Even in NYS, it CAN be done

I recently visited my hometown, and was pleasantly surprised by how it had changed. I grew up in the 70s, and I remember the main drag, Mamaroneck Avenue, as a 50s throwback - little independent shops along the way, some movie theaters, coffee shops, with a Macy's and a Woolworth's with a Luncheonette at the far end. Urban renewal came, and the only real, palpable change to Mam'k Ave consisted of new sidewalks and some trees. The Galleria Mall opened in 1980, and that led to the slow death of businesses on Mam'k Ave. (Sound familiar?). By the late 80s, it was looking pretty sketchy. Even the Galleria was in decline. The Westchester Mall opened on the site of a long-abandoned B. Altman's in the late 90s, complete with Nordstrom's and a link to a Nieman Marcus that opened in the 70s. You'd expect this new, high-end mall to drive the last nail in the Galleria's coffin, but instead the old mall found tenants aplenty and is still going strong. The vacant Macy's is now "City Center" with a Target, a Barnes & Noble, an Atlanta Bread Company, a beautiful new Italian restaurant, and a huge new municipal parking garage for a high-rise apartment complex. Trump is building new apartments across the street, at the end of Mamaroneck Avenue. It's a stunning rejuvination, and one from which Buffalo could take some lessons. Here are some choice quotes from today's NY Times article:

The mayor, Joseph M. Delfino, used to joke that you could shoot a cannon down the street at night and not hit a car or a pedestrian. "Now you have to be careful where you aim," said Bruce Berg, an executive vice president of Cappelli Enterprises, the leading downtown developer. For the better part of a decade, a former Macy's department store sat empty at the corner of Main Street and Mamaroneck Avenue, a vital intersection that was dotted with vacancies and 99-cent stores. Even Starbucks, which plants a flag in almost any town with a retail pulse, had stayed away. But now there's a glossy new Starbucks overlooking the fountain. Macy's has been replaced by a huge mixed-used development called City Center, with a 35-story rental tower, One City Place, already built, and a twin condominium tower, bearing the Trump name, still rising. And in perhaps the clearest sign of the transformation of the business district, there is now a sales office for Trump Tower, as well as an adjoining loft building, where stores once hawked cheap toys and toiletries. Breaking the city's traditional 20-story skyline, the towers loom over a retail complex that includes Target, Barnes & Noble, Circuit City, the Legal Seafood restaurant, Filene's Basement and the first new movie theater the city has had in years. The towers also lifted the prices in the housing market. With an indoor pool and views of the Manhattan skyline and Long Island Sound, One City Place, with 311 units, is charging $2,000 to $2,600 for granite- and marble-sheathed one-bedroom apartments and as much as $5,500 for a three-bedroom apartment. Leasing started in April, and about half the apartments are rented. The Trump Tower condominiums are priced from $645,000 to $1.6 million. The tower, with 212 apartments, will not be finished until fall 2005. But the condominiums have sold so fast that the developer, Cappelli, has increased prices four times. Two-thirds of the units have sold since the apartments went on the market in early October, sold by Cappelli under a licensing agreement with Donald Trump... ...City officials say the infusion of high-income residents is adding balance to the makeup of the downtown. Much of the nine-square-mile city of roughly 54,000 residents is composed of solidly middle and upper middle-class neighborhoods, with spacious single-family houses and some mansions. But according to Paul Wood, the city's acting executive officer, a recent study revealed that 82 percent of the housing stock in the downtown area, defined as the blocks between Main Street and East Post Road, from South Broadway to the Metro-North Railroad station, fell into the "subsidized, regulated or assisted" categories, either through limits imposed on rent or federal housing vouchers. "It was stacked the other way, so we evened out the demographic," Mr. Wood said. "The whole plan was to create a neighborhood downtown, which was ripped out during the urban renewal of the 1960's and 1970's."

Even in New York State, it CAN be done.