More buildings play nice with the street in Starkville

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.

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.

A metal building with large culverts and boxes to bury a stream

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.

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.

The easternmost condo. Looks great, but no access to sidewalk

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.

Viewing Russell flats from the East

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?

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.

The Balcony on North Montgomery Street. Several street-level access points.

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.