Stuart Main Street Was Spot On
Over the years, I have been rather rough on Stuart Main Street for accepting thousands of dollars from the City of Stuart every year. I still may take that position in the upcoming budget discussion. Now I want to give them a compliment.
On May 30th Stuart Main Street put on a program that was superb. They assembled Stuart’s movers and shakers of the 1980s and early 1990s to show how Downtown was revitalized. Many of us were not born or living in Stuart or Martin County at the time.
If you are only used to seeing Flagler and Osceola Streets as they have appeared in the last 20 years, you may have given no thought to the bad old days. I first came to Stuart in the mid-1990s with my then girlfriend, Polly. We would come down to visit her mother who had moved here in 1971.
While Polly’s younger brother finished high school here, she was already in college when they arrived in Stuart. Her memories of Stuart were on breaks and summers of those years. And yes, like so many others, she recounted to me how you could roll a ball down the street and not hit anyone…it was so dead.
Interestingly most people who are still around from that period realize how fragile the economy of Downtown is even today. Until the malls and suburbanization happened beginning in the 1950s, it was a real city with stores that sold goods to residents not just tourists. Downtown was revitalized and repurposed for survival. It could easily revert.
I guess everyone from those days would say that Joan and Peter Jefferson were the main catalyst for revitalization. Peter was an architect from down south who saw the possibilities of the Post Office Arcade Building. He recognized the bones were there for a rebirth. His wife, Joan, was the politician in the family and moved the effort along as both commissioner and mayor.
The Jeffersons and McMillans sunk their savings into the arcade project and Downtown began to resemble something again. Then through the Treasure Coast Planning Council, Andres Duany and his wife and business partner, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, came to Stuart. They wrote, presented, and birthed the revitalization plan that has come to be known as New Urbanism.
Main Street’s board and Executive Director Candace Callahan put on an amazing event outlining this history. The panel consisted of former Stuart News Editor Nancy Smith; Joan Jefferson; Ann McMillan; Jim Dirks, the owner of Stuart-Stained Glass who was there at the inception; and Dan Hudson, former city manager who was instrumental in incorporating many of Duany’s ideas. It was moderated by Jacqui Thurlow-Lippisch.
I wish the panel discussion had been longer. There wasn’t sufficient time and there were no questions taken from audience members. The panelists combined knowledge and experience on this subject deserved an evening of their own. I was sad when they left the stage.
The next speakers were the conceptual founders of modern Stuart, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. They looked at the community and saw a walkable downtown instead of a blighted area. A city thrives when it encompasses all the necessary elements for people living there.
In my opinion Stuart has a way to go before that happens. We have entertainment, restaurants, professional businesses and mostly one type of retail store. There are now buildings where people live. But there are still missing elements to complete what was started.
There needs to be more urban living in Downtown. Because without sufficient residents the retail establishments needed to be more than a tourist destination wouldn’t open. There were once pharmacies, department stores, and food markets. The residents need to be able to shop for basics without getting into cars.
Duany was a visionary 40 years ago. He wanted mixed use structures and people of all economic groups clustered together. Instead of the auto, there is public transit. The city concept isn’t built around cars but people.
Our present commission majority will never save what they say they want, which is our small-town feel. To have that, you need to have vibrancy…not blocks and blocks of single-family homes divorced from schools, jobs, and shopping. The vision that Duany, the Jeffersons, the McMillans, and Smith wanted for Stuart was that.
Stuart almost went under the wrecker’s ball because stores moved to malls, jobs to office parks, and housing went to suburbs. This looks like the dream of Boss Collins, Giobbi, and Reed. Instead of the Herbert Hoover saying of “a chicken in every pot,” theirs is a car for every resident with two parking spaces for each.
We tried that in the 1970s and 1980s and it failed. We need to go back to Duany’s vision and not ask for more suburbia. A small town means a town…not a name for a place with no cohesiveness of purpose.
There was much to be learned from the panel discussion, the Duanys, and finally listening to Blake Fontenay the author of Saving Stuart Florida: Rebuilding America’s Happiest Seaside Town. If you want to get a feeling for what Stuart was then, this is the book for you.
