Word: downtowner
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...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...
Enthusiasm for skywalks has not been ubiquitous. In the 1970s, when corporate headquarters and shoppers were abandoning its downtown, Hartford came very close to erecting a skywalk system as a way, its boosters hoped, to revitalize the city's downtown. Local opposition, on both fiscal and philosophical grounds, prevented all but a few skywalks from being built. Meanwhile, downtown Hartford has undergone a renaissance on its own. A 1982 / Seattle ordinance prohibits any skybridge that blocks a vista or reduces street traffic -- in effect, all skywalks...
...suburbs because they want low anxiety," Portman says. "We must bring them back to the center city. The pedestrian bridge is a part of that." Now, however, Atlanta zoning officials are considering a recommendation by the 300-member Central Area Study group to prohibit further skywalk construction downtown. As the novelty value of skywalks palls and as more cities realize that downtown vitality is a function of far more than ultraconvenient shopping, urbanites can only hope the fad will continue to fade...
Skywalks, those enclosed bridges linking downtown buildings, provide warmth in cold weather; they also cast a chill on urban life...