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Old Hyde Park Village: an upscale ghost town?
© St. Petersburg Times If you look at old photographs of downtown Tampa or downtown St. Petersburg or downtown anywhere, what you see are people. Lots of them, on the street, walking, sitting on benches, coming in or out of stores and restaurants, stopping to talk to a friend. Those were the Main Streets of America, whatever their actual names were. There are almost no original Main Streets anymore, but everyone wants to be the new Main Street. Yet the whole concept of Main Street is that it is the main street. There's only one. That's why all the people are there. Main Street was the place to shop, eat, gather, go to the movies. It is no accident that the Brandon and Citrus Park malls, built out in the middle of nowhere, were first called "town centers." What they are, of course, are regional malls, but for those regions they act more like a town center than, say, Tampa's downtown or the city's more urban marketplaces. The people who live there go there because it's the only game in town. Come closer in, and the game changes. Old Hyde Park Village is in trouble. The marketing director for Madison Marquette, the owner of the non-residential aspect of the village, came to town last week to pitch the company's case to the Architectural Review Commission and came away with an expanded list of options to get those empty stores and office spaces filled. Tampa's downtown, it was announced this week, has chosen the Byrd Corp. of Clearwater to build a high rise condo in the yet-to-exist Cultural Arts District -- a first step toward making downtown the 24-hour city it desperately wants to be. Ybor City also wants to be a 24-hour kind of place, but it needs people there during the day. It wants what Old Hyde Park Village and downtown want: a good mix of residential, retail and entertainment that brings people in and keeps them there. In the Channel District, the Giunta Group has just announced plans for a new loft development -- the first of major size in a district that still has more warehouses than people. The retail-entertainment complex there, Channelside, after a miserable start, seems to be getting off the ground. Go on a weekend, you'll see people there now. Bay Street at International Plaza has successfully tacked on some outdoor street life to the main mall with crowd-attractors like the Cheesecake Factory. And WestShore Plaza's new entrance strives to looks more like a village than a mall and is drawing people with bustling chain restaurants like Maggiano's and P.F. Chang to come. People. That's what everyone wants. There's no substitute. Go to Old Hyde Park Village and see no one, it's a downer. It doesn't matter how nice the stores are. Go to Ybor and the indigenous architecture feels like a ghost town if no one is there. Going to the movies at Channelside's empty theaters was creepy the whole year after it opened. Downtown? When I left the Architectural Review Commission meeting Wednesday night, the guard offered to walk me to my car the place was so deserted. Everyone wants people. But only a certain kind of people. People with money. You should have heard the discussion at the Old Hyde Park Village meeting. A pool hall? No! Billiards? Sure, in a restaurant with a cigar bar. A supermarket, no way, but a gourmet grocery, okay. "What's wrong with a bowling alley?" one of the commissioners finally asked after that option had been swiftly nixed. When the commission asked Madison Marquette to clarify what it meant by "Retail Sales -- Distilled," its lawyer passed the buck to someone else who revealed this meant "beer, wine, liquor," so it was surmised that meant a liquor store. No! It could be a wine store. Or a store that sold only specialty Scotch. It almost sent me running to the nearest tractor pull. -- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com. City Life appears on Saturday.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
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Times columns today Sandra Thompson Lucy Morgan DONALD R. EASTMAN From the Times Metro desk |
