Why Main Street Isn’t
in the Middle of Town
Peter F. Orazem
If we were
to plan Ames
knowing what we know today, where would be put the downtown? If you said on a four block street enclosed
on three sides by a power plant, a railroad track and an underpass located on
the east side of town, you have accurately described our Main Street, but no
sane planner would have selected that.
Our Main Street
was the center of Ames at its founding, but Ames was not founded with
the University in mind. Rules governing
where a land grant school could be located stipulated that the college had to
be out of town. Therefore, ISU was
originally established two miles from the original center of Ames.
One can barely see ISU on the left side of the Ames map in Figure 1.
The Ames downtown did not
serve students conveniently, and so a second commercial zone sprang up close to
the campus. The Campustown area focused
on student needs for shopping, supplies, and food. We can see an early version of Campustown in
Figure 2. Some of the current buildings
in Campustown date back to that time.
Over time,
the areas of empty space between the campus and the city filled in. As it did so, the population of Ames rose from a few
thousand to the 52,000 we have today.
Campustown is in the middle of Ames
and is the logical place for the commercial center of town. It is where the town and the university come
together, a natural place for chic stores, quaint restaurants and
nightclubs. What has kept our Campustown
from becoming such a wonderful and vibrant commercial center of the sort many
of us have admired in Iowa City or Madison or almost any
other college town we visit?
Parking.
In the Ames
survey of residents, 80% express satisfaction with parking downtown and
only 25% express satisfaction with parking in Campustown. The fraction
expressing satisfaction with Campustown parking has stayed at 20-25% for many
years. Limited parking prevents
patrons from frequenting the businesses in Campustown, and that has limited the
economic health and the variety of the businesses that locate there.
How is it
that Iowa City
can have a pedestrian mall across from the University? Iowa
City has a parking garage so that people can park and
then walk through the pedestrian mall.
When I have
visited cities in Europe, I love the city
centers with the areas closed off from cars;
the outdoor cafes; the multitude
of people walking about. Our Campustown could easily serve that purpose, the
natural place for visitors to the town or the campus to relax.
However, visitors would have to be able to park their cars. Visitors can park in our current downtown,
but they would only find our current Main
Street by accident.
Where could
we put a parking garage in Campustown?
There are five churches in the Campustown area that have parking
areas. Every Sunday, there is an
interdenominational competition among the various religions to find
parking. The rest of the week, these
parking lots are underutilized. Perhaps
one of the churches would volunteer their space for a parking garage in
exchange for guaranteed parking on Sunday and a smaller allotment the rest of
the week. The parking garage could more
than replace any lost parking from closing off a four block area of Campustown
to pedestrian traffic. With a ready
availability of parking, the value of the business sites in Campustown would
rise, and we would see an immediate increase in the quality and variety of
businesses that would invest in the area.
Before the
installation of the campus at Iowa State University,
the downtown of Ames
was in the logical place for a town 12 blocks long and 7 blocks wide. However, given we have a large university
located where it is, it makes no sense for Ames to continue to ignore the
natural center of town while trying to shore up a downtown that is far too
small and inconveniently located to serve a town of this size. A comparable investment in Campustown would
create the visitor’s center that is sorely missing in Ames.
Figure 1: Map of Ames circa 1875
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Figure 2:
The view south from ISU along Welch Ave.
to what is now Campustown circa 1912
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Sources:
Figure 1 http://www.amespubliclibrary.org/farwell/publication/Pub6879.htm
Figure 2 http://www.ames.lib.ia.us/farwell/publication/Pub2116.htm