UNCG Professor David Wharton writes,
" If we put the PAC at the Coliseum, the best-case scenario is that we'll have a good performance venue that's easy to drive to, park at, and drive home from. Good, but not great. It won't put Greensboro on anybody's map of cool places to visit, and I think we need more added value than that."
And I agree. He continues,
"If we just plunk the PAC in some vacant corner of downtown and surround it with a parking lot, we'll get basically the same thing as at the Coliseum, but probably at a much higher cost. If people can just drive to the PAC's lot, go in, go out, and go home, there isn't much net gain for downtown. In my view, that's not worth the extra expenditure."
I also agree. Professor Wharton goes on,
"But if we site the PAC carefully downtown, give it a distinctive architectural and pedestrian presence, and distribute the parking so that people must walk by shops and restaurants in order to get there, then we have something worth spending some money on."
This is where we disagree. Professor Wharton is comparing apples to oranges. Here's my reply as posted on the professor's blog, A Little Urbanity.
"David,
For starters-- thank you. But...
You wrote: "But if we site the PAC carefully downtown, give it a distinctive architectural and pedestrian presence, and distribute the parking so that people must walk by shops and restaurants in order to get there, then we have something worth spending some money on."
You're right, but I think you fail to realize that a PAC could be built on Phillips Ave for less than 1/2 the cost of a downtown site. No one pitching downtown wants to talk about the necessary water, sewer and utility upgrades that, as best I can tell, no one has figured into the price. Downtown Greensboro's water and sewer system is over 100 years old and antiquated. Even the City continually runs programming on the city owned TV channel alerting us to this problem. The cost of utility upgrades will run $2-10 Million Dollars a mile to the treatment plants.
By saving 1/2 of the cost of building the PAC downtown we can afford to improve the Phillips Ave location, which, by the way, is much more attractive than anything in downtown Greensboro. A PAC built on Phillips Ave could easily be the focal point of the project-- downtown it will be overshadowed by many taller and very ugly buildings.
Why not locate it on Phillips Ave, "give it a distinctive architectural and pedestrian presence, and distribute the parking so that people must walk by shops and restaurants in order to get there, then we have something worth spending some money on"?
Apples to apples... "
Continue to article #24 But What About Greensboro's Performing Artists?
