Word: skywalker
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...northern cities like Calgary, where the average winter temperature is 26.2 degrees F, the original, climate-mitigating rationale for skywalks was not unreasonable. What's wrong with being able to wander unbundled from office to store to parking garage in the middle of north-country January? "To be out of the weather," says Pat Huntington, general manager of the Saks Fifth Avenue store that is plugged into Cincinnati's 23-odd skywalk system, "is a tremendous feeling of security...
...very early on in the skywalk boom, weather was superseded by boosterism economics: elevated bridges came to be seen as prods for real estate development, quick fixes for tapped-out downtowns.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...
...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 and sterilizes ground-level activity." For a city to lure pedestrians off the streets, whatever the reason, may be suicidal in the long run. "The retail shop on the street is the key to a multi-use downtown," explains Jaquelin Robertson, former New York City planning commissioner...
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...
Despite the generally balmy weather in Atlanta, Architect-Developer John Portman loves nothing more than connecting his bombastic towers and atriums with skywalks: one running through Peachtree Center is 640 ft. long. "People moved to the 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...