by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
Making the Bay Street Town Center a reality calls for up close-and-personal excitement, variety, excitement, quality, excitement and security.
An extra helping of excitement wouldn’t hurt.
The surest way to make those budding enterprises die on the vine is to operate them from the boardroom with all eyes fixed on the bottom line.
When he came to Orlando in the early 1970s, “Orange Avenue was dead. They used to hose down places at night to clean them up,” said Bob Snow, a developer and entertainment consultant.
By the time Snow was done buying and developing property, he was in the middle of Church Street Station, one of the best-known entertainment destinations anywhere.
Snow shared his experiences Friday morning at a meeting of the Urban Land Institute, hosted by the St. Joe Co. The program, with about 70 people in the audience, was about the importance of entertainment, retail and cultural activities in downtown Jacksonville.
Other participants were Michael Munz, vice president and director of Strategic Communications at The Dalton Agency; Amy Crane, the new deputy director of the Cultural Council of Greater Jacksonville; and Maxine McBride, president of Clockwork Marketing Services.
Starting with a three-story, boarded-up, derelict building in Orlando, Snow put together 32 pieces of property on eight acres of land.
“We had retail on the bottom floor, apartments on the top floor; condos,” he said. “But what I really do believe is the answer for the long term is live entertainment. It creates the kind of pizzazz and excitement that brings people down.”
As his venues showed they could be successful, other developers started working “the rest of the street and the other side of the tracks,” said Snow. “It gave us a confidence it could be done.”
Church Street Station started to fail almost as soon as Snow sold it years later. It had been running with 30 managers and 900 employees “on the floor, every day,” he said. The new version was run “from the board room” with accountants scrutinizing the bottom line.
“That was their first mistake,” he said.
Where Snow had featured a variety of live performers — from jugglers and bagpipers to flying circuses and R&B groups — the new owners began cutting their numbers, “cutting down on the pizzazz, the excitement.”
As the visitors began falling off, the owners and accountants cut more, creating a steeper downhill slide.
He added that those who fail may also be found one step behind the fads they’re trying to chase.
“What really did it for me was strong, classic American entertainment,” said Snow. “Rock ‘n’ roll, bluegrass, Dixieland, rhythm and blues.”
Munz said he was concerned, particularly once he started living downtown, that not enough was planned for the new residents of the area. He was right.
After all the investments in public infrastructure, incentives for private businesses and the Better Jacksonville Plan, “What are you going to do about the rest of us?” Munz said he asked then-Mayor John Delaney. “His answer was, ‘We’re not sure.’
“They didn’t have a complete plan.”
When he and Jim Bailey, publisher of the Financial News & Daily Record, began talking about a “vision” for the Bay Street area, “People said you’re crazy,” Munz told his audience. “Boarded-up buildings. It’s not going to happen there.”
But they talked to several business people and put together the Bay Street Committee.
“We’re talking about the same things [for Bay Street] that sit around the corner from churches and residences,” said Munz. “What I visualize is San Marco Square downtown. I want to paint that visual. Shops, retail, art — the various things we need to support those who are living downtown.”
The next sign of the changes that are coming is the Dec. 5 grand opening of the Eclate jazz club, featuring “a major street party” across Bay Street from the Duval County Courthouse.
“We’ve got business people who bought into the vision,” said Munz. “And we’ve got government saying, ‘OK, if the private sector is going to put themselves out there first, we will come and support them.’”
The planned facelift for the Landing, which could run between $200 million and $250 million, will only mean good things for downtown, Munz said.
Asked if a strong Landing would be complementary or competitive, Munz said, “The way we look at it, it all fits together. We look at this as downtown as a whole. I see us all working together.”
When Munz talks to businesses coming to downtown — or thinking about it — tax incentives don’t rank at the top of the list:
“It comes up in conversation, but the first question they ask is about parking. If I’m going to put this business or this art gallery in downtown Jacksonville, how am I going to deal with the parking?
“The question is parking and the perception of parking. When I look at [Downtown Vision, Inc.] and everything they’ve done, they’ve really helped educate people about parking opportunities downtown. But that’s not the perception.”