When I returned to the US from my dissertation year abroad in the UK in 1981, I returned to a small town in Montana. Helena is the state capital but, by any measure, it is a small city. At that time, the pedestrian mall was a little over five years old. A product of the urban renewal movement of the 1970s, the mall sought to preserve a historic area and rehabilitate the downtown, an almost perfectly preserved mining camp-turned-nineteenth-century-entrepot city. It struck me that the people who had managed to bring the mall into being had precisely the right idea. I liked the idea so much that I determined to live on the mall in an old Placer Hotel refurbished as an apartment building. My address was 23 North Last Chance Gulch. My apartment overlooked the old First National Bank building and, if I craned my neck, I could look up the hill to court house. On the gulch, there were restaurants, a movie theater, a saloon or two, a fabulous candy store—the Parrot (“Speaks for Itself”), a clothing store, bookstore, and several art galleries. There was even a bit of street life. The gulch had a very urban feel in a place that was not really urban. Yes, it even had the perennial city life problem of parking. But I didn't mind. I loved living on the gulch; for a historian, it was heaven.
As it happened I wrote a book about Helena and its women and came to know the city very well, even down to the legal descriptions of the properties and their owners. I knew (and know) its geography and geology probably as well as the any developer or city engineer and, as a historian, I understand how the city has changed. Some parts of “urban removal” I bemoaned, such as the destruction of particular house on Joliet Street and a place I called the Mansard Roof House. Other land use developments I understood completely. Cities are living organisms. They teach their residents how to live in them, and the residents instruct the city.
So, it was with some sadness that I learned that the Helena city commission recently determined to turn the Last Chance Gulch Pedestrian Mall into a street or some sort of street. The goal, it seems, is to revitalize the downtown. The problem is that Helena's downtown is no longer its downtown. The city, as its original planners envisioned, has moved out into the valley toward the railroad station, a trend solidified by the recent construction of the Great Northern Depot complex. There was (and is) simply not enough room in the small saddle and in the pinched gulch for the downtown to expand or accommodate parking. Certainly, the downtown hung on to its cramped quarters probably longer than was practical because it housed places where people had to go: banks, department stores, and so on for a long time. (Much of the downtown's longevity might be traced to the proximity of downtown business owners' homes.) Besides, Helena and its metro area remained small. The downtown could handle the traffic. By the mid-1980s, Last Chance Gulch had become a neighborhood that still thought of itself as a downtown, but that was OK. It all worked.
By the middle of 1990s, however, the Helena metro area had grown enough to pressure the downtown and its parking. Reeder's Village was symtomatic of these changes. A high-end housing area built on the west side of gulch saddle after 1995, the village sparked heated debate. Many Helena residents frankly deplored its construction. When I learned of the village, I saw it a positive development and something that the city's nineteenth residents had tried only to be defeated by the engineering involved. Reeder's Village brought more people into the “neighborhood,” people who would patronize the businesses on the Gulch. Handsome as it was, however, the development wasn't designed for pedestrian movement—no pedestrian egresses to cope with the steep sides of the gulch, no golf carts, no cart sheds. (Oh dear, I thought, they're not thinking neighborhood.)
So, it seems that the city fathers have decided to return the mall to its “historical roots” and redesign it as a street. This decision strikes me as unimaginative and narrow. Despite all the arguments (some of them really quite silly or downright ahistorical) about preservation and history, no one seems to be really using history as means to approach the problem. Last Chance Gulch hasn't been a downtown for a long time and it cannot be. Give it up. Make it a historic neighborhood based around a pedestrian mall with the kind of businesses that will support a historic neighborhood and attract the persevering tourist. Make it a place people want to work and live. Of course, conceptualizing the area as a neighborhood begets its own problems, but they are all more interesting than a figuring out the right kind of street.
Update: The Friends of the Mall were victorious. The Mall will not be turned into a street, but it's not clear what will happen to the Mall. Apparently, the parking garage on Jackson will go forward. I haven't had a chance to get downtown yet to see what's going on. Too many odd and ends to take care of.
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