Word: gruen
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...businessmen of Fort Worth-like those in many another U.S. city-watched in dismay as traffic congestion clogged downtown streets and customers fled to the suburbs. At their behest the city hired Architect-Planner Victor Gruen to redesign the downtown area, but Gruen's elaborate plan proved to cost more than the city fathers were prepared to pay. Then a downtown mall was tried, but planners failed to provide enough convenient parking space; in the Texas long hot summer, the few potted trees they installed did little to shade the wide concrete expanse, and business declined. But Marvin...
...Town. Last week Gruen got his chance to show the country what a determined city can do. Unveiled in Rochester. N.Y. (pop. 316,000), was his Midtown Plaza, a seven-acre. $30 million shopping center smack in the middle of town. Built without federal financial aid. Midtown is a self-contained complex made up by closing off a whole street, and shortening others and using the space to create a system of arcades and malls. Gruen has covered the sunlit mall with a handsomely structured louvered ceiling and has air-conditioned the whole area. Surrounding this central area are about...
...buildings are wholly renovated department stores, McCurdy's and Forman's. It was Gilbert J. C. Mc-Curdy and Maurice R. Forman who brought Gruen and his project to Rochester. They had heard of Gruen's plan for a similar center in downtown Fort Worth (still on paper). Together. McCurdy and Forman put up the bulk of the cost to build Midtown; they got Manger and other businesses to go along...
...Gruen was off and running. The city was persuaded to spend $10 million to close off Cortland Street, enlarge another on the plaza's perimeter and to provide extra parking facilities. To get commercial traffic out of the way, he built a delivery tunnel beneath the stores. Alongside the tunnel, but burrowing three stories below, he built a 2,000-car garage, provided escalators to whisk the motorist to the plaza level. In the spacious, columned malls and arcades he put gardens and sculptures. To add a town-square touch, he designed sidewalk cafes, planted trees, and put benches...
Tenets, Anyone? Gruen is delighted with the results, and he vocalizes his joy with a characteristic prolixity that is as endless as one of his own escalators. "I have no illusions that this is now the new downtown," he says, "but even if this is only a piece, not the whole, it will demonstrate the three main tenets of my planning philosophy for downtown." First, "the separation of utilitarian func tions from human functions," i.e., truck and service traffic are separated from other traffic by use of the underground truck roads and the underground garage. Second, "the ideal city should...