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Tampa's Franklin Street Mall has failed to draw much foot traffic, so the city is being pushed to allow vehicles again.
By KYLE PARKS
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 19, 2000
TAMPA -- Almost 30 years after the city turned downtown Franklin Street into a pedestrian mall, it may be about to bring back the cars.
In 1973, Tampa leaders closed a five-block stretch of Franklin Street to traffic, hoping a pedestrian mall with brick-street ambience would keep shoppers from fleeing to suburban malls.
By the 1980s, the move had proven to be a disaster. As Tampa's downtown decayed, retailers left in droves. Now, even though the south end of downtown is filled with gleaming office towers crammed with workers, Franklin Street Mall could be described as sleepy at best.
Most stores on the north end of the mall are boarded up, while the south end is a ghost town after the lunch hour.
To try to turn it around, the Tampa Downtown Partnership and developer Jack Wilson are leading a drive to open Franklin Street to traffic, at least after lunch hour. Though their effort is still in the planning stages, they hope the city will include as much as $400,000 in the fiscal 2001 budget for street lights, landscaping and new sidewalks.
The idea: People driving by would discover the shops and restaurants, and car headlights would make pedestrians feel safer at night.
"This is happening all over the country because downtown pedestrian malls just aren't working," said Jim Cloar, president of the downtown partnership. Similar moves are in the works in Chicago; Philadelphia; Eugene, Ore.; Kalamazoo, Mich., and other cities, he said.
"People are going back to having downtowns do what they do best," Cloar said, "and that means having streets with auto access."
Sentiment among the beleaguered retailers along Franklin Street is that anything would help.
"It would be nice if the city did something," said Micha Hodge, who has owned Paramount Wigs & Hats at the north end of the mall since 1970.
Her shop, filled with mannequin heads topped by hairpieces in every color imaginable, still sells about 100 wigs a week at $30-$50 each. But she succeeds despite her location, not because of it. "There are only a couple of wig shops in Tampa, and we have made a name for ourselves," she said.
Hodge remembers when Franklin Street Mall was the vibrant center of downtown Tampa. "There was Maas Brothers, Grant's, Kress, Woolworth's . . . this was the place to be," said Hodge, a South Korean immigrant who figured the location would be perfect when she opened the shop.
But now, Paramount Wigs is surrounded by boarded-up buildings. While the southern end of the mall bustles at lunch hour with workers from TECO Energy Inc., Wilson Co., Manufacturers Bank of Florida and other businesses, few people venture to the north end anymore.
After lunch, even the south end clears out, and restaurant owners who stay open at night have had to improvise to survive.
Lisa Pacchini and her husband, Stelvio, opened Caffe' Firenze five years ago after moving to Tampa from Florence, Italy. (Firenze is the Italian word for Florence.) "People told us we were crazy to open here," Lisa Pacchini said.
Still, the 100-seat Italian restaurant has built a decent dinner business by schmoozing with downtown hotels -- it even had a dinner party for concierges. "The hotels keep us going," Pacchini said. "People visiting from other cities don't mind walking here all the way from the Marriott Waterside. "What is wrong with your downtown?' they ask me."
At Nickalouie's CDB's Uptown, owner Pat Iacovella has kept his restaurant thriving since 1982, but much of his nighttime business comes from rehearsal dinners for weddings at downtown churches.
"Letting traffic back would help, but we need a unified concept for downtown, showing how everything would work together," he said. "The mayor is starting to look at things that way, thankfully."
Mayor Dick Greco and other city leaders support the traffic idea in a general sense. "We are going to cooperate with those who are spending their private dollars to revitalize downtown," Greco said. Still, there are a number of questions to be answered before the plan becomes reality.
First, the city must decide whether Franklin should have two-way traffic or one-way traffic with parking. The street isn't wide enough to accommodate two-way traffic and parking.
Two-way traffic would give drivers an option to go north or south in a downtown dominated by one-way streets, which might attract more drivers. But merchants also like the idea of offering more parking.
The other major question is whether the street would be open to traffic at all hours, or only after lunchtime. Business leaders seem to favor the latter approach, since there's no need to increase business during the lunch hour.
"While we're redoing curbs and putting in plantings, we'd also like to have the sidewalks replaced," said the partnership's Cloar. "They are crumbling."
Cloar estimates the total cost at $400,000, which would come out of the city's general operating budget. Business leaders and city officials will hammer out a proposal by this summer to take to the City Council. If the council approves, cars could be driving Franklin Street by next spring.
Downtown leaders hope this is only the first step. Next could be bringing the city's new streetcar line, which initially will run from Ybor City to the Tampa Convention Center, on a loop that would come up Franklin Street.
"We have to go in phases, because if one phase helps, then that can build support for the next phase," said Jack Wilson, president of Wilson Co., which made a $20-million investment in Franklin Street by renovating the old NCNB office complex into what's now called Franklin Exchange.
Still, changing perceptions about downtown will be tough. Even though crime isn't a major problem along Franklin Street, retailers say there's still fear. And getting people to come downtown to shop or to stay downtown after work would require a major change in habits.
"I live in South Tampa, and people tell me, "I just never go downtown,' " said Beverly Gray, who has owned Beverly's Card & Gift Shop, one of the Franklin Street survivors, since 1963. "They act like it's just oh, so far away. Downtown sounds like a dirty word to them."