Looking forward

If you build it, they will come.

In the Kevin Kostner film, Field of Dreams, those paraphrased words brought a dream to life. Clarksville has the potential for dreams to come alive.

I love Franklin Street in downtown Clarksville because it reminds me of home, but on a microscopic scale. Refurbished old buildings creatively filled. It has a bit of charm. I know about the ravaging tornadoes, the destructive force which left downtown looking like the dregs of a city whose time has passed. But its time hadn’t passed.

When I read of the proposals for downtown and riverfront development, all I could say was “yes, yes, yes.” And if takes a tax hike to do it, then raise taxes. Find private investors. Seek out “Main Street” grants. Get the bigger businesses involved.

Yes, it will take twenty years, major planning, a lot of money, huge increments of time, and a ton of patience – all major revitalization programs take at least twenty years – but the end results are generally spectacular and worth the wait.

I come from a mid-sized New England city, Northampton, Massachusetts, which, in the 1970s, was a bleak Main Street with empty and underused businesses and a crumbling downtown infrastructure. Before I left New England to join my family here, I took one last walk sentimental on the “Musante Mile,” named after a visionary mayor who launched major redevelopment over a mile-long stretch of Main Street that is now flourishing with restaurants and shops, dance and performance space, accessible bike trails, a skateboard park, incubator business collaboratives, and much, much more. Tapping on the area’s extensive college network helped considerably, but it was the vision and the ability to see a multi-dimensional plan to fruition, the assembly of a network of businesses and government and citizenry working together, that made it happen.

Across the Connecticut River was a similar town, Amherst. Again, food, art , interesting shops and cultural activities catered to the areas huge university population, but were also developed as attraction of and by themselves. A destination. Business incubators were created for commercial and artistic use.

With limited parking in both communities, mass transit was expanded to a twenty-hour day, with service on Sunday as well. It was done first to accommodate the tens of thousands of students who filled the area from September to June, but also to serve the community at large. People bused to school and work, and could get a bus in one city in the early evening, be at a concert hall or some other event across the river in half and hour, and ride the bus home again at 11 p.m. or midnight. Buses started at 5 a.m. and ran through 1 A.M. Even if one drove a car, one would ultimately have to walk — which had its own fringe benefits: it was the healthy way to move about town. A bikeway connecting multiple communities gave people another way to move around the valley.

When I arrived in Clarksville, and was unable to drive, I couldn’t go to an evening show at the Roxy because while the bus would get me there — it took in excess of $25 to get home again by cab. The cab cost twice what the theater ticket did. Buses didn’t go to the fairgrounds, and didn’t run late enough to allow attendance at an evening program at the library. They didn’t run late enough for me to go to an evening movie either: I had to pay a massive cab bill for the ride home. Who wants to see what is essentially a $30 movie?

Vermont’s capitol, Montpelier, is another such “destination,” a small town with quaint shops and unique character, a city that booted the brassy commercialism of fast food eateries to the outskirts of town to keep the homey country flavor of the town’s main streets. Bigger businesses are on the perimeter; the heart of this city is comfortable, a place where people come to shop, dine and linger.

Now, I’ve met some wonderful people here in Clarksville; interesting, funny, kind, artistic, creative thinkers, activists, concerned citizens, simply beautiful people. I’ve been lucky and blessed to find a wealth of good friends here.

That said, my perspective, as a non-native of Clarksville, is this: give me a reason, beside my new friends and my family, to stay here once I’ve done what I came here to do. I am educated, and I have many skills. Tempt me.

Offer more than a vista of car dealerships around town area and the riverfront. Enforce noise laws all day long and get those booming car radios turned off and out of residential neighborhoods. A half-dozen $100 tickets for noise pollution can have a quieting effect and shouldn’t be limited to the overnight hours.

Offer greater and uncensored access to the arts. Create an incubator art space. The Roxy Theater is a gift to Clarksville. Let it, and the galleries and shops and eateries around it, grow and be the cornerstone for additional artistic development and growth.

Offer music and dance (other than just country and rock) venues, a theater that shows foreign and independent films and anything beyond Hollywood’s targeted “young male between 16 and 23” offerings that the megaplexes favor. The only place to get a diverse selection of foreign and independent film in Clarksville is at its fabulous library; their buyer is a genius in creating an eclectic mix of film. The library’s growing DVD collection is a breath of life.

Offer a First Night celebration that caters to both adults and children. Create a New Year’s afternoon for children as the start of a day of festivities.

Offer bus service that is more than simply “adequate”; offer Sunday service, expanded routes, express services with non-stop point-to-point transit, and later hours. Does anyone realize that to travel from the upper gates of Fort Campbell to Governor’s Square Mall takes two buses, and 90 minutes each way, and the last time I checked there’s not even a bench at the mall to sit outside on while waiting, with bags and boxes, for the bus? Doesn’t anyone notice that there are people who don’t drive and who would love to work a second shift but can’t, or get somewhere on a Sunday and can’t, because there is no public transit available at night or on Sundays? Progressive cities, true GATEWAY CITIES, have extensive transit systems.Play up the city’s history; create a Civil War Guide with links to area sites. The rivers were a critical front in the waging of that war, and there is much history floating on the currents there. I used Tennessee Blue Book historical section as a textbook in homeschooling. Play it up.

Offer still more incentives to create small, distinctive restaurants and eateries, a bagel shop, a whole foods market, organic or co-op shop. Bring the Farmer’s Market into downtown on a Saturday morning. Cordon off one small street downtown and let shoppers roam an open-air market with ties to eateries and other shops. We are deluged with unhealthy fast food and need more places like the Gaslight, Bennie’s Steakhouse and Piano Bar, or Tandoor.

Offer new and improved (updated) visitor information. When I finally got off my crutches after a year of illness, I called the Chamber of Commerce to ask about restaurants. I wanted to find one with a formal style for a special occasion: tablecloths, candles, flowers on the table, silverware arranged around the plate rather than wrapped in plastic or folded inside a napkin. I was told “I don’t think we have anything like that here…maybe the (former) Rose Garden…but I don’t know. You could go to Nashville…?” I almost dropped the phone. Clarksville’s got to do better than that if it hopes to be a destination, a true Gateway City. Where do the business people go for nice dining? My first dining experience  at a restaurant with table linen in Clarksville  was in the company of a friend at Jade Garden (where the Kung Po chicken was also made correctly) and to perfection. I waded through a lot of informality before we stumbled on that one.

Offer creative and plentiful handicapped-accessible parking that could be factored into the topography. Northampton MA has a similar geography; parking was built into the hillside, with an elevator covering five levels of garage with a walkway directly accessing the back of the shops (or street), connecting the businesses and activities on the bottom of the hill with those on top of the hill — important to those with disabilities. An old five story department store was converted into a collection of small shops, markets, bookstores, and even an alternative medicine shop.

Offer the young people of the city a vocational/trade high school (not unlike a magnet school) that would acknowledge the fact that not all kids are book learners; some are hands on learners, some are destined for a trade (welding, automotive, CAD/CAM engineering, computers, electronics, HVAC, home construction), and some are simply born artistic and thrive when they can apply that focus. Applied English and Math studies in such schools relate directly to the trade/curriculum being pursued. Most vocational schools develop culinary programs and some manage restaurants for real-life experience. Montpelier has six acclaimed restaurants run by culinary arts students. Young people leaving such programs up north get good jobs because they graduate with practicals skills; many go on to technical colleges as well. But those who don’t get jobs. To not have vocational training available at the high school level is unconscionable and fails a percentage of young people who are left behind by traditional programs. And those training young people could fill jobs here instead of leaving.

Offer sidewalks. Sidewalks and benches everywhere. And fill those small, still empty spaces with mini-parks. A former mayor of Holyoke, Massachusetts, said, and I paraphrase here, I’d rather see a park, a patch of green grass and a bench, than a vacant, boarded up building, an empty lot, even an empty corner, full of rubble. He city was ghost town of abandoned buildings and empty lots; using a major grant he demolished crumbling buildings, cleaned up debris and planted grass, improving neighborhood safety and providing a clean blank canvas for future developers.

Offer the Riverfront a chance bloom; the Riverfront is completely underutilized and suffers from its physical disconnect with the heart of downtown. Two points of interest with nothing in between. Beyond Riverfest, and Rivers and Spires, the Riverfront Park could be the site of summer band concerts, arts and crafts fairs, food or “taste” festivals showcasing good restaurants, outdoor children’s theater in the summer, fundraising “duck races,” model boat races…the options are endless.

Offer revitalized housing downtown, a mix of new construction and refurbishing old buildings, bringing people back into the heart of the city.

I see the first wisps of change happening. I want to see more.

The reality of redevelopment, or revitalization, is a balancing act: it is keeping the essence, the character and history of a community alive, while moving small and large business, industries and a social and cultural core forward, accepting that simply because of the time span involved, adjustments will happen all along the way, and the way will take at least twenty years to come full cycle, even if it starts now.

I love the area I grew up in; I also watched it fall into disrepair and decay, which was, by the way, another twenty-year process. Its rebirth was something miraculous to witness: a slow evolution to something different, but definitely something good. I want to see that process happen in Clarksville. For whether I stay here, or move on to other places, the people who live here, and their children and grandchildren, will be the beneficiaries of the decisions our city leaders are making now.