Moving Downtown Waynesboro forward
Special Report by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Downtown Waynesboro is what used to be. Used to be a Leggett’s downtown. Used to be a J.J. Newberry’s downtown. Used to be a Rose’s right there on Main Street.
What Downtown Waynesboro needs is a sense of perspective. It’s great that it used to be a lot of different, great things, but there’s no future in what used to be.
The future of downtown is upon us: a residential district, with rental units and eventually residential-property owners downtown; an urban entertainment district, with a theater, with museums, with art centers; a central business district, with retail, with office space, with city government maintaining its presence as an anchor for activity.
Key among the recommendations from a groundbreaking analysis of downtown revitalization conducted by the Brookings Institution was this observation – that downtowns need to be viewed as a large mixed-use project.
Think for a moment or two about the ideal mixed-use project. There’s a residential element at its foundation to provide life for the retail and the restaurants and entertainment that tap into the people who live on-site and draw new people in from outside. There are offices that provide activity in the weekday daytime hours and a second base of customers for nightlife after work and on the weekends.
The ideal mixed-use project has one thing working for it that we can’t exactly replicate in a downtown setting – a single owner or developer calling the shots and making decisions on the different elements and pace of buildout.
Our own worst enemy
Waynesboro knows all too well the difficulties in getting multiple owners and multiple developers to agree on anything resembling a unified vision for the buildout of a new downtown.
“We as a community tend to be our own worst enemy,” said Len Poulin, the president of Waynesboro Downtown Development Inc., a nonprofit development entity that has been at the lead of the revitalization effort since its founding in 1999.
“What our biggest challenge has always been is getting everybody together as a group to agree to disagree and understand that we may need to compromise to get where we want to go,” said Poulin, a downtown business owner and owner of a significant downtown property, The Edmunds Building, located on the north side of the intersection of Main Street and Wayne Avenue at the ground zero of Downtown Waynesboro.
“It’s been frustrating working on stuff for 10 years, and when it finally gets to the point of approval stage and implementation stage, we all the sudden pull the plug, or somebody has the opinion that it’s not the right thing to do, that we need to move a different way, and we move on. That’s been our Achilles heel all these years. Everybody talks about all the studies and all the discussions. The result of it has been stalemate,” Poulin said.
“We keep hearing the same thing over and over. We study something, sit it on a shelf, get it back out, restudy the study, put it back on the shelf. We’ve got a lot of possibilities down here, but we just can’t seem to take that first step,” said Webber Payne, the owner of Waynesboro Florist, a mainstay in Downtown Waynesboro since Payne’s father first opened the business downtown in 1968.
“I have a deep affection for Waynesboro,” said Tripp Franklin, a Waynesboro native, a local attorney and the owner of a downtown building on South Wayne. “You’re either a Waynesboro person or Staunton person. I identified myself as a Waynesboro person growing up. I remember getting milkshakes at Haney’s Pharmacy and shopping for school clothes at Leggett’s.
“I can remember when downtown had a lot more energy than it does now. I’d like to see that energy restored, and I’d like to see downtown revitalized, and I have some ideas as to how that could happen,” Franklin said.
Ideation
So we’re back to where we started. We have ideas, we want to do something, we have energy, we have some forward momentum. The first downtown-revitalization effort that I’ve found in the histories of Waynesboro dates to 1962, which we can look back upon now as the salad days for Downtown Waynesboro, with restaurants and movie theaters and department stores all thriving.
And folks back then thought the downtown could use some new energy. Nearly a half-century later now, with the manufacturing economy that fueled our downtown a shadow of its former self, with the West End serving as the effective center of commerce not only for Waynesboro but for the Greater Augusta-Crozet-Nelson region, Downtown Waynesboro is on life support.
To continue with that analogy, the patient is still fighting for life. An effort led by the WDDI and the Waynesboro Redevelopment and Housing Authority aimed at putting the city in position for a state community development block grant to go to physical improvements in the downtown district has injected some energy and enthusiasm back into the downtown-revitalization set.
More than 70 people attended a December visioning session associated with the project. The two-hour session brought in some in the way of participants that you could call the usual suspects, but there were also a couple of dozen fresh faces on hand representing a diverse selection of downtown business and property-owner interests and subgroups that one wouldn’t automatically associate with interest in downtown improvement.
“Keep in mind that people showing up at a meeting is just a starting point, but this was significant in terms of being something to build on,” said Tom Carlsson, who wears two hats as a member of the WDDI board of directors and the development director at the Redevelopment and Housing Authority.
One thing to take away from the session was the sense of buy-in from community members from across the interest spectrum to the idea that downtown is something worth giving up two hours on a cold December night to talk about. The session was largely oriented toward promoting brainstorming among participants about what a future Downtown Waynesboro should look like.
The general consensus was a confirmation of the path that has been laid out by WDDI and the RHA – coalescing around the idea that downtown needs to be a 24-hour downtown, with a strong residential population, with offices, with restaurants and retail stores, with entertainment options and a vibrant nightlife.
The next phase in the WDDI-RHA effort is to move from building a general consensus to engaging focus groups, “for example, the arts and culture destinations, the Heritage Museum, the Art Center, the Wayne Theatre Alliance, and really do pull some specific ideas out of those groups,” Carlsson said.
“What do they need to build a higher profile? What do they need to generate more foot traffic? They know their needs and their facilities better than we do. We really need to hear directly from them,” Carlsson said.
Vision to reality
I like to tell the story about going shopping in Downtown Staunton with my grandfather to buy shoes for basketball when I was in high school in the late 1980s. We went to the A&N downtown on a Saturday afternoon. It’s early fall, a nice day, middle of the day, and my memory of the experience is that Downtown Staunton was so bleak that I assumed that at any time we were about to get mugged.
I remember the empty storefronts, broken windows, chunks missing out of the sidewalks. The very idea that Downtown Staunton could ever be anything other than the trashhole that it had become was ludicrous, and the right response to those who said that it could come alive again, and could thrive again, would be to laugh them out of town.
This was the backdrop against which people like John Avoli and Rita Wilson worked beginning in the early 1990s to get people in Staunton to believe that they could breathe new life into Downtown Staunton.
And then, get this, they didn’t just put out there for public consumption, We’re going to revitalize Downtown Staunton. They said from the get-go, We’re going to rebuild the Stonewall Jackson.
It might be hard to get this now, after the $20 million renovation of the Stonewall Jackson Hotel that has turned Staunton into a destination for movie stars and dignitaries and a host of state and national conferences that fill the hotel’s schedule, but to say in 1991 or 1992 that you wanted to do something with the Stonewall Jackson that didn’t involve a wrecking ball was to risk proclaiming yourself in public to be a top contender for the title of village idiot.
The Stonewall Jackson seemed to be falling in upon itself. The sign atop that was visible for several miles in any direction almost taunted the city as being a place that used to be.
But not only did the Avolis and Wilsons say they wanted to rebuild the Stonewall Jackson; they said that, then set out on a plan that had the city for more than a decade doing everything but anything involving the hotel.
It started with City Council empowering downtown property owners to form a special tax district downtown. Later on, the city led a project to redo the streetscape downtown, burying power lines underground, rebuilding sidewalks and making other infrastructure improvements. A $5 million publicly-funded parking garage at the intersection of Johnson Street and New Street at what had been an old gravel parking lot went online. The city then seized upon an opportunity to snare the Blackfriars Playhouse from Harrisonburg when officials there balked at the initiative of the Shenandoah Shakespeare touring company to build a permanent home for itself in the Valley.
It wasn’t until 2003 that the city signed off on a deal with a group of private developers to rebuild the Stonewall Jackson.
This basic structure for downtown redevelopment has been repeated hundreds of times across the country. Develop a vision for what you want to do, then build from the ground up, from providing a stable source of funding to rebuilding infrastructure to being in a position to take advantage of development opportunities and then finally putting the final building blocks in place.
Get specific
More than 1,600 words into this special report, and we’re still talking about – well, what are we talking about? What is the future of Downtown Waynesboro? Is it what surrounds a minor-league baseball stadium? We’ve heard talk off and on about some interest in that direction in recent years. Is it an arts and culture district with the Wayne Theatre as a hub like the American Shakespeare Center is a hub for economic activity in Staunton?
How does the Riverfront Commons mixed-use development concept fit in?
Are any of these ideas at all realistic for Waynesboro?
Do we have to limit ourselves to just one idea that we try to make the catalyst for everything that we want to happen?
The wording to the final question there is intentional. The example of Staunton, replayed hundreds of times across the country, tells us that there is no magic bullet. It’s not like the great baseball movie “Field of Dreams,” where “if you build it, they will come.”
Waynesboro, fortunately for us, isn’t in the middle of an endless series of cornfields. The city is located a couple of miles from the busy Blue Ridge Parkway, Skyline Drive and Blue Ridge Parkway, just a few miles from the nexus of Interstate 81 and Interstate 64, with literally millions of people driving by every year.
Efforts in the tourism sector aimed at developing a major hotel and conference center on Afton Mountain on the Brucheum property could draw people in like The Biltmore does for Asheville, N.C., down the Parkway from Waynesboro. Arts and culture programming at the Wayne Theatre and the Waynesboro Heritage Museum and the Shenandoah Valley Art Center and the Artisans Center of Virginia aimed at those visitors could give them a reason to stay in town an extra night or two.
But let’s say that we set that as our goal. We’re going to do Brucheum! That’s not going to happen tomorrow or next year or in five or necessarily ten years. As with Staunton and its experience with the Stonewall Jackson, you start with the building blocks.
The building blocks for Waynesboro:
- The creation of a special downtown tax district would provide a stable source of funding for WDDI and the RHA to serve as the joint lead development corporation that is essential to getting things organized and keeping the revitalization effort on course in the early years.
- Make it easy: There are still substantial zoning barriers to the adaptive reuse of downtown properties as residential properties. Residential development will be a key building block for the rebirth of Downtown Waynesboro. We need to clean up the code to let the developers do their thing.
- Infrastructure improvements: We need to see through the work on downtown streetscape and the greenway. As we’re working through those projects, we need to get back on track with programs aimed at improving the physical appearance of building frontage downtown.
- Public-private partnerships: The special tax district is a public-private partnership – with the City Council enabling the tax district with the assent of property owners. Zoning amendments need to be the result of dialogue between the city and the private sector.
- Putting our money where our mouths are: The city needs to be an active player in the process. The infrastructure improvements are going to require seed and match money from the city. If we’re going to see a Brucheum happen, it’s not going to happen without the city getting involved at the early stages to help open the property up for development. The same can be said for a baseball-stadium project or Riverfront Commons. We have developers interested in investing in our city to make these projects happen, but they have shied away because the city hasn’t shown its commitment with its own investment dollars.
Moving forward
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. We know from studying what other communities have done to give new life to their downtowns that the process described above will work.
What’s missing in Waynesboro is what was for a long time missing in Staunton and Charlottesville and countless communities that struggled with rheir own downtown-revitalization efforts: the will to see the job through.
As their success stories indicate to us, this is something that can be overcome, and if the turnout at the December visioning session is any reflection, the first steps to moving things forward in Waynesboro are being taken.
But just as 2010 represents a year of opportunity for the downtown effort, we can’t look past the possibility that this effort, like the many that have come before it, will result in another report left to collect dust on another shelf.
The stakes to our work here are clear. At some point people are going to tire of the endless talk about what we’re going to do after years of talk about what we’re going to do that results in nothing actually getting done.
2010 could be a tipping point for Waynesboro. It’s up to us whether we make it the tipping point for moving Waynesboro forward.
