The City: Filling the Doughnut

For years, downtown storekeepers in the nation’s cities have been standing morosely watching all the ladies go by—to the suburban shopping centers. It is the city’s biggest dilemma in the age of the automobile: the stores have the goods, but where does the shopper park? After a few more years of this, says Planner-Architect Victor Gruen, the cities of America are going to be like doughnuts—”all the dough on the outside, and a hole in the middle.”

To Victor Gruen, 58, a lively Vienna-born leprechaun, solving the problems of the deteriorating downtown has become something of an obsession. The automobile, he says, is downtown’s most virulent enemy. “No automobile—not even the most elegant Cadillac—ever bought a thing.” Dismount the shopper, free him of driving and parking worries, give him a modern version of the old town square, and the city will be born again.

New 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 50 shops, a half-dozen restaurants, an 18-floor office building topped by a three-story, 78-room hotel, and a second hotel, the newly redecorated Manger.

Two of the key 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 beneath them for the tired shopper or any idler who wanted to stop for a gossip. As a centerpiece he ordered a big central clock (“Meet me under the clock”) that contains puppetry: every half-hour, shoppers see a little “show” keyed to the folkways of a different nation. Midtown’s overall effect, says one entranced lady shopper, “is that it’s glamorous. You can get all gussied up and have lunch downtown and make a real shopping spree out of it.”

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 fulfill the needs of variety and diversity.” Midtown intermingles old and new buildings, tall ones and squat ones, and there is space for a post office, playground and a new auditorium. Third, there must be “improved environmental quality,” by which he means the air-conditioned 20th century town square, complete with its fountain and sculptures.

Finally, the new center’s success may encourage similar activity in other sectors of downtown Rochester, creating a chain reaction that will bring a new vitality into the whole of the city’s life.