by Sean McManus
Staff Writer
There’s a difference between an abandoned building and an historic one, but if that building is vacant, it’s vacant — whether it’s historic or not. As part of the overall effort to clean up downtown, City Council is considering a plan that would utilize the first floor windows of vacant buildings for advertising, artistic and expressive display purposes. The idea is to make vacant buildings look not-so-vacant.
A resolution before Council would allow Downtown Vision, Inc. to facilitate contact between property owners and display contributors.
“I wouldn’t want to bring a client to my office past homeless people and rotten buildings,” said Fitzhugh Powell, the chairman of Cecil Powell & Company, who has been selling financial services downtown for 50 years. “We’ve got to do something to spruce up this place.”
Powell chaired the Structure Appearance Committee, one of five committees that emerged from Council president Matt Carlucci’s Historic Preservation Task Force, which developed the window dressing plan. The 13-member committee, which included Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Harry Reagan, Council member Pat Lockett-Felder and Dalton Agency vice president Michael Munz, started meeting last summer to talk about ways to ameliorate the problem of crumbling buildings and boarded-up plywood doors.
“We explored a few ideas,” said Lisa Sheppard, who works for the City’s Planning Department and also served on the Structure Appearance Committee. “And there are also other ideas that make sense. But we think this is the best way to address the concerns that downtown businesses and residents have about the look of some of our vacant buildings.”
The plan calls for Downtown Vision to initiate contact with local schools, businesses and civic organizations to discuss what kinds of displays would work the best. The resolution names the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts and the Jacksonville Historical Society as potential candidates to contribute to the displays.
“It’s the same principle that is applied inside a mall,” said Sheppard. “When there are empty stores, you don’t just walk past cardboard, you walk past displays and advertisements for other stores.”
The overall mission of the committee was to address the appearance, safety and maintenance of “under-utilized” buildings for the purposes of making pedestrian areas safe and clean.
“I’d like to see schools and civic clubs adopt these windows and even light them up at night if they can,” said Powell. “As long as the City enforces the building codes effectively, then building owners should be more than happy to let these groups utilize their space for something nice.”
Although not explicit in the resolution, the Structure Appearance Committee also discussed other, similar remedies for downtown’s vacant buildings. Saying that there is a desire to “maintain the rhythm of building openings at street level such that vacant property blends in with the existing streetscape,” in it’s preliminary analysis, the Committee mentions the use of reflective material to secure windows of vacant property and the daily removal of graffiti.
“The other part of this is actually just enforcing laws already on the books,” said Powell. “Building owners should be required to keep their property clean. Then we can go from there.”
Terry Lorince, executive director of Downtown Vision, Inc., said this kind of initiative is common in other cities.
“Lots of cities do this, especially in vacant storefronts,” said Lorince, who helped revitalize downtown Pittsburgh. “We will explore this in context with our other revitalization efforts.”
But Lorince is mindful of the fact that placing displays in abandoned windows is a temporary solution.
“We can put art in windows but we need to find tenants for these buildings,” she said. “That’s really the goal here.”