Word: downtowner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Among the latest local projects: the conversion of a down-at-the-heels Renaissance Revival textile building into offices. The former Tivoli Union brewery in Denver, a pseudo- Bavarian fantasy, is a giddy complex of shops, offices, restaurants and movie theaters. The vast old Bullock's department store in downtown Los Angeles has been turned into the country's largest wholesale jewelry mart, and Houston's art deco Alabama Theater has merely exchanged one muse for another. The place is now a bookstore. Pioneer Square in Seattle, with its raffish characters, is proving that preservation and up-market transformation...
Elsewhere, a few eccentric real estate gamblers started buying old buildings in godforsaken downtowns. Frank Akers paid $4,200 in 1969 for his first two buildings in Portland, Me. The area, Akers says, "was loaded with winos and pimps and seedy waterfront characters. Everybody said I was crazy." Today, of course, downtown Portland is loaded with architects and lawyers and high- butterfat ice-cream stores...
...Whitmanesque to suggest that it is the hurly-burly pleasures of democracy -- pluralism incarnate -- that pulled Americans back downtown? Old cities are architecturally eclectic places, where Queen Anne turrets bump up against an International Style library. On a single block, even in a single building, people work as well as live as well as shop. In good cities, infants in Apricas share sidewalks with octogenerians, Salvadoran immigrants with manicured executives. In good cities, eras and generations and races and pursuits are a jumble. Serendipity and surprise are the point...
...matter how many splendid old buildings are refurbished, downtown revivification does not necessarily follow. The historic district of Charleston is an antebellum museum of architecture, but despite the surfeit of charm and platoons of tourists, the downtown was dying in the '70s. Developers proposed an un-Charlestonian remedy: a new hulking hotel-and-retail complex. Originally opposed by some preservationists, Charleston Place -- somewhat scaled down -- has not only breathed new life into the downtown but triggered another round of restoration work...
Charles Harper, for one. Harper is chairman of Omaha's ConAgra food- processing company and may move the firm downtown, near the city's gentrified warehouse district. But he does not want to play along with the preservationists. He says he will not put his headquarters next to "some big, ugly red buildings" just because they are historic. Harper is demanding that the warehouses be demolished. "Some people love old red brick buildings," Harper says. "Some...