Lessons from a West Palm Beach FL Lifestyle Center
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The new owner of the failing St. Louis area enclosed mall, Crestwood Plaza, recently announced plans to raze the place and construct an open air “lifestyle center” on the site. Subsidies from the city of Crestwood will be sought (surprise).
This made me think of one such center I saw last Fall when I was in Florida for the Rail~Volution conference. With the registration they gave us passes for all of their transit systems. So on my last day I took their Tri-Rail line up to Palm Beach. This is a heavy rail line serving several counties in the south Florida region. I was using the line on a Sunday so I didn’t get any picture as to how well it does serving commuters.
Not much existed around the depot but I could see buildings off to the east — toward the water so that was the direction I walked.
After several blocks of nothing I found something of interest:
Above on the left is a grocery store and on the right is the back end of the lifestyle center — the “front” faces onto a major road — more on that later. At first I wasn’t sure what it was I just knew the buildings were up to the sidewalk and of multiple levels
Up half a block I spotted motorcycle/scooter parking. Nice.
I was at the North end of “City Place” — a mixed-use upscale lifestyle center. The name is only part of selling a city/urban lifestyle. As you can tell from the map this development integrated itself into the existing street grid.
Three story buildings aligned both sides of South Rosemary Ave. The upper floors of most of what you see above is residential.
The upper floors overhang the sidewalk space to create an environment safe from the hot Florida sun. The high ceiling gives it an open feeling.
looking back the other direction toward the intersection we see shrubs — the line of travel was shifted. I had lunch at the outdoor patio you see on the left and I observed that most people crossing the street above went to the left of the shrubs rather than to the right for the crosswalk. The lesson here is that people take the shortest route — architects and planners need to remember as much. If they would take the time to do a pedestrian circulation study of their proposed design they’d catch these issues. Sadly, more time is spent on the circulation of cars. Still this project is a thousand times better than a typical strip or enclosed mall.
The main street is narrow with on-street parking to help give that city/urban feeling. Balconies, even when vacant, suggest a lively streetscape. But don’t get any ideas about running a clothesline across the street from building to building — this is not a typical urban street — it is under the control of one management company.
Further down the street we see a large multi-level Macy’s was integrated into the design. Looking closely at the design it is easy to find flaws with the execution but just walking down the street it works as intended — to blend in and mask the true size of the store behind the walls.
Up next was a pleasant surprise — a former United Methodist church was reborn as the centerpiece of the whole project with life as a performance hall. The inclusion of an existing structure within the development site added a nice bit of history lacking in the new buildings.
A modest sized plaza with outdoor dining is at the rear of the old church. An important lesson here, which they did well, is to make the plaza a good size but not so big that it looks empty most of the time.
By putting the stage in the middle of the space it broke up the area to keep it from being too expansive. The plantings and pavement further help break down the overall size of the space.
Sadly the entire project lacks bike parking. Here cyclists used the pole from a stop sign. Unfortunately the sop sign was placed at the end of a crosswalk so the bikes now contribute for blocking the pathway. This project has numerous parking garages hidden behind the buildings but they failed to plan for people arriving by a mode other than the car. This area, not far from the water, has a number of condo buildings nearby so it should have been assumed that some customers would bike.
We’ve now reached the south edge — a major blvd in West Palm Beach. As you can see in the distance are nearby condos.
Directly across the street to the south is more new housing nearing completion. Unfortunately crossing the boulevard on foot wasn’t part of the plan — at least not that I saw.
Entering from the main entry (above) you certainly feel like you are going into a singular unified project rather than just another city street. Such a tactic is probably necessary to attract the right tenant mix, the right shoppers and the right residents. Still, Im glad that in other directions that it just blends so much better.
Housing types vary within the project — these townhouses with garages are great for those that may not care for an over a store type of unit. Note this is an alley serving these units — pedestrian entrances face courtyards or in the case of the ones on the left facing a public street.
Overall not a bad project. Many of our St. Louis area projects would do well to copy elements such as the streets in addition to the building scale. Loughborough Commons, for example, would have been outstanding with a main street through it’s center and side streets connecting to the adjacent streets. Sure this type of project costs more to build but you also get more in return. I doubt that whatever replaces Crestwood Mall will be as diverse as the above project. It will really come down to the vision of the developer and their architect as I am certain the City of Crestwood has no vision beyond sales tax revenue.
