Word: downtowner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...1960s, when spick-and-span, won't-the-future-be-fab urban schemes were still regarded with automatic enthusiasm by almost everyone, and when suburban malls were suddenly sucking shoppers away from central cities, the idea seemed perfect: build enclosed bridges -- skywalks! -- between the upper stories of downtown office buildings, stores and hotels, and nobody will ever have to go outdoors at all. Fortunately, most such future-a-go-go notions of the era -- moving sidewalks or 300-story apartment towers -- never came to much...
Skywalks, however, have proliferated. During the past 25 years, the downtowns of more than a score of cities in the U.S. and Canada have become climate-controlled labyrinths. Calgary has 42 bridges running 6 miles that link 110 buildings. The American skywalks (also called skyways, skybridges, * or, in the unfortunate case of Charlotte, N.C., the Overstreet Mall) are concentrated in the upper Midwest, where winters make strolling problematic. Two separate systems in Minneapolis and St. Paul consist of 73 bridges running 6 1/2 miles between 65 city blocks; Des Moines's 32 bridges connect 21 downtown blocks. Most of Detroit...
...very early on in the skywalk boom, weather was superseded by boosterism economics: elevated bridges came to be seen as prods for real estate development, quick fixes for tapped-out downtowns. Here and there they seemed to do the trick. The growth of the publicly owned Des Moines Skywalk System, which began in 1982, has indeed coincided with an economic revival of the city's downtown. Skywalks are not cheap: construction can run as much as $3,000 per linear foot. But developers can charge 5% to 10% rent premiums to tenants in towers plugged into the systems...
...Warner Jr., a Boston University urban historian, sees skywalks as a symbol of urban abandonment, not reinvigoration. They are, he says, "a sign that we've given up on the street. They treat the street as essentially an automobile place. That is going to make for a very poor downtown...
...skyways in St. Paul are perhaps the best in the U.S.: the design is standardized and inoffensive, the system is publicly owned and easily accessible to people in wheelchairs. Nonetheless, skyways have come to dominate downtown St. Paul's cityscape and retail life entirely. About 90% of the shops are on the second story, and on the streets below there are long stretches of shopless, blank walls. Calgary has gone out of its way to retain street life (roving musicians and soapbox speechmaking are encouraged), yet even there, says James McKellar, a former Calgary planning commissioner, the skywalk system "kills...