You can always go downtown
Middletown, R.I., designs center to create new image for itself
By Alice Giordano
Globe Correspondent
2/18/2001
'It's actually a common-sense plan: increase density with the right streetscape and landscaping, and you have a downtown.'
-MICHELLE MAHER Middletown town planner
MIDDLETOWN, R.I.
- In the hope of boosting its identity, this beach community plans to build a downtown - from scratch.
The project combines a little bit of the Boston Common, New York's Central Park, and Downtown Los Angeles.
It calls for the construction of a giant stone wall with pedestrian and traffic archways at the edge of a parking lot, an eco-amphitheater on a corner section of an old farm pasture, a skating park, and most radical - the creation of classic New England storefronts on the backside of a 1950s strip mall.
The proposed location is as bizarre as the concept - in the middle of what recently was described as one of the worst examples of out-of-control urban sprawl.
"It's like the ultimate vision," said Michelle Maher, Middletown's town planner. "But it's actually a common-sense plan: increase density with the right streetscape and landscaping, and you have a downtown."
Oddly enough, Middletown, a community of about 24,000, has long served as the center of two of Rhode Island's most celebrated communities - tourist magnet Newport and pastoral Portsmouth. The three communities make up Aquidneck Island, surrounded by some of the state's best beaches.
"Middletown is a very desirable urban community," said Keith Stokes, executive director of the Newport County Chamber of Commerce, a staunch supporter of the downtown plan.
"But we think the creation of a town center - a place to bump into your neighbor or grab your morning cup of coffee - will bring a new and important identity to Middletown," he said.
Middletown has been working on its downtown venture since late 1999. It's expected to take at least two years before the plan starts to take shape. The town has received some federal highway funding and state grants to help pay for the steetscape. Total expense to the town is expected to exceed $4 million, according to officials.
The idea of building a town square was borne out of a long history of being known as a drive-through between its two neighbors.
Last year, The New York Times printed a photo of West Main Road in Middletown along with a national story on unbridled retail development.
The familiar neon-lit and shiny plastic signs of fast food and big chain department stores line the road, also known as Route 138. It converges with Middletown's other main drag, West Main Road or Route 114 - equally as littered with retail tinsel.
The town first addressed the problem last year by adopting a highly restrictive sign ordinance, under which any new or replaced sign would have to be smaller, made only of wood, and illuminated only by external lighting. The ordinance was fashioned after a sign ordinance that the tiny town of Ogunquit, Maine, adopted in the early 1990s to preserve its downtown.
Middletown officials realized that controlling signs wasn't enough to compete with its neighbors for tourists, retailers, and vacation-home seekers. What they really wanted was a downtown, and they asked a Newport architectural firm to design it.
Newport Collaborative Architects Inc., along with a Providence landscape design firm, came up with a plan last February to use zoning that would create a downtown by actually encouraging dense development in a small area. The zoning would include strict aesthetic requirements addressing details right down to roof shape, building layouts, front facades, walkways, porches, and awning requirements.
Arnold Robinson, planning director with Newport Collaborative, said extreme zoning often is used in California to create downtowns.
"Originally, downtowns were made up of department stores like Macy's and J.J. Newberry," said Robinson. "We see that returning in the likes of stores like The Gap and Banana Republic, which are invading downtowns everywhere. What Middletown is proposing is really quite neotraditional."
Stokes says the Chamber of Commerce has been talking with anchor stores such as Old Navy and Borders, the national book chain, about moving to the new downtown.
But what's a downtown without a few binko shops, a newsstand, and at least one "mom and pop" bakery? Stokes said plenty of interest ensures that the new downtown will have all ingredients of a classic village center.
Especially interested, he said, are early retirees from Manhattan and Boston who had always dreamed of opening a quaint bed and breakfast or bookstore in a small New England town. "It's pioneering," says Stokes, " and these people like the idea of being part of that."
Other New England communities have struggled with the absence of a downtown. Wells, Maine, has had its share of jeering as a strip of Route 1 that connects Ogunquit and Kennebunkport. The town even predates Middletown with the idea of using a shopping center to building a downtown, but so far, it hasn't reached fruition.
Middletown's dedication to creating a downtown is resolute. When CVS said it couldn't possibly meet the town's new sign laws because they interfered with its corporate logo, planning board members drove to Stowe, Vt., to take photos of small wooden signs a CVS there had been required to use.
There is also skepticism. Rainy Taber, a longtime resident and waitress at the posh Viking Hotel in Newport, said that with Middletown, Portsmouth, and Newport so close, she doesn't see the need for it.
"The towns are only a few minutes away from each other." she said. "Really, this is an island community, and Newport's its downtown."
The location for this unusual downtown fuels added skepticism. The Aquidneck Mall, the epicenter of future downtown Middletown, includes a truck depot for Shaws Supermarket. It's also next to a BJ's and in front of two water-quality ponds.
But Maher said the stone wall proposed in the development, along with proper landscaping, will block unattractive fixtures and create a service similiar to those found in Boston.
Included in the area's natural advantages is a picturesque corridor of Bailey's Brook, which cuts through the future Town Green and according to the plan, will someday cross beneath a classic footbridge - a near replica, in miniature, of the famed North Bridge.
Promise of the future also has come by way of the Starbucks coffee chain. It has proposed an addition to its existing store at the Aquidneck Mall that includes an outdoor patio, sidewalks, a small garden, and even a traditional street clock.
"We didn't even ask them to go this far," said Maher. "They liked our downtown idea so much they got creative."
This story ran in the Boston Globe on 2/18/2001
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company
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