Mon City could learn from others’ failure
Monongahela Main Street Program has a goal of revitalizing the city’s downtown business district. The nonprofit community group is getting support from city council, which plans to offer grants to business owners to help them restore their buildings.
Council will offer grants of up to $5,000, or a third of the cost of projects, to building owners under its facade improvement program, funded by $65,000 from slots revenue from The Meadows Casino.
The program is a small step in a long journey, and it’s important Monongahela heads in the right direction. The failures of other communities with the same goal should be heeded.
Forty years ago, Washington launched the Bassettown improvement project, a multimillion-dollar attempt to keep shops and shoppers from going to the malls. Today, most of the storefronts along North Main Street in Washington – the center of the Bassettown project – are empty, and several of the buildings are uninhabitable. Many do, however, retain the ugly, modern facades, erected in 1976 and 1977 to disguise the fact quite a few of these buildings were then more than a century old.
The project was pushed hard by Mayor Michael Johns, and it was indeed ambitious. New brick sidewalks, street and lighting improvements, art installations, a parking garage and restricted parking on Main Street were all intended to make downtown as appealing as the shopping malls. There was even a proposal to construct a roof over Main Street from Beau to Chestnut streets to protect shoppers from the weather.
That idea was rejected because of its cost and the potentially low return on the investment. Roof or no roof, people would still be attracted to the abundant and free parking at the malls and the convenience and comfort of shopping indoors.
Making downtown stores more accessible to shoppers should have been the priority, and it wasn’t. Perhaps just as big a mistake was to conceal the city’s greatest asset: its history.
Had the money been spent to actually restore and preserve the beautiful old buildings, rather than to mask their age, they would be in much better shape today and more attractive to merchants.
We certainly hope the facade improvements envisioned by Monongahela Council involve restoration of the building fronts to their original appearance, and not the erection of chrome and plastic makeup.
Another lesson might be learned from the experience of West Alexander. Back in the early 1980s, that borough just this side of the West Virginia state line was a bustling little tourist attraction. Shops, cafés and art galleries lined its central street, drawing traffic from Interstate 70. Sidewalks in what was earlier a sleepy village were regularly crowded with shoppers in the weeks before Christmas. Development of business in the borough was largely the work of merchant Jackie Walker. When she closed her store and moved from the area, things went downhill. Today, there’s nothing left of the West Alexander Village Shops.
The mistake in West Alexander was not with the goal or the vision; there was no coordinated effort to maintain, promote and sustain the business district; there was no organization.
Monongahela has an opportunity now to improve its downtown and avoid the pitfalls. Terry Necciai, an architectural historian and one of the leaders of Monongahela Main Street Program, advocates a four-point approach: organization, promotion, design and economic restructuring.
“At first, a lot of places thought they could make the buildings pretty and then walk away,” Necciai told this newspaper. “Some make the buildings look the same. Some tried to recruit a big business. These weren’t the right solution to towns around the country. You need all of those things in the four-point approach.”
Monongahela’s history is no less interesting than Washington’s, and its Main Street buildings are a living testament to it. We hope the city revitalizes with vigor, but keeps in mind its history is very much a part of its future.