Government Failure - The Urban Renewal Years

Schenectady, NY - Franny Wentzel - Thursday, December 1st, 2011 : goo

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Government failure occurs when government intervention makes matters worse rather than better. Perhaps no great oject lesson in the theory is the decades-long failure after failure of government initiated urban renewal schemes.

Schenectady in 1945 was a booming industrial city whose vibrant downtown served fairly well, the retail and entertainment needs of its residents. There were issues of traffic and parking that - with war's end - the City hoped to address...

This is the heroic cover image of a pamphlet promoting The Glorious Plan

These are the heroic Architects of The Glorious Plan

These are the heroic Civil Servents ready to enact The Glorious Plan

Never did find a copy of The Glorious Plan

In the 1950s the Nott Terrace Plan involved demolition of an area along the uphill fringe of downtown. In a area with some of the nastiest winters they wanted to build an open-air shopping center. Noice!

This supplanted an earlier plan to rebuild the area with apartment blocks

The area in question was the most run-down section of town

But there were a couple of city schools in the parcel - the picturesque Nott Terrace elementary school...

...and the elegant Nott Terrace High School - the city first - which had just been supplanted by a more modern structure uptown

Half the school was torn down for a new traffic alignment but the other half survived into the 1970s...

...and was replaced by this.

The rest of the demolished parcel stood empty for a few years due to lack of project funding

Two Guys - a local discount chain occupied the parcel to from the 1960s till the company folded in early 80s. General Electric bought the main store for back offices whilst their auto repair department building was sold to an HMO in the 1990s

Listed as part of The Plan - though I suspect it was included to give the illusion of action being taken - was the Picotte Building

The Plan called for a hotel to be built... and there is this Holiday Inn on a corner of the parcel

This 1968 photo survey shows the Nott Street development - bottom right of center - as a sea of parking with buildings that bear no particular relation to each other.

The 1968 Urban Renewal Plan was even more ambitious

The city's old hotel was to be converted into a Community College - which it was - with new structures built across the street to serve functions not doable in the old structure. These were never built

Instead a section of the Mohawk River was filled in and new structures built as needed

More important was the need to revitalise the retail core of downtown

Following the fashion of the time buildings were to be interconnected - just like the suburban shopping malls

Virtually all the old buildings of the 400 block - including Proctor's Theater - would be replaced with this

Across the street the Wallace's Department store would get a new brick and concrete ribbon facade. There would also be a bank with offices above...

...as well as a skywalk connection to Carl's Department Store

With specialty shops to occupy the space between

A third department store - and this motor lodge - would be built later. Well actually none of this got built. Downtown continued to decay and by 1974 two of the three department stores and a number of other retailers closed their doors

In the hopes of restoring some life to the old dorp city planners rebuilt the Wallace block - restoring the facade which had been covered over in the 1950s - into the Center City skating rink.

Parents did take their kids downtown but only to drop 'em off and pick 'em back up again. They didn't really want to linger for shopping.

Ironically the office and bank just recently got built over the former Center City entrance. The Wallace block had its facade fully restored and the former rink is now a YMCA athletic facility.

The 1968 plan called for the landscaping of State and Jay streets with Jay Street to be converted to a pedestrian mall

This didn't happen till the early 1980s

Oddly enough Jay Street has proved a relative sucess

Though on my last visit the vacancy rate looked to be about 50%

The early 80s saw a landscaping plan applied to State Street as well. One thing the designers apparently didn't count of was the fact that streets are arched for drainage purposes so now the sidewalks were turned to gutters

The most recent landscaping scheme cut back the sidewalks to a semblence of their former outlines.

They also did a lot of unnecessary streetscaping that hopefully a few snowy winters will convince them to remove

The late 70s/early 80s saw a revived attempt to rebuild the 400 block in the form of the Canal Square mall

This time they would retain the old buildings - adding infill structures as need - but unify them...

...with an awning and similar brown and yellow colour scheme. Behind the facades would be interconnections...

...and a decorative canal big enough to float paddle boats in the summer. The canal only lasted a couple years and was filled in

More importantly, the interconnections only went to half the project leaving this end more or less for dead. The brown and yellow colour scheme didn't look so great either.

After the 1991 recession Carl's - the area's last locally-owned department store - finally folded leaving Proctor's the only going concern. By the late 90s the city saw the 'Metroplex' as the next Great Idea.

It didn't get built

The 400 block still stands, though now with only half the buildings of old. The 1968 planners did get their motor lodge - on the site of the dead end of Canal Square. The Metroplex planners had to settle for this multiplex - built on the one building their plan was to have saved.

As Schenectady's retail fortunes waned the one thing downtown didn't have to fall back on was office space. Enter the Kossows in 1986 with their Broadway Center project

This too was an ambitious plan - three towers atop a parking ramp...

...and the first tower got built. The parking ramp was built across the street.

However the project went up just in time to be hit by the 1991 recession. The Kossows sold out at a loss and the other two towers were never built.

Did you know Schenectady was going to build a World Trade Center? A local developer bought a licence from the World Trade Centers Association in the late-80s

Their plan got as far as the renderings phase

The city cleared the property - and nothing happened.

A local HMO took over the site and built their headquarters there about a decade ago.

It is a supreme irony that for all the new ideas thrown up the flagpole in the years since World War II ended...

...that the best idea was to have a downtown with a dense cluster of buildings...

...and all the fancy-schmancy ornamentation those City Planners hated

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Peter: this is a great post... thanks, franny!

Schenectadian: Thank you.

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