To the Editor:
Norwalk has two-thirds the population of Stamford, yet Stamford feels like a city and Norwalk feels like a suburb. People actually ride buses in Stamford, and there are tall buildings downtown.
As I see it, Norwalk really isn’t a coherent city, but an exploded one with its pieces scattered. There are three strips of retail radiating outward toward neighboring towns, several tenuously connected village centers and a self-contained office park in a far corner. Its core is cut into pieces by I-95, the connector and the upper harbor.
There had been a concerted effort by a succession of administrations, the Norwalk Redevelopment Authority and several developers to create our missing downtown. The vision was a chain of mixed-use developments stretching from Wall Street to the railroad station, connected by public transit. To date only a scaled-back Waypointe is under construction.
The key element in all these developments was apartments, to populate the downtown and feed the planned new retail. It was understood that a new downtown needed regional traffic to survive, and the original 95/7 plan was skewed in that direction. But the basic idea was to create a populated center that would serve as the city’s missing downtown.
Why these projects could not be financed is a mystery to me. Billions are being invested in Harbor View in Stamford, where they can’t build apartments fast enough to meet the demand. Young people, tired of high rents and long rides on subways, are moving to Stamford, where they have a 45-minute ride into the city. The trip from South Norwalk is only 10 to 15 minutes longer; why can’t we attract our share of this rich market?
The proposed regional shopping center at 95/7 will answer this question in the negative. If we build it, we will forever have lost the chance to create a populated downtown. After the stores close at 10, there will be a huge population desert stretching between Waypointe and SoNo, a gaping hole in the city’s texture.
As several others have pointed out, retail malls rise and fall, and when they fall, they leave devastation behind. The U.S. has two to three times as much retail space per capita as a typical European city. When you build new retail, you are stealing customers from existing retail somewhere, and sooner or later, some other center or the Internet will steal customers from the one proposed for Norwalk.
What we need at 95/7 is apartments, lots of them, with 24/7 shuttle links to the train station. The “circulator” running on West Avenue, proposed by one of the many studies sitting on the shelves of the Norwalk Redevelopment Authority, would do the job, and link the new population with Waypointe and Wall Street.
One way to look at the mall proposal is as an act of desperation, a sense that if we don’t build something on the vacant lot at 95/7 the sky will fall. Another more cynical way is that some back-room dealing has gone on that will benefit the developer at the expense of the city.
Regardless of its origins, a regional mall at 95/7 will seal Norwalk’s fate as a failed city. It must not happen.
Gordon Tully
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