An open letter to Everett Shaw

Advice to Worcester's new chief development officer

by Walter Crockett

Dear Mr. Shaw,

Welcome to Worcester. Your stay will be happy and brief. Feel free to unpack your bags, but don't take a long-term lease. Rent a big house on the West Side and plant annuals. Keep that résumé active. And as soon as you cut the ribbons at Union Station and Medical City (excuse me, I mean Worcester Medical Center), catch a plane out of T.F. Green Airport to a mid-size Southern burg that isn't at war with itself.

You'll have two more notches on your development belt by then, and our powers-that-be will still be in celebration mode. By the time the public realizes it's been played for a sucker, you'll be safe and sound in some place we can't get to from Worcester Airport.

Not that you'd play the city for a sucker -- we're fully capable of doing that ourselves. We just need you to put the official stamp of approval on the mindless boosterism and big-buck boondoggleism that has passed for Worcester city planning since the early '60s.

There isn't a lot to do in the city at night for a guy your age, so you might as well get to work and try to solve some problems while you're here. City Manager Tom Hoover says your first responsibility is to revive downtown. We've been trying to do that since 1954 and it's deader now than it was then. But don't let that stop you from appointing a committee and paying a prestigious consultant to do a study. You can actually save a whole bunch of money if you just tell the consultant to skip the research and rewrite the previous studies. That's what most of them do anyway.

Everybody knows what the problem with downtown is: it's a big granite graveyard. It's empty, locked up, devoid of sentient pedestrian traffic. Unwed teenage mothers could leave their babies for naps in the middle of Main Street, but even they don't come downtown much anymore since McDonald's closed and the Youth Center moved. Most nights, you can't find even a handful of restaurants, nightclubs, old people, middle-aged people, or college students on Main Street. And the people who run the city, shun the city. They don't have a clue about what goes on after dark. You want to know what's happening on Main Street? Ask a PIP Shelter resident.

Yes, everybody knows what the problem is, and our city leaders are pretty sure they know the solution. As a matter of fact, they're so sure of the solution that they've tried it over and over and over again since the 1960s. Their answer is to build some huge building or complex thereof at great expense to the taxpayers -- state, federal, and local. "If you build it, they will come," is the working motto. Actually "working" is the wrong word for it. It hasn't worked yet.

But our city leaders are patient. They subscribe to the philosophy of former City Manager Jeff Mulford. Back in 1983, in response to complaints that the redesign of Lincoln Square had killed North Main Street, which one merchant described as "like a desert after 2 p.m.," Mulford replied, "How can you say it doesn't work when [it] isn't completed yet?"

In fact, it still isn't completed. Lincoln Square remains a festering sore. In 1985, they dead-ended the north end of Main Street, but that didn't work. Jordan Levy was one of the few city councilors who voted against closing it off. And just because he's chief executive of a company that owns property that would be more valuable if Main Street were opened doesn't mean he was wrong.

Pretty soon the city will open up the north end of Main Street again, but that won't solve downtown's problems. Lincoln Square, which once funneled traffic from Highland, Salisbury, Grove, Prescott, Lincoln, and Belmont streets onto Main Street remains a major engineering challenge. And Lincoln Square is just the beginning of Worcester's avenue of regrets.

First came the mall at Worcester Center, then the Centrum, then the Worcester Common Outlets, then the convention center, then Medical City, then the redevelopment of Union Station. The powers-that-be and their loyal fans in the press smiled benignly on each jumbo project and dismissed all public criticism as the niggling nonsense of "naysayers and doomsdayers."

So it has been, so it remains. Just last month, Andy O'Donnell of the Union Station Alliance, which is blithely promoting the city's latest white elephant to the tune of $40 million for starters, opined that "We have a tendency in this area to think small, perhaps to be unwilling to take some risks." On the contrary, our city government, at every crucial juncture, has insisted on thinking BIG and taking mammoth risks with taxpayer money -- risks that have never paid off and probably never will.

Worcester Center killed most of what was left of the downtown retail district. There was no spinoff from the Centrum. There has been no spinoff from the Worcester Common Outlets. There will be no spinoff from the convention center and the medical center. And the new Worcester Redevelopment Authority plans for the area to the south of Union Station, all the way over to Green Island, are bound to tighten the noose around Main Street.

That redevelopment money should be spent on Main Street, Mr. Shaw. The artist district they're talking about putting south of Union Station should be on Main Street, along with an entertainment district centered around the Palladium, which the city should take by eminent domain if necessary. (It should come cheap since the current owner thinks it's worth more as a parking lot.) The proposed Senior Center should be yanked off Vernon Hill and put back on Main Street where it belongs. Residential housing developments for seniors should be encouraged on Main Street.

Back in the early 1960s, Classical, Commerce, North, Boys and Girls Trade high schools were all just a few minutes walking distance from Main Street. Why must we tear up open space to build new schools when we have a perfectly good downtown wasteland waiting for them? You can put all the parks and fountains you want downtown, but if you don't put people there on a daily basis you cede them to the vagrants and the ne'er-do-wells. That means we need jobs and housing downtown, and that means we need more tax incentives, more creative zoning, and more creativity in general than the city has ever been willing to put into solving the problem. It means thinking small for a change -- doing what's right for the small business person instead of the heavy hitter.

You, Mr. Shaw, may be just the right person for the job.

So before you fall victim to the conventional wisdom, before you start knocking your head against the same wall your predecessors knocked theirs against, take a trip to the public library (its books, by the way, should be moved to a Main Street location next year while the library's being rebuilt). On the second floor you'll find some folders with old press clippings about Main Street and downtown.

You'll find the one that says downtown retail sales totaled more than $100 million in 1952, but began to decline by 1954 after the shopping centers at Lincoln Plaza and Webster Square were built. You'll see how that decline continued in the '60s when Auburn Mall was built. You'll read about the Columbia University proposal to rehabilitate downtown in 1963 and how it made one editorial writer believe that "there is hope for our old city."

You'll read how the Worcester Center mall was bound to revitalize downtown, and how it didn't. You'll see a quote from George Photakis, owner of the Owl Shop in 1973 -- 25 years ago -- about how he had no doubt that Main Street was about to make a comeback. You'll read a 1976 editorial about how the proposed civic center could be built "without costing taxpayers a dime in the first five years," and a 1979 editorial about how downtown was, yes, about to make a comeback.

You'll read about developer James Soffan anticipating a renaissance in Federal Square in 1983. No such luck. About the city coming up with plans to attract college students downtown in 1994. No such luck. You'll see Bill Short of the Chamber of Commerce quoted in 1994 as saying, in essence, that new projects are turning Worcester's image around. "Perception is reality," Short said.

So go stand out in the middle of Main Street some lazy afternoon, Mr. Shaw, and see just what kind of reality you perceive there. And after you stop crying, roll up your sleeves and get to work.

But don't let that résumé get dusty.