Owensboro’s Downtown: A “Living Room”?
In renewal accomplished and grand things to come, Owensboro’s waterfront and downtown are standouts. We doubt if the citizens of Owensboro and Daviess County fully appreciate the importance of what’s occurred already—and what will happen soon—on their doorstep to the Ohio River.
Like most cities, Owensboro saw its downtown retailing flee to the shopping centers and Wal-Marts. The familiar, dreary story of so many cities was repeated here: mindless demolition of many fine, still serviceable old buildings, the appearance of gaping holes in the flow of a once-proud streetscape.
But during the last decade, the pattern of downtown decay in Owensboro has met its match. First came coal mine owner Bob Green, who stumbled into the hotel business in Evansville and liked it so much that he decided to build on the waterfront in Owensboro. By booking Las Vegas-quality shows into the Executive Inn Rivermont, Green not only captured a lot of hotel trade that used to go to other towns, he also encouraged people to come to Owensboro, stay overnight, spend their money. Green became the Father of Tourism for a city that had never known it.
Terry Woodward, by contrast, became Owensboro’s Entrepreneur Extraordinaire. He was the man who carried off one of America’s great business success stories of the times, right in downtown Owensboro, which virtually everyone else had declared dead.
Woodward took his father’s business and parlayed it into one of America’s leading music and video distribution firms—WaxWorks. (Sales soared from $200,000 in WaxWorks’ first year to $172,000,000 in 1990.) Choosing Sears’ old downtown store in Owensboro as his staging area, Woodward expanded almost constantly until he’d taken over the entire building. Today he owns all four corners at Second and Crittenden.
Bob Green and Terry Woodward are at least half the story of downtown’s historic turnaround. But they aren’t all of it.
There’s also the saga of the host of Owensboro leaders who got engaged in the process of planning for their city’s future, decided downtown was critical to the city identity and well-being, and then went to work to make it happen.
In 1987 their thoughts and plans came together in a broadly representative “Strategies for Tomorrow” for Owensboro-Daviess County. The official players in the strategic planning effort ranged from the city and county governments to the Chamber of Commerce and Metropolitan Planning Commission. Three hundred private citizens took part. While the future of downtown and the riverfront was only one element of “Strategies,” it was a critical one.
Here was the community’s first official call to implement the long-held dream of a cultural/civic center, built directly on the riverfront. The center ought to be, said the “Strategies” committee, a new home and stage for Owensboro’s leading performing arts groups, a civic gathering spot for speakers and special events; a place, in short, where the entire Owensboro Daviess County community could come together. The facility also would be linked to a new Bluegrass Museum and Hall of Fame.
“Strategies” urged the building of a major corporate office center downtown—also directly on the river. It recommended public construction of downtown parking, which had been identified as a major barrier to further development.
And on the existing riverfront, which they called “woefully underutilized, unsightly and unattractive,” the “Strategies” planners called for a stem-to-stern clean-up, redoing all the riverfront property from Smothers Park to English Park.
Many cities’ strategic plans go on the shelf, honored only in the breach. But in the last half decade, the steps the “Strategies” report outlined for the downtown and waterfront have left the realm of abstract dreams to become very tangible brick, glass, concrete, and walkways. Today the corporate center, the waterfront cleanup, the parking facility are well advanced. And RiverPark, the name with which the new civic/cultural center got baptized, is to open in 1992, the crown jewel of the downtown redevelopment.
A remarkable quotient of civic “imagineering,” replete with all manner of citizen input, has been added to the new downtown formula in recent years.
Take bluegrass. In the mid-1980s, Terry Woodward had the idea to launch an annual bluegrass festival on the riverfront at Owensboro. It was a compelling case. Bluegrass sprang from this area of Kentucky: father-of-the-art Bill Monroe was born 30 miles from Owensboro at Rosine. Jerusalem Ridge, of the bluegrass ballad, is nearby.
The Bluegrass Festival started in 1985, culminating in a joint concert by the Osborne Brothers and the Owensboro Symphony—the first time a symphony orchestra anywhere had ever performed at a bluegrass festival.
But Woodward’s mind already was racing ahead: why not found an International Bluegrass Music Association and make sure its headquarters got located in Owensboro? How about a bluegrass awards show? Why not, by the fifth year or so, create the Bluegrass Museum and Hall of Fame and put it right beside Owensboro’s new RiverPark Center?
So far, the Woodward timetable is working almost perfectly. And it would be tough to think of a better business move: 40 million Americans listen to bluegrass; 1 million call it their favorite music.
Or consider barbecue. The art is legendary to Owensboro, dating at least from the 1830s. We were amused when Mayor David Adkisson took the trouble to prepare a fully researched article for the Messenger-Inquirer to certify the community’s standing as the barbecue capital of the world. (Adkisson’s measure: More barbecue restaurants per capita than any other city. No competitor came even close.)
In the late 1970s, Ken Bosley, whose family owns Moonlite Bar-B-Que Inn, was one of a bunch of Chamber of Commerce members dreaming up new ideas to promote tourism in Owensboro. Recalling how big church barbecue picnics are, they settled on Bosley’s idea—a barbecue festival. Soon Owensboro’s International Barbecue Festival became an annual event, drawing tens of thousands of carnivores from far and wide to the barbecue pits around Smothers Park.
Bluegrass and barbecue, twin legends, demonstrate Owensboro’s skill at capitalizing on longstanding local tradition, turning popular custom into stunning commercial success. They suggest the potential of turning Owensboro increasingly into a “celebration city,” offering a year-round diet of events that attract hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.
Yet, however impressive the downtown and waterfront revival has been, it’s too soon to celebrate, to rest on one’s oars.
Take the challenge of Owensboro’s looks. A downtown design review commission has been seeking to encourage owners to build with good taste, to preserve the integrity of historic buildings, to see to it that buildings and streets, old and new, work well together.
For the entire city, Mayor Adkisson has pushed a “Streetscape 2000” initiative to work year by year at improving the main arteries and central business district. The effort embraces planting trees and bushes along streets and in the medians, banishing ugly signs, sprucing up buildings with fresh paint.
These efforts are critical to Owensboro’s future—critical to the way the town sees itself, vital to the city’s image to the world. Looking at the community through the eyes of a prospective new business, one city official said, you “notice every bad sign, every sagging wire, every pole and weed. Fighting for good aesthetics isn’t an interest in botany. It’s a competitive thing.” And nowhere is the competitive challenge greater than downtown. People insist on top-level services in their neighborhoods, where they have major personal investment. But downtowns so often lose out. Their future is everyone’s interest, but no one’s in particular.
So one has to ask: What particular advantage do downtowns offer that suburbs can’t? One answer is history, color, variety—rare commodities in the world of homogeneous subdivisions and shopping malls. But in today’s world, there’s an equal value to downtowns: compactness. Only in downtown do you have a chance to get where you want to go on foot, to shake dependence on the automobile for every move.
On this score, Owensboro’s quite lucky: it has a remarkably compact downtown. The points of attraction—from English Park to RiverPark Center, Executive Inn to Courthouse and City Hall—are close enough to walk between (or, at most, to ride to on simple downtown shuttle buses). That’s an asset to build on.
But downtown streets also have to be attractive and enjoyable—and lead somewhere interesting. Again, Owensboro is lucky. While some cities consider spending millions to create the waterfronts nature didn’t give them, Owensboro has the banks of the Ohio River, which helped spawn the town in the first place.
During our stay in Owensboro, we found ourselves fascinated by the river, by the constantly moving panorama of mid-America’s brawny commerce. The river constantly changes its face. At one moment its waters are roiled by the winds and churned by currents. And then, as if by magic, the powerful flow seems to dissolve into a placid pool.
Clearly, there’s the potential for so much more use of this waterfront. It was a stroke of genius to pick this location for the new RiverPark Center. We predict the grand lobby, overlooking the Ohio, will become renowned among public places along the river’s 700-mile span.
As Owensboro’s planning goes forward, we’d keep a clear view to the water for every street and walkway possible. As Dick Rigby of the Washington, D.C.-based Waterfront Center said when he visited Owensboro, Owensboro people need “to go and get inspired” by what other cities—from Charleston (South Carolina) to Wilmington (North Carolina) to South Bend (Indiana)— have done with their waterfronts, in some cases with more difficult situations to start with than Owensboro.
For Owensboro, it makes sense to do everything possible to encourage lively recreational boating activity. Multiple restaurants, walkways, and viewing spots should be sited with river exposure. The Executive Inn should cooperate—gladly, voluntarily—to let the walkway from Smothers to English Park pass by its water side. Indeed, the Inn could benefit a great deal by reviewing and rebuilding its entire river exposure with promenades, open-air restaurants, and cafes all oriented to the city’s expanded water and boating future. (Bob Green’s entrepreneurial spirit has given a lot to Owensboro, but he also owes this hospitable host town a great deal.)
But what about street activity when downtown workers have gone home for the day, when the festivals take a holiday, when tourists aren’t thronging the scene? Owensboro, like every other downtown in America, needs people who select the center city as their neighborhood and decide to live there full-time. We think there ought to be a market for downtown Owensboro housing—among office workers who’d just as soon be in the center of action near the river, among senior citizens who prize a walkable environment.
Downtown housing doesn’t need to depend on a wave of upscale buyers willing to plunk down hundreds of thousands of dollars for a pricey condo with a river view. A successful downtown neighborhood encourages residents at all points along the income scale. Owensboro ought to think about multiple public-private incentives for a mix of people to live in and help create a lively downtown.
Housing, in turn, can be a big inducement to specialized retailing. When enough people live downtown, one can expect the retail landmarks of a strong community—hardware stores and beauty shops, newsstands and dry cleaners, grocers and florists—to return. Downtown living may not be everyone’s choice in the age of the automobile and sprawling lawn culture. On the other hand, not everyone drives, or cares to, all the time. If a livable, walkable downtown environment is offered, more people than you’d think will snap up the opportunity.
To anyone who suggests downtown retailing is irrevocably dead, never to return, we’d suggest that the shopping patterns have always been volatile, always in flux. It’s true many downtown retail stores became stagnant, forgot how to compete. But in some American cities today, the smart small retailers are discovering special niche markets and competing successfully, on the turf they choose, with the Wal-Marts and other mass outlets.
Oftentimes, downtown retailers begin a comeback when they think anew about their potential customers—not the thousands following the red-tag or blue-light specials at a mall or outlying mass retailer, but the downtown resident who pursues quality at a reasonable price, or the tourist who isn’t above impulse buying of memorabilia, or the downtown worker who squeezes in a purchase over the lunch hour.
Owensboro is fortunate to have Downtown Owensboro Inc. working on these issues. But all the downtown players will have to encourage some form of what’s called “centralized retail management.” The idea is for the downtown stores to collaborate and mimic some of the advantages of a mall. They could establish systems, for example, to recruit stores missing from the mix, survey customer preferences, standardize hours. (Why not set downtown store hours at 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., to catch both lunchtime and after-work customers? Then keep downtown stores open every night there’s a special festival or event, so people can count on the opportunity for late shopping on those days.)
Successful retail management efforts in other cities have made the whole downtown environment predictable, accessible—and newly attractive—to customers. A prime example is Neenah, Wisconsin, an old manufacturing town of 35,000 people, so successful in marketing its downtown that the outlying mall last year took downtown’s marketing theme as its own. Another is Oak Park, Illinois, which chalked up 20,000 square feet of new downtown leases over three recent months.
There is a lesson to be learned from all these towns: serious staff time and long-term commitment have to go into the process. Consider that the average shopping mall agent works 200 hours, or five weeks, to sign a single new merchant. Retail management won’t work without a real commitment to outreach, organizing people, holding intensive meetings. But it is doable, and Owensboro could do it if it cared.
Sadly, we ran into some prominent Owensboro citizens who’ve effectively written off the downtown as a safe or attractive place to do business. But that judgment was the exception, not the rule. A refreshing majority of Owensboro leaders appeared not just to have hopes for, but to believe in, their downtown.
Communities across the country might copy the counsel of Mayor Adkisson:
Downtown is the living room of our community. It’s where we all come together to see each other. The suburbs are like the bedrooms. If you give a kid everything he needs in his room, you’ll never see him again in the living room. We need to provide the arts, entertainment, restaurants, cultural celebrations. Downtown is our gathering place. It’s our people place.