Archive for February 22nd, 2009

(Editor’s Note: This was veteran newsman Steve Emerine’s first column for Inside Tucson Business. It appeared in the June 20, 2005, issue and dealt with an idea at the time to build a 27-story high-raise in downtown Tucson called the Century Tower. Estimates were that it would cost $60 million to $70 million. That week, the Tucson City Council decided against giving Bob McMahon, owner of Metro Restaurants, and Don Martin, owner of Competitive Engineering, their requested exclusive negotiating rights to buy the city-owned property for the tower. As a result McMahon and Martin never pursued the idea.

We reprint the column in tribute to Steve Emerine and as an example of the knowledge and institutional memory he brought to local issues.)

So where in the world did restaurant owner Bob McMahon and manufacturer Don Martin get that idea of building a 27-story high-rise next to the Joel Valdez Library in the middle of downtown Tucson? Are they crazy? Well, it wasn’t their idea. And no, they’re not crazy.

For 40-plus years, experts have told officials in cities whose downtowns have crumbled because of outlying shopping centers with plenty of free parking to do exactly what McMahon and Martin are proposing.

They told Tucson to do it. I wrote stories mentioning buildings like the McMahon-Martin proposal when I covered City Hall in the 1960s for the Tucson Daily Citizen (the afternoon paper’s official name when it was owned by the William A. Small family.)

In those days, urban experts were urging cities to let the private sector build tall structures with underground parking, retail stores at street level, several floors of office space, upscale residential units above the offices, and a restaurant or night-club on the top floor.

The last idea was the only one Tucson adopted then. We had the Skyroom, which later became the Tucson Press Club, at the top of the nine-story Arizona Land Title Building at the northwest corner of Stone Avenue and Alameda Street, and the posh Old Pueblo Club later took over the top two floors of the Tucson Federal Savings Tower south of Pennington Street on the east side of Stone.

Buildings at those locations are now owned by Pima County. The title building was gutted and rebuilt to house development services. The former savings tower is mostly occupied by county lawyers. And the night-clubs and restaurants in both buildings are gone.

Tucson finally jumped on the national urban renewal bandwagon, but it followed advice from other urban planners to pursue the tourism and convention business. Once historial neighborhoods that had been taken over by sleazy bars, flop houses, prostitutes, drug dealers and other frowned-upon uses were condemned.

They were replaced by the Tucson Convention Center Arena, Music Hall and Leo Rich Theatre, the hotel currently known as the Radisson City Center (Editor’s note: now the Hotel Arizona), and the rambling multi-colored La Placita complex. Recommendations to build a building like McMahon and Martin have suggested were put on hold.

City officials were told that the Diamonds department store chain would anchor La Placita. When Diamonds decided to go to shopping centers and not downtown, the promoters swore La Placita would thrive anyway with restaurants and lots of small shops and offices on all levels.

That didn’t work. In hindsight, it might have if they had let people live on upper floors of La Placita so the ground-floor businesses could have some customers within walking distance. When that idea was proposed later, the cost of adding adequate plumbing for residential uses was too high.

So La Placita joined the title building and the savings tower building to house more offices for government workers to hang out in from 8 to 5, five days a week.

That brings us back to McMahon and Martin, who want a six-month option to buy land next to the library at its appraised market value so they can study the feasibility of their tower idea. If it will work, they would buy the land and go ahead. If not, the city would keep the land.

Some opponents decry the loss of a grassy patch next to the library and say the tower would block their views of the mountains and the old Pima County Courthouse.

But the grass is relatively new, replacing what was an old green-colored office building and a parking garage. And some of the views have already been blocked by other things.

At least the tower would help hide that ugly red cockroach statue at the library.