As Maryland Parkway rolls north from Tropicana, six lanes wide and hauling ass for Downtown, it draws a hard line along the eastern edge of UNLV, stopping the campus cold. In part that's just a random act of city development: The university has to end somewhere. But it also has a lot to do with Maryland Parkway as a sharp physical boundary, a wide moat of asphalt and thousands of cars that rarely go the posted 30-mph speed limit. You can cross it, and God be with you if you try, but it's hard to engage in much back-and-forth on this street.
Standing in front of UNLV and looking across, you can see how Maryland also functions as a kind of sociological line, separating the campus and what it represents in our minds from the surrounding area and everything it represents: intellectual property from rundown property, forward motion from lethargy, hot coeds from aimless loiterers.
I've come to UNLV to talk to President Carol Harter about an ambitious, complex plan to blur that line, to leapfrog the campus mentality across Maryland Parkway, setting the stage for a new phase of university life—and a new kind of life for the neighborhood, too. I'm barely out of my car when I behold a sign. It's a billboard heralding the new student union complex that will rise here year after next. UNLV has been on a construction bender, 17 new buildings in the last decade. This one, blockish and muscular, isn't particularly adventurous, but it clearly spent far more time in an architect's design software than anything across the way.
It's a late-May morning, shortly after the end of the spring semester. Students drowse in the arboreal green calm of the school's shaded mallways or shake off their post-Melville stress disorder at the outdoor tables. Summer classes are a couple of weeks away. What are these kids doing here?
Across the street, well, I don't have to tell you what's going on there; we've all been to Maryland Parkway. It's not blight, by any means. But it is largely charmless and without character, not at all what you expect a university border zone to be: eclectic, chatty, energetic, culture-driven, alive with the smart set drawn to the intellectual vigor of a college setting. Sure, there are pixels of campus-side vitality here and there: in the sharp-lined design of Chipotle, part of the "funky" nuevo-Mexican chain owned by McDonald's; in the elbow-bending camaraderie at the Freakin' Frog bar; in the boho-lite ambience of the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, where the cool people go to be seen at their laptops. But the rest of it looks as though a tide of bland architecture has rolled out, leaving behind a jumble of clunky, graceless strip malls offering nothing you want to stay and do. A block behind it, things get worse.
Raw territory, in other words, waiting for an extreme makeover. In UNLV's Flora Dungan Humanities Building, I get into an elevator and ascend, to hear the details.
2. Luring the Creative Class
Close your eyes. Clear your mind. Blank slate. Now: Reimagine the university stretch of Maryland Parkway like this:
On the campus side, where valuable streetside land is now wasted on parking lots, picture modern buildings stepping out to the curb in a more urban fashion. It's amazing to think of it, but UNLV has no grand, impressive campus entrance. The closest approximation is Harmon, as it moves west across Maryland and dead-ends in UNLV's midsection; less a doorway than a doggy-door, it becomes, in this imagining, a bona fide entryway. (Say goodbye to Maude Frazier Hall, one of the school's first structures but now an impediment to growth.)
On the other side: The generic strip malls and franchise joints have largely been rooted up and replaced by mixed-use development, which means tall buildings with shops and restaurants on the first floor, residential above. The sidewalks are broad, public spaces abundant. The architecture picks up visual cues from the campus, tying the whole scene together.
And running down the middle, picture if you will a much different Maryland Parkway—four lanes instead of six, with streetside parking and a lot less traffic, easily crossed.
Now, sketch in a crowd, but not just any herd of shlubs. One load-bearing assumption of this plan is that such a cool new district will attract what's called "the creative class." As described by Pittsburgh sociologist Richard Florida in his book The Rise of the Creative Class, they're an influential demographic comprising artists, scholars, techies, scientists and others whose work hinges on creativity. Their presence does more than just up the IQ of café conversations; Florida sees them as a transforming economic force, and so does this new vision for Maryland Parkway. Not only will they help zap new spirit into the neighborhood, they'll bridge the intellectual industry of the campus and the free-range creative types at large in the community. Everyone benefits: UNLV can attract better students and faculty while the city gets a gathering point for more smart people (at present, Las Vegas fares pretty low in Florida's creative-class assessments, thanks to our overwhelming service sector).
This idea of a new Maryland Parkway is called Midtown; Harter and developer Mike Saltman, head of The Vista Group, are its co-captains. By the time Harter went public with the idea in last year's state of the university speech, Saltman had already been on the case for months. He'd flown first Harter and later a group of UNLV administrators to Tempe, Arizona, which had developed a similar zone on Mill Avenue, adjacent to Arizona State University. He'd generated drawings, held brainstorming sessions—he was pushing this thing. Some of Saltman's earliest developments were on the stretch of Maryland in question, including the shambling Promenade mall. Because his morning runs take him along the street, "I began to see that I have been as responsible as anyone for the neglect," he says.
In her seventh-floor office, the window of which overlooks a small portion of what might one day be Midtown, Harter evangelizes for the project she sees as necessary to the school's future.
"It's a physical manifestation, a metaphor for community involvement" on the part of UNLV, Harter says. "It's an upgrading of human intercourse. A sense of community—I guess that's the dominant meaning. I don't think we have a lot of community in Las Vegas."
If not in its specifics, Midtown is in its broader aspects a version of the same dream that grips Oscar Goodman when he looks out on the 61 virgin acres he's pinning his Downtown growth hopes on. The same mind-set that's creating a market for smaller mixed-use projects like The District and Curve, as well as the many loft projects Downtown and the condo high-rises everywhere else. That is, it's an aspiration for a kind of café urbanism whose defining features are density, cultural commerce, exciting architecture and a lively streetside life conducted in quaint restaurants, bars, music clubs, art galleries, offbeat boutiques and welcoming public squares. To that mix Midtown proposes an intellectual overlay, envisioning professors, students and freelance brainiacs living upstairs, descending to have smart conversations over great coffee. "It would be a destination place that has a special quality of experience," Harter says.
But destination places with special qualities of experience—which sounds an awful lot like "gentrification"—usually come at a price, as surging real-estate values dislodge social services, community fixtures and poor people. Some of that is already happening in the shadow of some of the city's new condo towers. Will it happen in Midtown?
"How do you create an environment to promote the growth of the creative class?" Harter wonders aloud.
Say you went to Maryland Parkway on a recent Saturday evening to ponder that very question. It's not oppressively hot, thanks to cloud cover. Maryland is deadsville anyway, which you find unusual, given, you know, Saturday night. Where are all the off-duty students? A few strollers loaf along the street: some guy heading home with a huge bag from Jason's Deli; an obvious member of the underclass, with his dingy camo cap and a tall silver can wrapped in plastic. The creative class is somewhere else tonight.
The patch of Maryland likely to be transformed first is the campus frontage, between University and Cottage Grove drives. Of the few places in that span that offer themselves as streetside gathering points—patios at the Coffee Bean, Chiptole and outside a teriyaki joint in the Promenade mall—only the Bean is seeing any action, if two guys communing with their laptops at widely separated tables can be considered action.
Mike Saltman is a compact, energetic man who didn't get to be a successful developer by failing to anticipate questions. Before I can ask what Midtown will look like, I'm led into a conference room where architectural renderings are hanging. (The answer: See descriptions above.) Before I can ask how Midtown will fit into the wider context of the neighborhood, he hands me an aerial photo of the university district, with possible Midtown amenities pasted on. It will be his role to push the private half of the public-private partnership necessary to make the renderings real. That means convincing fellow property owners to embrace the concept, invest in upgrades and weather the short-term upheaval. He'll put his money where his mall is, too, as he plans to eventually flatten the Promenade and erect a tall mixed-use building.
Saltman is persuasively lacking in guile throughout all this; I don't find many indications that Midtown is really about maximizing the value of his Maryland Parkway holdings, although it will undoubtedly do that. Rather, it brings together two of his strong philanthropic concerns, UNLV and the arts. He gestures at one of the renderings. "That's my fantasy. That's the end of this story."
You pull into the parking lot of University Gardens, one of the three main strip malls comprising the area to be terra-formed by Midtown. Ringing its pitted asphalt are a test-prep service, a Goodwill superstore, gyro and sushi joints, a one-hour photo shop. It's hard to imagine most of those places making the cut, although the Starbucks outlet, a funky vintage clothing store and maybe Einstein Bagels might survive. The parking lot is mostly vacant, the only humans in sight a group waiting to get inside for some sushi.
Not much more is going on just down the street at Rebel Plaza, home to the Coffee Bean, Chipotle, the Mazatlan Mexican restaurant, a mini-mart, a karaoke bar and a nail shop. Same story, different mall at the Promenade, still stuck in the '70s thanks to the loopy round cutouts in its façade and the way its split-level construction feels like a 30-year-old sunken living room. You walk around. Of the businesses here, which include a pizza place, a telephone marketing research company, the Disorder Café, Cyberzone and a couple of others, only Kinko's and a tattoo shop are doing any obvious business. On the first floor, the empty space that once housed Café Espresso Roma—precisely the kind of hep, culture-driven spot Midtown hopes to nurture—mocks the idea that proximity to those crazy college kids makes for a viable business plan. In the parking lot out back, two guys argue about tattoo styles. Nearby is University United Methodist Church, one of the community fixtures some fear will be lost to Midtown's rising property values.
A few days later, a man will be shot in a nearby parking lot, prompting an anonymous store manager to tell the Review-Journal, "It's not the best of neighborhoods. There are shootings in this neighborhood all the time."
"I tell people that Maryland Parkway is actually a nicer stretch of land than Mill Avenue was," Neal Guiliano says to me. He's a former mayor of Tempe, hired by Saltman to prod Midtown forward. Twenty years ago, Mill Avenue was a state thoroughfare cutting through a beat-up part of town, a grungy zone of "tattoo parlors, head shops and biker bars." If Maryland circa 2005 shares some characteristics with old Mill Avenue, like too much traffic, overhead power lines, dozens of driveways inhibiting pedestrians, it's still, by comparison, ahead of the curve. If you've been to Tempe's Mill Avenue on a Saturday night, you know how drastically it's changed: Traffic is slow and manageable, parking is scarce and people are everywhere.
"We're real excited about Midtown," says County Manager Thom Reilly. "It's exactly what that whole area needs." If it works, he says, it can serve as a model for public-private redevelopment projects throughout a valley that could use a few more.
You poke around a half-block west of the street. There is a clutch of nice homes down one street. But there's also the Desert Living Apartments, a name that aptly suggests the parched, cheerless feel of the place, from the uncurbed asphalt to the low-slung, motel-style living quarters. They're the sort of grim streets that look sun-baked and unforgiving even in winter. Apartment complexes, ramshackle houses, vacant land, parking lots—this area is not a slum by any means, but it is late-stage suburban entropy, and you have a hard time grasping how the glories of Midtown will bleed back into these places.
Everything depends on the street. That's the tipping point: Maryland Parkway itself. It needs to be narrowed, from six lanes to at least four, maybe two at some point in the misty, perfect future. Simple as that and the hardest thing in the world.
"That is the critical component," Harter says. "First, you can't bring sidewalks out unless you have a narrower street. Second, you can't stop the freeway approach to life that six lanes is, unless you narrow the street." Only in a more modest configuration will the street stop hemming in the campus.
Think for a moment about what's involved. Thousands of cars a day barrel up and down Maryland, only a small percentage destined for the university. Subtract a lane and you're asking for gridlock and taxpayers blowing their gaskets. Where are all those cars going to go?
The county is computer-modeling that question; results are expected in a few weeks. (The next phase could be a temporary pinching-off of one lane in each direction, to see how it works in practice.) The nearest sizable north-south arteries are Eastern and Swenson—which switches to one-way at Trop. Neither seems an immediately convenient option. How long until commuters regroove their habits and the traffic permanently dissipates along other routes?
It's an easy idea to love, Midtown—who doesn't want a patch of well-scrubbed urban excitement within easy driving distance? A small real city within our spread-out simulation of a city? Even so, some embraces are looser than others. A few voices on campus, most sotto voce, are concerned that despite having buildings full of smart people, UNLV's campus community has largely been left out of a process that seems like a closed loop between Harter and Saltman. Sociology—now there's a department that might have something to say about the process of laying a brand-new community over an existing one. "We have not been contacted by anybody," says Chairman Ronald Smith, who's done research into the sociology of architecture, and who is enthusiastic about Midtown's potential. "Our emphasis is on community sociology; that's what we do. We really wanted to give some input."
Counters Guiliano, "Anything this complex depends on having visionary leaders get out ahead and articulate the vision. That's what Mr. Saltman and President Harter have been doing. I think the goal is that everyone gets brought along." That's the line Harter and Saltman are taking, too. Both talk about opening the process to many points of view, and while Saltman has used his freedom from institutional bureaucracy to forge ahead with conceptual drawings, he insists he doesn't plan to own or control Midtown. He only wants to get it going.
Once he does, will property owners along western Maryland Parkway buy in? Again, Saltman thinks he can persuade most of them. So does Guiliano. "The private sector fought some of the changes [on Mill Avenue]," he says. "They did not want to live through the difficult times to get to the good situation they have now."
Hell, for that matter, will the people Midtown is trying to attract buy in? After all, aren't members of the creative class the very people most likely to be skeptical of a project so obviously calculated to appeal to them? The template for cool cultural districts is that they happen organically, spinning to life on their own energy. Harter and others don't think much of the question. "I don't think it can happen organically," she says. "Because there are obstacles you can't overcome organically." Maryland Parkway isn't going to narrow itself.
It's early; Midtown isn't even in the birth canal yet, and those are long-term questions in a process that could take a decade or more to play out. There's a palpable sense that answers will be found as such questions come into clearer focus. Yet there's at least one question, an odd but compelling question, that should receive more immediate attention. To wit:
What if Midtown succeeds too well?
That is, what if it does what gentrification always does, even better than it attracts Starbucks franchises: drive up real-estate values?
"The age-old problem," sociologist Smith says, "is, when you go in and displace them, the low-income and fixed-income people, where do they go?" Here's a figure I heard on public radio the other day: The median home price in Las Vegas is just north of $300,000. It's hard to imagine the residents of the Desert Living Apartments, flushed out into today's hectic housing market, landing softly. "In terms of affordable housing, it's not there," Smith says. In the current housing market, he adds, "I'm not even sure what affordable means." Reached by phone, a worker at the East Valley Family Resource Center, which occupies a building behind the Methodist Church, said he's heard that some of the counseling-center's clientele "has been on the concerned side." "If the church goes, social services go with it," he said. Guiliano recently spoke to the church's congregation, just filling them in. The reaction? "They had a mixed view," he says.
"We're cognizant of the need for affordable housing," says Saltman, who says he doesn't want the area to become an exercise in upscale demographic correctness. "This is about urbanization, not purification." Says Guiliano, "It has to be a blend of all types of people. That's what will make it that true urban setting." Says Harter, "I hope the private sector folks will develop [housing for] all levels of income. Trying to keep a really diverse set of folks here is really important."
But it's hard to see how even the most well-intentioned developers can keep the ruthless math of real-estate speculation at bay.
"If they think that's just not gonna happen, it is!," Smith says. "Those prices are going to go up! That's what speculation and development is all about."
Almost everyone who's heard about Midtown embraces the idea, even those with qualms, and they should. It's so obviously what the area needs, what the school needs, what the city needs. It just needs to be done without fracturing too many lives, and in regard to that, it has one powerful factor on its side: "This is going to take a long time," Saltman says. Plenty of opportunity to get it right.