Eldon Karr: “This is an Eldon Karr initiative.”By DAN SMITH
Eldon Karr has fought this war before—and won—so he comes into it, not as a naïve kid, but as a seasoned 67-year-old with that naïve kid’s enthusiasm. He knows what’s possible and it excites him. He’s also seen year after year of failure in trying to replicate the success of Roanoke’s best downtown plan ever: Design ’79, the one that allowed City Market to become what it has become and the one that ultimately helped encourage people like Ed Walker to concentrate his substantial efforts in the middle of Roanoke.
Eldon’s newest franchise is something called Heart of Roanoke. It began as “Spirit of Henry Street,” but that was too limiting and suggested that one part of downtown deserved more than the whole. He quickly rethought and rewrote that. Downtown, he insists, “has been a problem for many years and you simply can’t separate it into pockets” (as the city recently did in designating several downtown “districts,” including an Arts District).
The idea here, says the architect and urban designer, is to replicate the success of the Williamson Road neighborhoods and Grandin Village. Eldon says he has time to devote right now because business is not all that hot and he’s not all that needy. He has the time, the energy, the knowledge and the organizational skills—some of them newfound, as with his high profile on Facebook—to pull it off. In a single week alone, he went from 29 members of his little cadre to 145 willing to contribute time, expertise and—maybe—money to get this thing going full bore. Norfolk Southern has bought in. Other business people are talking seriously to Eldon—a guy who looks about as much like a businessman as Willie Nelson looks like a movie star.
Architects, says Eldon, are an odd breed: “right brained and left brained at the same time. Able to engineer a structure, but as artists we’re also sensitive to the aesthetics and to the environment for the structure.”
He insists that reclaiming some authority over the direction of the city’s plan is a central goal. “Urban planning,” he says, “has been left to government officials, who hire designers, pay them and then tell the designers what they want done. I think we need to have the community tell us what needs to be done.” We may be look at a revolution here. Maybe a shooting war.
With partner Steve Gift 30 years ago, a mid-career Eldon Carr was at the center of Design ’79. He worked with Charles Moore and his Centerbrook organization (from Essex, Conn.) in putting together a coalition of design professionals from the Roanoke Valley to tackle the City Market problems. “We identified the projects, put priorities on them and involved locals in the solutions. We haven’t done that sense” to any real degree, he says. “We’ve spent well over $1 million in urban design fees [in Roanoke] and nothing significant has come of it.”
So Eldon went to Facebook to see what he could manufacture in the way of a jump start for the effort. He found high voltage. He says he’s been told by people who know that the Roanoke Valley has a Facebook presence of 92,000 souls (which is not to suggest they’re all active, just registered) and he found that enticing. “We’re still trying to figure out how to use it,” he says. “Right now, we’re looking at setting up different categories where people can help and one of the most appealing [not to mention easiest] is a simple sharing of memories of downtown. What was best about it? What would you like to see return? What have we lost?”
The naïve kid comes out with one simple statement: “I have to be apolitical.” Yeah, right, Eldon. How does one accomplish that in a city that is so intensely political, so divided by section, economy, race, education, competing neighborhood organization? Well, he mulls, maybe finding common ground would be a good thing: “We have to understand our own tribes.”
Eldon is absolutely focused on one specific point: this has nothing to do with government. “This is an Eldon Karr initiative,” he stresses. “I don’t want to be guided and directed.” He wants partners, though, and he’d like to have a little volunteer money from his volunteer army. “There are going to be some costs and I don’t want to have to bear them. If people share my perspective, we can do this together.”
The plan, he says, is “not about where the next building is going.” It is about incorporating spaces and making that space friendly to everything around it. It means getting both sides of the tracks—both literally and figuratively—in downtown Roanoke planning in the same sandbox.
You can reach Eldon at EldonKarr@hughes.net or you can look him up on Facebook, where he has posted his plan.
No comments:
Post a Comment