For decades this newspaper has championed the urban core of metropolitan Phoenix, believing it important to our community as a whole that the place where we come together thrives.
We have watched one major project after another land in downtown: Arizona Center . . . convention-center expansion . . . two stadium projects . . . light rail . . . a new Arizona State University campus . . . a major convention hotel . . . the University of Arizona medical center . . . new hospitals . . . history and science museums . . . the T-Gen biotech campus . . . the $900 million CityScape retail and office development . . . the Jackson Street entertainment district.
All of these projects are impressive in scope and ambition. But none by themselves can awaken a slumbering downtown. The "next big thing" isn’t and never was a single mega-development.
We are on the cusp of a dynamic core because of the confluence of many projects big and small and their cumulative impact. There is so much creative enterprise occurring in downtown today that the eye can’t decide where to focus first.
Last Sunday, Arizona Republic reporters Ginger D. Richardson and Angela Cara Pancrazio characterized the redevelopment of downtown for what it truly is: a long, exhausting and expensive struggle with no real conclusion. It is a process. Rather than a redevelopment project or two (or a dozen), it is a development in progress, defined more by where it is headed than what it is at any given moment.
"Successful downtowns are not successful because of one project," a senior resident fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Land Institute told our reporters. "It’s hundreds of things, maybe thousands of things, working together," explained Michael Beyard.
What a concept. So, after championing all those projects – year after year; decade after decade – who would have thought that the strength of the Valley’s urban center would be defined as much by a wee corner coffee shop called Matt’s Big Breakfast as it is by mega-developments like stadiums and rail lines? Who knew?
Every weekend morning, crowds of people young and old encircle a tiny whitewashed building at the northeast corner of First Street and McKinley. They wait, an hour or more sometimes, and happily so, for a seat in a tiny diner. The payoff is excellent. And, yes, big. One of the best breakfasts in town is downtown.
It is that sort of minikin gem in the sea of several hundred million dollars worth of mega-projects that define downtown progress as much as anything. More specifically, it is the people patiently waiting outside who personify progress.
Downtown Phoenix, nearly vacant and lifeless for nigh on 40 years, has been waiting for them. In the course of those years, we’ve raised the colossi, the sports stadiums and the light-rail lines.
And, all the while, those city-dwellers that downtown so craved were just waiting for really good hash browns and a mellow cup of coffee.
As always, it is the little things that bring people, and downtowns, "back."
Article can be found: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/0415sun1-15.html
