In
2011 I wrote a piece praising property owner Rick Underwood and contractor
Chad Yost for their work enhancing an old house on a prominent downtown corner.
Five years later, Underwood, who owns Rick’s Furniture on Stark Road, operates
a boutique for baby items called Sprouts at the site. I visited the other day
and it remains a beautiful building with a beautiful porch swing and edible
landscaping (persimmons, tomatoes, herbs) in the planters. Other good things
have happened in the neighborhood. Cadence Bank
razed an electric supply store and auto body shop and built a bank, putting the
parking in the rear and enhancing the pedestrian experience with a spacious
plaza with fountains – Starkville’s second downtown plaza. A few steps north of Sprouts, a Mississippi State University Department
of Landscape Architecture student and faculty member installed
an award-winning "read" garden on the corner of Main Street. Numerous big and small improvements to the pedestrian experience all over Starkville have come to pass, many of which deserve their own blog post shout-outs.
Today I want to
write about four more recent major developments in Starkville, three that
engage the street in good ways and one that absolutely does not.
When I was
studying for a Master’s in Landscape Architecture at Mississippi State
University (2007-2010), the principle that great streets are framed by
buildings was axiomatic and oft-repeated. We studied examples of street and
building configuration presented in The
Next American Metropolis (1993) by Peter Calthorpe and Great Streets (1993) by Allan B. Jacobs and responded accordingly
with our own designs. Not one Great Street has a parking lot between the street
and the building. Put the parking in back, put the building on the street, to
increase interaction between the street and the building, bring life to the
city, we were implored, again and again. The urgency of the message reflected a
concern among our professors and mentors brought about by a half century of
automobile-centered urban design in America, resulting in acres and acres of
characterless fields of parking, corporate boxes, and cu-de-sacs described so
vividly by Andreas Duany, Elizabeth Plater Zyberk and Jeff Speck in Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the
Decline of the American Dream. Every student, graduate and undergraduate
alike, in the Department had a copy, and read it.
About the
time I was writing my thesis, Jeremiah Dumas, MSU MLA alumnus, was elected to
the Starkville Board of Aldermen. A few years later Jason Walker, an Associate
Professor in the Department, was also elected. Our mayor at the time was Dan
Camp, who, according to the whispered rumors in the Department, built the
Cotton District one re-habbed mill workers' house at a time. Camp, the graduate
studio lounge gossip went, basically invented New Urbanism, and Duany visited
the Cotton District in the early days to get ideas. Camp soon returned to
in-filling the Cotton District with his signature combination of Neo-classical columns
and gables and New Orleans style galleries, including the mixed-use Rue du Grand Fromage, and a
mini-Parthenon adjacent to City Bagel, and Starkville elected an energetic and
progressive mayor in Parker Wiseman. Slowly, steadily, and not without hiccups,
ideas, particularly those centered on a sense of place and pedestrian-oriented
urban forms, articulated in the Department of Landscape Architecture, began to
emerge in the weekly agenda of the Aldermen meetings. Sunday alcohol sales,
long a part of the football weekends of the college town I came of age in,
became a thing. A city branding campaign, with the tagline “Mississippi’s
College Town” (which I considered an unnecessary swipe at Oxford) became
visible both on downtown sidewalks and in local publications. Directional
signage, pointing visitors to celebrated nodes and points of interest,
appeared. A sidewalk ordinance compelled all developers to include sidewalks in
their plans. Form-based codes were discussed. Which brings us to Russell Street.
But before
we stroll down Russell Street, let’s stop by the northwest corner of Jackson
and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Drive, and take a look at the worst of the bad in recent development.
Here the property owners have done everything our LA professors told us not to do. Parking in front, metal
building (a Family Dollar Store relocating from across the street I am told) in
the back away from the street, achieved by moving an amazing amount of dirt,
cutting deep into the existing bank, drastically altering the landscape setting
of one of Starkville’s grandest homes, and stressing (if not ultimately killing)
the mature oak between the two properties. And check out the size of those
culverts: a vegetated gully (can we call it a stream?) will be buried to
accommodate all that parking, increasing bounce, velocity and erosion
downstream. It’s 1975 again! How did this happen? Corners are important to
great streets. This corner does not seem to be destined to make this
neighborhood better, which is a shame, because good things are happening on Dr Martin
Luther King Dr as well, with the recent addition of sidewalks and pedestrian
crosswalks west of this site near the Henderson – Ward Stewart Schools.
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| Google Earth image of northwest corner of Jackson and MLK Jr. Dr. Building Footprint is far off the street, cutting deep into the bank that supports the neighboring house and mature oak. |
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| A metal building with large culverts and boxes to bury a stream |
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| The neighborhood context of the adjacent house, above the wall, was ruined in order to set a metal building away from the street. |
A couple of
blocks southeast of this corner, on Russell Street, a major connector between
Starkville’s downtown and the campus of Mississippi State University, as Lynn
Spruill points out in a recent column,
good
things are happening. About four years ago, where Russell Street crosses
Highway 12 and becomes Stone Bouevard, MSU installed large brick entrance signs
with gaps for sidewalks -but no actual sidewalks. This summer the sidewalk
was installed for one of the two grand signs, and the rehabilitation of the intersection of Russell and HWY 12 is well underway. I
was very happy to see highway crews
actually jackhammer out the long sweeping, highway
exit from westbound 12 and replace it with a 90 degree turn. This slows traffic
on Russell and signals to those coming from the northeast that Russell is a
boulevard and not another highway.
On football
Saturdays, Russell St carries a lot of pedestrian traffic to campus. In the
past years, cars were allowed to park on the shoulder. When you put cars where
people would walk, the people walk where the cars normally go, that is, in the
street. Not a good situation. This is changing: private developers, working
in partnership with the University, in a very complex and challenging set of
projects, have renovated the historic Cooley Building, also known as the Cotton
Mill, or now, simply, The Mill, into a complex of offices, conference center,
and Courtyard by Marriot Hotel, with a parking garage and shuttle service to
Golden Triangle Regional Airport. The Mill project and the multi-unit
residential development currently under construction across the street brought
sidewalks to both sides of the campus end of Russell Street (but not all the way to HWY 12 yet). Placing the multi
story condos right up against the sidewalk (a little too close if you ask me,
for they afford no space for street trees) creates an urban feel and brings
excitement to the space by creating an illusion of accessibility and easy
interaction between the sidewalk and the building. I say “illusion” because, in the case of one building, the
accessibility is only suggested by the proximity to the sidewalk. All building
access is from the rear parking area. Judging by the current state of the
construction, pedestrians will actually experience the building as a brick
wall, with gaps for a few street-level galleries, with the principle physical
interaction coming from the occasional spilled drink from the galleries above, or the tossing
of mardi gras beads from below.
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| Approaching the two new multi-unit housing buildings at the east (campus) end of Russell Street. Cooley Building, now called The Mill, is on the right. | | | | | | | |
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| The easternmost condo. Looks great, but no access to sidewalk |
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| The adjacent condo appears to feature double doors opening to the sidewalk |
A block
closer to town, at the old Palmer Home Thrift Store site, Russell Street Flats
offers more multi-story, multi-unit residential living. Here a single
street-level doorway offers some interaction between the sidewalk and the
building, and street-level patios, separated from the sidewalk by railings, are
an improvement over the brick wall. I agree with Spruill that the choice of
exterior siding makes the building seem less “permanent,” and several friends
have remarked that it just looks cheap and unfinished.
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| Viewing Russell flats from the East |
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| Russel Street Flats. Parallel parking is a great traffic calming feature, but if you can't access the units from the street, what's the point? |
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| iPhone pano of Russell Street Flats. Overall a fine concept, but the style and materials seem unworthy of a building as prominent as this. |
Why do two
of these buildings lack true, physical accessibility to the sidewalk from the
residential units? Is it a security issue? If you watch any TV show or movie
about people living in New York City, the ability to exit your residence
directly to the sidewalk is a strong feature of the neighborhood, and often and
essential element in the story. I know I enjoy that aspect of my house and
neighborhood just a block away from Russell Street and these new developments.
Which brings
us to The Balcony, a block north of my house. This thing is beautiful. High
quality materials, right on the street, parking in rear, close to the mixed-use
renovation of the old Borden plant (another nicely preserved historic
industrial building). The Balcony celebrates the street by having several main
entrances to the building connect directly to the sidewalk, which previously
hovered dangerously 3 feet above the street but which now has been brought down
to street grade. Also, for some reason, (I wish I knew why), this development has
somehow compelled the city to install a curbed median in the center of
Montgomery Street, a traffic-calming device that runs half a block. This
emphasizes what my wife and I have been arguing since moving to Montgomery
Street ten years ago: this is a residential
street, not an arterial road.
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| The Balcony on North Montgomery Street. Several street-level access points. |
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| Another view of The Balcony |
Behind the
beauty of the Balcony is a troubling reality: none of the units are for sale.
The development's
website makes it
clear that these units are to be rented by college students. If you want to
live there, the first thing you need to do is schedule a time to sign your
lease. The second thing is to fill out your parent guaranty form. Now, to be
clear, I love students. Students are not necessarily bad neighbors. But good
neighborhoods need a critical mass of permanent residents, and this project
significantly tips the demographic balance of my neghborhood to the temporary kind of
neighbor.
In
conclusion, good things are happening in Starkville, good urban forms are
manifesting. It’s not all good everywhere, but a major physical corridor
between campus and town is being strengthened in a way that considers
pedestrians as a vital component, rather than a game-day annoyance, and that’s
a good thing.
