Plan reinvents Assembly Street

Assembly Street in Columbia should be narrowed to four lanes by widening its median into a linear urban park, complete with bike path, landscaping and perhaps even sheds for a local farmers market, as it had in days of old, according to a statewide panel of urban land experts who met here this week.

The narrower street and inviting median park would help pedestrians more safely cross the busy thoroughfare, which bisects the state capital north to south from Elmwood Avenue to the State Fairgrounds. The panel did not specify how long the linear park should be, but college students who spoke at a public hearing complained of a lack of sidewalks on Assembly Street – a problem the park would solve.

The experts described the 125-foot wide street as a daunting “psychological moat” that separates a resurgent Main Street from the bustling Vista, and USC’s central campus from its emerging Innovista research campus. Most city streets are 60 feet wide.

“It’s a (6 lane) highway,” said Amy Barrett, of the Charleston development consulting firm Permar Inc.

She said the street was designed to handle 60,000 vehicles a day, but its current use is only 24,000.

The eight experts made their recommendations after two days of site tours, meetings and a public hearing. They were commissioned by the Congaree Coalition, a group that manages a $1 million grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to help transform “brown fields” such as former industrial sites into better uses. The coalition is made up of the cities of Columbia and West Columbia and their development corporations.

The eight experts are South Carolina members of the Urban Land Institute, a national nonprofit association of architects, planners and engineers founded in 1936 to promote responsible land use. The coalition paid $10,000 for the group’s expenses while in Columbia, according to member Fred Delk, executive director of the Columbia Development Corp., who helped organize the meeting.

The experts’ charge was to find ways to connect downtown’s disparate areas — the Vista, Innovista, Main Street, USC and Five Points — as well as ways to make downtown more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly.

The concept is called “connectivity,” and Mayor Steve Benjamin said it should be a priority.

“The ability to pull these areas of excitement together will dramatically change the quality of life for people in this city,” he said.

The city has applied for $125 million to the State Infrastructure Bank for work that would include removing rail crossings on Assembly Street south of Gervais, and narrowing the street north of Gervais.

The land institute’s experts said the intersection of Assembly and Gervais streets is one of the most important, if not the most important intersection in the state. With the State House to the southeast, the Capitol Center – which houses the S.C. Department of Commerce – and Main Street to the northeast, and the Vista to the west, it is crossed by not only every mover and shaker in the state, but also the nation when they come to do business here, the experts said.

“Every industry prospect that visits South Carolina walks across that intersection,” said panel chairman John Knott, president and founder of the Noisette Co., which with the city of North Charleston is restoring the 3,000-acre former Charleston Naval Yard.

Panelists said the intersection should be transformed into an “urban moment” with public art, a water feature or a park that spills from the State House grounds into the first block of the Vista.

But not all who attended the public hearing on Monday were in favor of changes to downtown’s main arteries.

Alan Rivkin’s family has owned Mark’s Men’s Wear, first on Assembly and now on Main Street, since 1947.

“Columbia is not like New York or Charlotte or Atlanta and I don’t want it to be,” he said. “People come (downtown) by car. You narrow Assembly Street, you cut off the economic viability (of the area). You need cars and better parking.”

But his views were counter to the panel’s, who acknowledged that merchants want abundant free parking in front of their stores but termed downtown as already “overparked.”

“There is a huge disconnect between the users of parking and the availability of parking,” said the panel’s Bogue Wallin, the chief operating officer and director of real estate for Pacolet Milliken Enterprises of Greenville.

The city’s parking garages are underutilized, he said. Surface lots should be redeveloped, encouraging people to use the garages.

The panel acknowledged that its ideas are not new; plans for improving downtown abound. But Columbia, with its weak mayor form of government and myriad political entities — including state government — makes it hard to get anything done.

“It’s a political city where everyone thinks they’re in charge,” Noisette’s Knott said. The answer is to “pick the low-hanging fruit first, and just do it.”