go shopping. The Imperial lot is perceived as dark and out of the way. What makes shopping in Westport world-class is that you can park right in front of the store you are shopping at, if you can’t do that then you have a mall, like any other. Removing any customer parking to a garage is a change in the Westport “small town” culture.
Here is the part people aren’t getting, it is that each little group of stores have individual unique parking issues, obviously the outside fresh eyes, in the form of the outside planning company, have admitted they missed these facts. Thanks to Steve Desloge, the president of the DMA, for picking up the very same reactions from people who work in downtown shops that I had logged and noted. A participant from the outside planning company acknowledged that something wasn’t jiving with his recent parking survey. Doesn’t surprise me in the least that they missed the whole dynamic of what is really going on because I ran into the kids that were hired while they were doing their survey. They said that they were counting cars in the lots that day and that they would even be coming back on Saturday. I tried to give them a few tips because I had been helping Drew Friedman(founder of the DMA) with parking analysis for more than ten years. They acted dismissive to me, of course they were just kids and had a job to do.
The other shocker is that there are so many stores that rely on municipal parking! Many stores are built right up to the lot lines. If there wasn’t town owned parking the stores could not exist. But the groupings around each set of stores is entirely different and unique. For instance when there is a book sale – you can’t park if you work in any of those stores along the Post Road where the Fine Arts Theater was; you have a helluva time – and still you would never consider parking at the Imperial Avenue lot. And yet the library people will contend that they don’t need to provide any more parking when they expand their square footage; by law they have to; it will be fun to watch as they try to wiggle out of the problem instead of confronting it, indeed this has turned into a game. Just ask the people who work near the Taylor lot and Jesup Green what happens when the Library has an event during the day.
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There have been stories for decades about devising a sort of tram from the Imperial Avenue lot – and viola- problem solved. I’d go for a mall set up downtown if they put in a tram.
The Brooks Community Corners across from the market place is another great study, for parking sampling ideas. They have no problems at all. They provide parking for all their clients in their private lot right on Main Street. There was the idea of turning that parking lot into a green park on Main Street; they would donate the spot out front, maybe keeping one little row of cars, for exclusive rights at a new parking garage at Baldwin. That is where the tram should arrive actually. More on the tram idea later.
There are more employees than shoppers: You don’t see that when you are counting the cars in each lot, counting the cars in each lot does you no good, you have to be able to distinguish the parkers. Since there are more employees than shoppers we need more long term spots.
Without understanding this dynamic I’m afraid a clear vision of a new downtown will be obscured. In most instances the stores have no private parking so if you take away 25 of the best spots maybe your losing a thousand shoppers in a week or two. I’m not crying for the building owners but they’re the ones who actually own the buildings, bought when certain parking rules were already in place.
Untangling the parking dilemma has been the real challenge. It was pointed out to me as a key to unlocking downtown issues – how quickly we were able to carry out the survey. I would say that after 3 years of blogging about the parking situation, some 300 odd essays, I am but a knebby scratch upon the surface, in getting the word out.
So I have decided upon a further course of action, namely, in explicit detail, I will outline my vision of how downtown should be:
In a perfect world all the girls who work downtown would have a place to park close to their store. There should be a huge tall low income apartment building called Imperial Towers, in this manner you would have hundreds of people, if not thousands, wandering the downtown streets. They need milk and lower priced clothing and just regular people stuff you can’t get downtown anymore.
Then if you are a resident you get a free tram pass – and there are portions of the ride where it is not unlike the monorail in Seattle. Stops by the old sea-port museum with the onion docks. Every building downtown must be preserved as if frozen in time, like Rome. If the library wants to build a glass monument so be it, even if they aren’t helping the parking situation by increasing their square footage and not providing extra new parking – there by putting the burden on the building owners, the plans for the library do look functional for the town, to me. As library director Maxine Bleiweis has said to me previously that the library is the main anchor downtown now – it is the main draw to downtown.
In my perfect world I would have more people fishing, oh, and also a dinner barge, off Parker Harding. A night time thing like the dancing barge in Rome in that movie with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck “Roman Holiday”.
A movie theater should go in, it could be the best art film house in the country, with a festival every year. If we had more economic diversity downtown we might have a different mix of shops besides the commercial mall types ones we have now. Like a market and a drugstore, so it feels like home a little bit, every store doesn’t have to be a gap or an urban outfitters.
With the income diversity we get the cultural treasures as well. We need to have a school for art in downtown Westport. This is the payoff from my vision of downtown. The town would be richer, not in money, but in people. We have a wonderful rich diversity now but it is mostly rich people, which is nice but now in my perfect world the pendulum would swing back in time to when not everyone in town was a rich ****. No just kidding, I don’t think that’s how it is now but we need “income diversity”, sort of my catch phrase for what is illing Westport. Too much money – what a problem. What to do with all the money? This is where I come in with my vision.
In my perfect world everybody gives me the money to radically re-town-scape the whole place. The first thing I would do is build a flood barrier wall, just like the Berlin Wall all along the river. Then I would lift every building on Main Street up 3 feet, and Main Street itself, and re-pour cement under there. Then I would declare August “Festival Month” and every day in August would be like a party, dancing at night and the movie festival. Then we would need an international hotel – with helicopter service, not all the time just in and out once or twice a day. A major art gallery would be the final dream, in the Baron’s mansion.
So, my plan calls for 2 museums, 1. in front of Jesup Green there should be a re-creation of Admiral Perry’s boat and a tall ship looking onion sloop. You should be able to see the tall ship mast from far away, and 2. the Baron’s land museum and art gallery.
The 3rd museum I would institute downtown would be the Sigrid Schultz museum; she did a good amount of linguistics, war reporting, spy work, writing and broadcasting. They are putting the Gunn House on her property this fall, 35 Elm Street where she retired. From the late 30′s till 1980 she lived right in the center of town, I was friends with her. I guess now it will be called the Waldman Gunn House. In my perfect world it would be called the Schultz Gunn Waldman House.