Civic masterplan sector1-appendixd

A P P E N D I X D

C L O S I N G P R E S E N T A T I O N

On March 28, 2011, Demetri Baches concluded the Sector 1 Charrette conducted by the Office of Civic Investment with a public presentation of the designs and ideas generated during the previous week’s public charrette process. Nearly 100 local residents and stakeholders attended the final presentation, which was held at City Hall. The following is the transcript of the comments Mr. Baches gave at the closing presentation.

2Civic Master Plan | Sector 1

C L O S I N G P R E S E N TAT I O NSector 1 | Appendix D

To put this presentation in context and reiterate what Josh Martin, Mayor Billy Keyserling and Craig Lewis have said, if you look at the process we’ve set out for Sector 1, the downtown area of Beaufort, this presentation marks the mid-way point of our effort. We started on January 1st collecting information through meetings with individuals, groups, and organizations, and by collecting data, physically through on-the-ground surveys of every lot, as well as digitally through all the various plans, reports, and studies completed in the past. The results from this three-month effort will be presented here tonight. We still have another two to three months to go to wrap up the work before we start the next sector of the City later this year. What you will see presented is the assimilation of all the work to date into a clear and comprehensive draft of ideas and visions that can be taken forward over the next several months and vetted with the public. Once completed, the final plans will become the Civic Master Plan for Sector 1. It will generate the discussion points, budget priorities, and implementation objectives for the City over, at least, the next twenty years to properly lay the groundwork for its next three hundred years.

What Beaufort has had the foresight to do follows in the tradition of some really great places. I said in a presentation on Saturday that the great communities of today are great because they spent the bad times thinking about what they wanted to be when times got good again. In the United States, the era of grand planning during the late 1910’s, the Great Depression, and early 1930’s occurred in many of the places that are admired in the country today for their economies and quality of life. The one thing these places have in common is that they had the vision to think outside the box and a desire to take control of their destinies. Some of the greatest plans and architecture that the United States has today, places and buildings that are admired around the world, can be dated to this period. Most of the grand civic buildings, schools and town halls; almost all the impressive museums; and many of the beautiful park systems that are the treasures of their communities today had their initial plans prepared during this time period.

One such example that you may know of is in the City of Chicago. Chicago hired a very brilliant man named

Daniel Burnham to prepare its master plan. He laid out a vision that is extraordinary today for its beauty and, in his day, for its boldness. It was a vision similar to something you would see in continental Europe at the time: grand park systems, iconic civic building architecture. This is a time when much of Chicago’s industry was on Lake Michigan and along the Illinois River – rail yards, slag heaps, factories. It was not a pretty place. Commerce was the law of the land, so imagine the disbelief when he proposed to reclaim the entire Lake Michigan waterfront for a park. People looked at him as if he were crazy. This is the man who said the now famous quote, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Well, one hundred years later, Chicago has one of the most amazing park systems in the world, as this picture of Grant Park along the lake front shows. It is also one of a handful of communities in the rust belt of the Midwest, to be growing and prospering. And it’s a result of a process similar to what we’re embarking on here in Beaufort.

With all plans, like the Burnham plan, they aim to improve the fortunes of a place, they foster change. Just as people questioned the drawings Burnham prepared showing parks and buildings on private land, I’m sure people have been looking at our plans on the walls, or will be soon, and have many concerns, such as: “I see you’ve knocked down my building to construct a park,” or “You have removed my neighborhood park to construct a building,” or “You’ve put a road through my yard.” Keep in mind the most powerful tool planning possesses: time. Planning is an effort that lasts generations, but you’ve got to start at some point, or you never achieve anything. It is almost always the case that what is needed to be done is impossible to do today. If I told you to learn a second language and you said I can’t do that today, does that mean you can never do it? Just because you can’t master Spanish or French by the weekend, do you throw in the towel? Of course not. It took hundreds of years to arrive where Beaufort is today. And most, if not all, that time passed without access to an endless pot of gold at its disposal. More on that in a moment. Very little is possible today, everything is possible long term. Another important ingredient is “the champion.” You can have a collection of plans and ideas, but unless they find a champion that makes it his

Sector 1 Civic Master PlanCity of Beaufort, SC | www.beaufortcivicinvestment.org

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or her business to will them into reality on a daily basis, they never materialize. The final need is for compelling visions, such as what Burnham provided the residents of Chicago. It galvanized the thoughts of the citizens and business community to nominate champions, who, over the years shaped policy that allowed the vision to be realized.

Another example is in Boston. This is a photo of the “Emerald Necklace” designed by a man named Frederick Law Olmsted, a magnificent landscape planner and urban designer who also designed Central Park, among other wonderful places. He envisioned a future Boston ringed by parks. For those who have visited Boston it is easy to see how the City and its residents have benefitted from the vision. Boston has some of the greatest civic spaces and urban structures in the United States, arguably the world.

Then there is San Francisco, another Burnham Plan. This is an area called The Presidio, which at that time – the late 1910’s – was on the outskirts of town. It is a hilltop and on it he designed a park. And he connected it to the rest of the city with grand civic monuments. Here’s the Presidio today. It’s a magnificent park, an urban park surrounded by some of the most valuable real estate in the US. So compelling was the plan and the illustrations that accompanied it that a few of the monuments were actually built as drawn.

Beside the beauty and technical expertise of the planning and urban design achieved by these masters, there is one additional take away from these examples. I’ve already brought it up and will do so again. They were envisioned and executed in a time when these places were not wealthy. We accomplished the best community design and building in this country when it was poor in relation to today. Imagine that. All you hear about today, if you try to get anything done, from placing a cross walk on a street to paving a sidewalk, is, “We have no money.” This is a false excuse – a straw man argument. No place that has ever accomplished long-term greatness has had money at the start. In fact, it’s almost a prerequisite that a place be poor in order to be able to achieve greatness. All great work starts off with an idea. The money follows the idea. You make people

excited about what it is you’re doing, and clever people rally around the vision, and the money follows. I’ll give you a great example here locally. Right now the Open Land Trust (OLT) is generating the excitement and getting the money, and as a result, they have become the de facto regional planners for the entire County. Through donations and successful tax referendums, they have made saving the natural habitats and scenic views of the local area exciting and important. Much time and effort by the citizens of this community goes into the work of the Open Land Trust. Here are photos of the Bluff and Bellamy Curve. These purchases have shaped the image of Beaufort as well as its developable footprint. To properly leverage this fine work, it is critical to ensure that as much effort and care are paid to the Human Habitat, (the neighborhoods and communities we live in) through excellent planning and urban design. The natural habitat has the OLT. The Human Habitat now has the Office of Civic Iinvestment (OCI). We have an opportunity to weave the communities we live in with the natural setting they exist in. To succeed, the visions we have and the plans developed to execute them need to be as compelling as the nature that is saved.

As already mentioned, The Lawrence Group, under Craig Lewis’ direction a couple years back, was hired after a competitive process to do a comprehensive plan for the City. A “Comp Plan,” as they are called, typically is one of those documents that sits on the shelf unused. In reality, most comprehensive plans are made work projects for bureaucrats. The great thing that Craig and his team did, though, was they actually went to that shelf and collected the dozens of plans that had been done for the city of Beaufort over the past 30-40 years, which didn’t find champions. He dusted them off, polished them up, and consolidated the best into the Beaufort Comprehensive Plan. And actually, as comprehensive plans go, it’s excellent. It prioritizes and lists out in great detail what it is the city should do. That was the first step that led to what’s happening right now. You need to have a document like this in order to get everyone’s ideas on the table and prepare the plans you see around you now.

What we’ve done is use this as the base for the work we’ve been doing to generate a Civic Master Plan, along


the lines of the examples of Chicago, San Francisco and Boston. This is very impressive for a City the size of Beaufort. We divided the city up into five sectors. The map at the top shows the city of Beaufort in color. We’ve started with Sector 1, which is downtown, and we’re calling downtown everything east of Ribaut Road, which you can see in this beautiful picture, the peninsula, basically. From day one, we said, “Downtown is not just the three blocks along Bay Street.” When we first started this process, someone said, “You’re going to do a master plan for downtown, so what are you going to do with Bay Street?” And we said, “Well, Bay Street is not all of downtown: There’s Boundary Street, there’s Bladen Street, there’s Carteret Street and Pigeon Point Road, the Old Point, and Higginsonville, and on and on. There’s the Bluff, the Northwest Quadrant (NWQ). Downtown is a series – a collection of neighborhoods – the core of the larger area that is Beaufort, so you have to study it comprehensively, not just Bay Street. The three blocks that constitute the historic “Main Street” cannot be the vessel in which every aspiration, idea, and need for Beaufort is forced. Too small.

We started on several fronts simultaneously. We went out, and we had students for four weeks walk every foot of every street in downtown, and they carried around with them these surveys. For every property and every building, we collected this information and created a database. It allows us to do some pretty amazing things. It allows us to quickly see patterns, create maps. We can go in and say, “I want to see every house that has a 10’ setback,” and we can get a list with photographs of each house in Sector 1 that does. We will be able to do this for any of the more than 30 attributes we have listed in the audit/survey for each property.

This information allows us to study the City’s DNA, how it works on the ground. This is an important step because it allows you to understand how to help it grow while retaining the charm and character that made it special. We have divided the downtown into five zones, and these five zones were assigned four to five professionals each. Those were the 27 people who worked here this past week in the shop front off of Charles Street so graciously donated to us by Low

Country Real Estate. Each group was given a dossier of important information pertaining to their section. This is the information that has been collected over the past three months, all of the projects, all the wish list items, the information we’ve gathered not just from the several dozen meetings we’ve had the past three weeks, but the many dozen meetings we’ve had the past three months. Many of you probably have been at one of our meetings at some point, some of you more than once.

In addition to understanding thoroughly what exists now, we also take a look at what existed before. In many communities around the country, growth has meant the destruction of history, historic buildings, and places. Beaufort hasn’t suffered that as much. Everyone wants growth and prosperity, but with it, post-World War II, that growth and prosperity has come with a lot of really ugly things. It’s quite a dilemma for most communities: If we grow, we loose what we are; If we don’t grow, we stagnate and lose what we are by neglect. The reason for the dilemma is because we stopped building real communities post-WWII. This is not to say we stopped building. In fact, we built more things since WWII – houses, shopping centers, offices, factories – than we had leading up to WWII. But notice what I listed: I listed real estate product, not places in the form of neighborhoods and communities, villages, towns and cities. We have built only a handful of new “places” since WWII. We’ve built endless miles of suburban product. Suburban Development became an industry unto itself, and as you may have heard, it was one of the major reasons for the financial collapse and the subsequent Great Recession. That’s an entire other presentation, but for our purposes here, the negative impacts of the suburban development pattern are what we are trying to remedy.

When you introduce car-oriented suburban development into traditional urban fabric, like downtown Beaufort, that development destroys the surrounding traditional development. It might not do it initially, but the accumulation of this type of development ends up eradicating what is the most special part about place-based traditional communities, which is their mixed-use, walkable quality of life. And keep in mind that the suburban development pattern is the default setting for

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all zoning, financing, and health and safety matters in the US today. Whether you plan or not, whether you have zoning or not, the suburban model is so entrenched in every aspect of American development and marketing that it is what growth delivers. Ironically, not much growth has happened post-WWII in Beaufort, so not a lot has been lost. One piece of the community that was lost was the old waterfront, which I think was a very cool, edgy piece of town. However, it was replaced by something worthy – Waterfront Park. In city building this is called a fair trade. This is an important concept, a litmus test for anyone passionate about community. Was it a fair trade? If you loose a piece of marsh land and gain a village, or a meadow and gain a proper neighborhood the trade is fair. When either of these is lost to a shopping center or subdivision, it is not. And naming the new development after what was destroyed doesn’t make it better.

In the instance of the Waterfront Park, the civic space gained is a worthy replacement, especially since there is still an opportunity to develop an urban, dockside fabric on some of the land nearby that did not end up a fair trade – the Marina parking lot. Bringing back the opportunity for a vital and busy waterfront is an important objective. More about that in a moment. Look at this picture taken of the end of Charles Street. Some of you who’ve been here awhile may actually remember it. This is a photo of the Beaufort Hotel; if anyone knows where in downtown Beaufort this building existed, we’d love to know where. We couldn’t recognize any of the buildings on either side. That was a great building. Here are photos, some close-up shots of the actual working dock and the structures. And this wonderful picture of a festival, the Water Festival, back in 1955. Look at all those people. Look how amazing that is. There’s nothing about that photo that can’t be recreated today.

So lets start with Downtown. What I want to walk through with you tonight are not the details of every building type and all of the principles and techniques used to design the plans presented here on the walls, because that is all kind of academic and even I get bored with it. I’m going to walk you through the plans and how they would impact you if you were a tourist or visitor coming to Beaufort 25 years from now, let’s say

by water and by bus/car. Because how the community impacts visitors directly impacts the well-being and opportunities of its residents. Let’s do water first. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if there were a reliable system of water taxis and ferries that allowed you to get here from Savannah and Charleston and Hilton Head to here and vice versa? All up and down the Intracoastal Waterway connecting the coastal communities. In such a world, what do we need to do here in Beaufort to make ourselves a destination that would require a day, or maybe two, to fully appreciate? After all, if you really look at the region correctly, Beaufort is the belt buckle of the low country, the mid-way point between Georgetown, SC and New Brunswick, GA. What would be compelling enough to entice someone who landed here, at a new day dock for example, to walk into town and do something besides turn to the right and buy a t-shirt, eat a hamburger or have a drink and then stroll the park? Keep in mind the locals are the ones that purchase whatever high-end wares are sold downtown and they do so infrequently because that’s the nature of such purchases. The tourists – well, you’ve seen them – they buy what’s left, and don’t spend much time at the park either. Why is this important? Because if we are only a trinket tourist stop, and our local population is not sufficient enough to support other pastimes that include cultural offerings now unavailable, then our residents are left with jobs that are not sufficient to build a resilient community. Places like that are exporters of talent, and that is what Beaufort is now.

What if the offerings were much more varied and robust, offerings that embed you in the place and its history: Get off the boat and browse local arts and crafts at a market or shops, visit a museum or two, stay at a spa/hotel or inn grounded in wellness and health. Dine at fabulous restaurants that offer indigenous local cuisines that only places like the Gulf Coast around Louisiana and New Orleans can also boast of. There’s a lot of history in the area, all of it scattered about, which could be centered here in Beaufort as the hub for those also looking to do day trips out into the historically rich countryside. Because our community is also less busy and hectic than our neighbors to the north and south, as the belt buckle, Beaufort could take the lead in the environmental, wellness, and tourist industry if it so desired, supported


by a top-notch environmental and fine arts institution of higher learning like a USCB. Beaufort needs to provide a compelling reason for at least a one- to two-day stop, because if you can see yourself stopping for more than an afternoon you can probably see yourself living here.

So, if you were to come by boat, what you would come to, in our vision of this future, would be a new marina-side development, basically an extension of Bay Street. Because right now, it’s a parking lot, and while that’s an important asset to have at the moment because it provides people with parking, it does happen to be located on some really prime real estate, real estate that would be much better used by people, rather than cars. As I said in the beginning: It’s not a fair trade. You can always put the cars someplace else, like a parking garage. They normally don’t care about the view as much, don’t like sitting in the sun, and they don’t shop.

If you come by car or bus what do you experience? Part of this downtown plan shows this large box here, which we’ve very cleverly hidden from the street. This is a parking garage. Looking at this from a developer’s eye, our waterfront experience is tied to our infill opportunities. To get the Marina to work, the package that you would sell to an investor or developer would be a combination roll-out of this idea, redevelopment of the Marina, and the replacement of that parking and more here. The connections back and forth are what layout the “experience” from the commercial tourist market and employment perspectives. This is not a very long walk. The average Walmart for example, the one on Boundary Street, parking at the very back of the Walmart to the front door of the Walmart is equivalent to the distance from Charles and Bay to Carteret and Bay.

A visitor could park at the deck, be dropped off by bus here along Bay, or even outside of Sector 1 at a transit facility here and take a shuttle bus in (more on that later). Each location would have a Welcome Center with brochures, video, and magazines about Beaufort and the local area, transportation, dining, and shopping info as well as people who would serve as community ambassadors, directing folks to whatever they were looking for. They would then avail themselves of all the

things to do just as the people who came by boat.

What is available cannot be just “one thing.” A common mistake is to think of a community as needing only one amenity. That’s a suburban mentality. Real places are complex. The fabric of real places must be complex and varied to meet the needs of a broad range of people and, just as important, the broad range of moods each of these people experience over the course of a day, week, or month. Sometimes you want to sit alone in a park, sometimes you want to be in the center of all the action. Sometimes you want to view a scenic vista, sometimes you want to be walking the crowded sidewalks shopping and socializing. If I’m a cyclist, sometimes I want to ride fast through the countryside, and sometimes I want to be on the street riding through town. Every pastime, every facility, and every motivation takes a different tone depending on mood. This gets to the point about the need to develop some of our waterfront. Sometimes I want to sit on a swing or in the grass and watch people or the water, sometimes I want to sit on a dock or at a restaurant on the water and eat, dance, work, live, or buy things.

As you’ve heard me say before, Americans have been trained to shop as if we’re in a mall. The American retail industry has created shopping snobs out of us: we’re very easily bored, very quick to lose our patience if things aren’t perfect, fickle with our attention and money. That’s because the mall environment and the shopping center environment in the US is perfection at every level. Mall planners influence – almost brainwash – you to do everything that they want you to do when you enter a mall, so really we are a bunch of snobby zombies. When you’re someplace where things don’t happen to click just right – a store might be closed too early, or the merchandising in the window isn’t quite up to snuff, or you didn’t get asked if you needed help right away, or it doesn’t smell as you think it should – this is the bar that’s been set by the retail industry in this country, and most of the older retailers on traditional main streets are the ones who can’t compete. I like to tell people that it wasn’t Walmart that killed Main Street America, it was the Mall. It replicated the idealized Main Street experience and out-competed it. Walmart, and what it represents, is a passing phenomenon in the



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retail history timeline. It’s only a factor when you have two goals in mind: cheap prices and free parking. If that’s your town’s goal, you’re probably already standing in the ruins of your Main Street. So you arrive at the new day dock from Hilton Head, where you’ve been golfing for a couple of days, because you wanted to visit a beautiful, real town. You dock, walk out, and you see the pavilion with signs or banners advertising music acts, symphonies or concerts in the park. You see this wonderful open space that frames a beautiful view of the waterfront and all these great restaurants and shops and people walking about in the plaza and laying about on the lawn. Across the plaza and park are arts and crafts stores, offices, and other boutique shops. Some of the buildings are “Live/Works,” allowing an owner of a business to live above the shop. Other buildings have condos or apartments on upper floors. We’ve located a pavilion for a proper full-time, permanent Farmers Market. We’ve moved the horse carriages to this location at the Welcome Center, across from the new Beaufort Museum. As described earlier, the buses will drop off people here. The boat dock and boat servicing areas would be here. Wrapping most of the waterfront bulkhead would be an esplanade similar to what was built along Waterfront Park. This is a grand vision. It would complete and complement the historic downtown by providing the focus for arrivals by water and land.

This is a detail of the marina and a rendering of what it might look like. We’ve kept most of the fabric at the same scale as the existing city. Here is the Elliott House. The day dock would be here. You see, the buildings are basically the same scale as the Elliott House. For the new buildings we looked at the old photographs to get the appropriate size and scale to recapture a bit of the old Beaufort dock vibe. While ambitious, this vision is not crazy. It can be accomplished in the mid to long term. It is all very doable. We’ve already got the square footages worked out, the parking worked out, and a draft development program established.

Some easy things that can be done right away are simple moves to begin to draw people back to Port Republic Street, for example. Beaufort basically is a three-block town on one street, so wayfinding is not really an issue,

but providing a coordinated image and experience is. The retail assessment and the detailed components of how a positioning strategy will work are not being explained tonight. That study is underway now and will result in a report and retail plan that will further refine the plans you are seeing here.

With appropriately scaled and located buildings, we were able to provide for a missing element on Bay Street, a central Main Street intersection. In this early plat of the City, you see a square at Carteret Street, an urban design technique used down in Savannah. Our square was never built, and we don’t necessarily need to introduce one by purchasing real estate, as shown in the old plat, to provide the same sense of arrival and focus. We can create a square with different techniques, using pavement patterns and building placement and architecture as shown here. Over time, this would allow for a public plaza to form where the City’s Christmas tree could be placed, for example, or the winner of the cycle race could receive their trophy. The City does not have a centrally located civic space that allows these events to happen in a dignified manner. This new Charles Square would be bookended to the east at Carteret Street and Bay Street, with another civic space created from some clever road realignment and paving material – Carteret Square – at the foot of the bridge. Together they would serve as the gateways to the historic core of Beaufort.

To activate Port Republic, which you see here, what we’ve proposed is using a different paving pattern and a flush curb so the right-of-way between the buildings becomes a shared space. Sidewalk and street become one and can be closed off to traffic for special events. The deck itself is an important component of the vision, utilitarian and necessary, but requiring great care to avoid harming the adjacent urban fabric. Great towns – Charleston is an example, Savannah too – hide and embed their parking decks within blocks by sleeving buildings around them. The best parking deck is only visible at its entrance/exit by signage.

What you’ll see in a moment is the treatment along Craven. Today it looks like this – Nippy’s is back here – but when the deck is built, it looks like this. These


could be condos, apartments, or single family homes. These have already been built, too. This is not pie in the sky. There’s a project called Baldwin Park in Orlando, FL, that is an infill development, a high-density neighborhood development. It has its own Main Street and has a series of parking garages in it, one of which is masked by this exact type of housing. We’ve done a design more reminiscent of the Lowcountry, but this blocks the blank garage parking wall, while providing much-needed housing. In the plan, it would look like this. The parking garage wall is here. So basically it’s a Charleston side yard house type, with a shared entryway, that could be developed as an apartment or broken up into individual units for sale.

The other side of the parking garage on Port Republic Street would be masked by other buildings: Commercial (this is the old grocery store building, directly behind the studio we were working at), some additional infill buildings, and at the main pedestrian entrance to the garage would be a welcome center. So people that come in by car would be guided to this parking garage. They would park in the deck; they would walk out into a building that would be the Visitors Welcome Center. From there you would get all kinds of information as to where you want to go, get maps, find out all that is happening, and from that point you’d be able to walk out, up, and shop, experience Beaufort by foot. Further down the road from the parking garage, which would be just past these trees, we’d be able to get rid of some of the surface parking lots, and build more commercial space and residential space.

I’ll take you through a fly-through. We did this today. It’s not finished yet, but it does give you an idea of what we’re talking about. Coming into the new Marina and the development around it, the Arcade, the Farmers’ Market, the Live/Work units, the shops that would be on the ground floor with the possibility of residential up above, ties right back into the existing Waterfront Park. You see the square that would be Charles Square, and the location in proximity to the parking deck. We’ve even gone green here: solar panels on the top for gathering energy and shading cars. These are the residential units we were discussing, the Visitors’ Welcome Center wrapping around this end, and other development lining

the other side. The development that you previously saw in the rendering would sit right there. Coming back down Bay Street – the termination – the place for the Christmas tree, bus, horse carriages, leading off into what I’ll tell you about in a moment, which is the Bluff, and the provision of a different experience to downtown, but a continuation nonetheless.

So you can see, in terms of the ability to actually pull this off, this really isn’t that much. We’ve packaged it from a development point of view, as a standard Urban Land Institute “Entertainment/Lifestyle Shopping Center.” But its real “package” is that of community. It’s a real place. Within the fly-through zone one can be born at Beaufort Memorial down the road a bit, grow up, go to school, hopefully go to University, get married, find employment, raise a family, retire and be buried. You can’t do that at a shopping center or piece of suburbia of similar scale.

Other underutilized sites include the Post Office. It used to provide central distribution, but that has been moved out of downtown. So there’s no need for it to be the sort of suburban post office that it is now. It’s a wonderful opportunity for infill mixed-use development. What you’ll learn after my talk, when you speak with the designers, are the principles and techniques which we use, called “Transect Planning.” This is a method of design that relies on building types to create places. Because we use building types, we can increase or decrease density with ease and without the problems that doing the same thing in a typical suburban setting create.

Remember I mentioned the “different experience” beyond Bay Street and Charles Street? As you leave the new Marina area and head west, you pass along the Bluff. The Bluff, and the viewshed that the Open Land Trust has been able to preserve along it, is pretty extraordinary. Connecting the visitor to the beauty of Beaufort beyond Bay Street is an important objective. The Bluff allows us to leverage a unique experience in the low country, which is a connected walk from the heart of a city to a quite natural preserve within a short walking distance. The vision here is to tie the Waterfront Park, the formal front door of the community, and its new active dock and marina development, to the more



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passive open space of the marsh front along the Beaufort River. At Waterfront Park the walking experience is along an esplanade, which continues as a plaza and pier condition at the Marina. As the walk continues to the Bluff, a boardwalk would be built along the waterline at the foot of the Bluff following the curve of the river all the way to Ribaut initially, and hopefully. I’ll get to that idea in a moment.

Now, I lived here for three years before I even knew you could walk down to the water. I had no idea what was down there. It’s pretty fascinating. I don’t know if any of you have been down there – probably all of you – but I’m a little bit slow that way. It’s a beautiful place. It’s hard to get down there, and it’s not completely well-kept. It’s obvious that you’re not supposed to really be down there because you don’t see many people. What a great asset. It’s maintained but shows signs of erosion. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if – and this is just in here to show a notion of what we’re talking about – you could walk from the marina and downtown, and arrive here. I don’t know if you all know the history of the Bluff, but there was once a low road in addition to the existing high road. The low road is what was used to carry the freight from the port down to the depot. There used to be a road that went all the way, from downtown, along the waterfront, all the way down, I think close to where the hospital is today. That’s a long way. And some people have told me, the old-timers, that you can actually still see the pins and the markings where that road used to be. I mentioned something about hope just a moment ago. Well, I would hope that within the next 20 years, we could reintroduce a boardwalk all the way to the Hospital. That requires some giving. Those who live along this stretch know what I’m talking about. Kind of harkens back to Chicago’s once industrial lake front, and Burnham’s vision of turning it over to the public.

In the neighborhoods along the Bluff there are opportunities for development. You’ll see a few of these that I’ll briefly show here. But a lot of the detail can be seen when you visit with the individual team groups. Using building types, we looked to insert homes and businesses to repair and grow the neighborhoods. Doing so here, and in other places in Sector 1, we found that there are a number of opportunities to develop in a way which does not disturb the existing neighborhoods or

eliminate tree cover. There is a lot of empty space in Sector 1. In fact, just in work we did the past week, we were able to increase the population of downtown by about 2,500 people and you couldn’t even tell. You could easily multiply that by 5 and still have a wonderfully livable, vibrant, and pedestrian scaled city center.

Back to the Marina. You’ve arrived and taken the walk down the Bluff. You also can walk down Waterfront Park. Today’s experience currently ends unceremoniously at a playground and utilities building. However, imagine if you were led to the Bridge at Bay Street where we envision Carteret Square shown earlier. There, you would be led to either a continuation of the riverfront walk into the Old Point Neighborhood, or onto the bridge where a reconfigured sidewalk would take you across the river to Whitehall. Right now Whitehall is undeveloped; a restaurant called Bateau used to be located there. Whitehall presents a great opportunity to preserve nature and enhance the human habitat. There are those that would scream that it be left undeveloped – and I would be one of them, tied to a tree – if a shopping center or a Big Box store, or a series of gas stations and fast food outparcels were being proposed. That would not be a fair trade, would it? No. You can’t remove nature and replace it with development that not only degrades the natural environment, but also negatively impacts the human environment. But if you propose a neighborhood, I would argue that those against it were short-sighted and selfish because a neighborhood, a proper human habitat, is a fair trade. Let me explain.

If you look at where development should go, in an already developed place, the obvious decision is closest to the most infrastructured and populated area. That’s where the cumulative investments of generations have been made. To insinuate that this property, left undeveloped, will somehow revitalize the ecosystem of the region or provide a wildlife sanctuary is misguided and ignores the greater context in which the property sits. Of the few places capable of handling development at high density within the sensitive ecosystem in which Beaufort sits, this is one. The volume of water that flows along the Beaufort River at this point provides for the greatest amount of natural flushing. It’s at the


foot of the bridge that connects to downtown Beaufort a quarter mile away and it has been developed on in the past. Instead of sprawling on Lady’s Island in the form of shopping centers and car-dependent commercial uses, a town center located at Whitehall would serve the community more efficiently and provide more opportunities for residents seeking lifestyle opportunities not dependent on car use and long commutes.

So what we looked at is a program – and we’ve been working with the owner’s representatives – to revise the old plan, and introduce appropriate building types. We were able to save a tremendous amount of trees, and we were able to provide a marketable and successful building program that allowed us to leave open about 25 percent of the property. That is important because the Open Land Trust is in the process of buying and clearing some of the older buildings along this stretch of road to open up the view out to the river. The Main Street of Whitehall and the buildings that front Sea Island Parkway will have riverfront and park views. And through proper design the new town center would allow the waterfront walk to continue forming an important anchor for pedestrians and cyclists enjoying the now extensive and unique waterfront experience we have begun to envision, stretching from maybe the Hospital all the way to Whitehall. Imagine landing in a boat at the marina and being able to walk three miles, a little over a mile and a half in either direction, through plazas with cafes and shops, into parks, along boardwalks that lead to points where you can access the water by Marina or boat launch, by kayak and boat, and cross the river by foot on the bridge. That’s a pretty compelling reason to spend at least a day here, if you were someone from Hilton Head golfing, or someone visiting the low country who came here via Savannah or Charleston. You could be convinced to come here for a full day or more for that. But wait, there could be even more. We’ll get to that in a moment.

Let’s cross back over the bridge. At the foot of the bridge you reach Carteret Street again. There’s a cannon there now that sits on the green spot, on the side of the bridge along with a historic marker that’s there. We would be enhancing that with a plaza or square, different paving, and some road re-striping to create Carteret

Square. Carteret Street abuts the Old Point along its eastern edge. Retail and urban development along Carteret Street and the existing Old Point neighborhood are not mutually exclusive. In fact most thriving business corridors have healthy neighborhoods on either side – a condition not currently present along Bladen and Boundary and parts of Charles for example – which of course form the perimeter of the Northwest Quadrant. More about that in a moment. So how do commercial and residential sit in close proximity or even side-by-side and not negatively impact one another. The answer is building type. The discipline of building type is what permits cities to work. I’ve used that phrase before, so let me explain.

Almost all buildings can sit on a piece of property in four ways – and only four ways – and I’ll list them from the most urban to the most rural: courtyard, rear yard, side yard, and perimeter yard. Each of these building types can engage the public realm. That is to say the streets and walks which enfront them in eight ways, again from most urban to most rural: arcade, gallery, shopfront/awning, stoop, forecourt, dooryard/terrace, porch/fence, and front lawn. These four building types and the eight possible ways they can engage the public realm combine to create all the traditional street scenes you have ever visited in real life or seen in pictures. They permit urban designers and architects to place within walking distance most of the uses required for daily living because their combinations are governed by a tool called the “Transect.” The Transect is the foundation for all Form-Based Codes. I’ll show you how as we wrap up the presentation and discuss the Form-Based Code that is being written in partnership with the County, Town of Port Royal and the City of Beaufort.

Application of a Form-Based Code has already happened along Bladen Street. Once we write a full code, we can then apply it to all of Sector 1 and eventually the entire City. Along Carteret, the Code would permit the insertion of several building types that would mask their use through their designs and maintain a coherent and mutually-reinforcing pedestrian experience. That is the key to successful high-density mixed use. The other key is a balance of parking and residential use. This is



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accomplished through the use of rear lanes. Buildings closer to the residential fabric would be residential in duplex and attached form. The rear lanes would free these structures to face onto the Old Point neighborhood with complimentary frontages. The commercial and mixed-use buildings would line only Carteret, turn in only half the block at the corners, and then feed back into the rear lane/passage system. This photo is of one such place. It’s in Destin, Florida. There are hundreds of these places. We have them all modeled; we understand how they work. One of the architects really loved the façade of the Von Harten building and decided to go ahead and give it some love, so that’s what that could look like. It could be incorporated in with such a campus.

There, on the other side of the street, is the old City Hall. We’ve had interest in the City Hall since we started this process. And you will have probably read in the paper the very poor response to the City’s request for proposal. It wasn’t because it’s a bad site or it’s a bad building. The only reason there have been no takers is that there really isn’t a vision for what is going on there for someone to respond, “What are you going to do with it? So what? It’s a beautiful building. It’s going to require some work on the inside. But then, what do you do with it?” Once you provide a creative vision, once you start getting people interested in and excited about the opportunities of a place, they start to think outside the box, at the possibilities. We have one such group now who sees the space with a different set of eyes and are looking to bring an exciting and sorely-needed business to downtown.

Let’s talk about USCB. USCB anchors the northeast side of downtown. In terms of the commercial improvement downtown, the four streets that are Carteret, Boundary, Bay and Bladen are the commercial corridors. Three of these corridors allow Beaufort to be able to expand its retail and commercial menu, without destroying the existing fabric or character of Bay Street. Because, as we said from the beginning, Bay Street is just three blocks. It can’t be the active Main Street for all the citizens of Beaufort, while also being the historic Main Street for all the tourists. It can’t be the place where you go to get whatever you need from

a Walgreens or a Kinko’s and still be the place that has unique furniture shops and art galleries. The residents and City have decided that the historic structures along Bay Street are important enough to keep. And we’re here to help the city fulfill its goals and aspirations, so we agree: That’s a fabric that is important to keep. In order to keep it like it is, you have to provide other places for certain things to go that don’t fit into the buildings there.

If you didn’t know that Beaufort was a water port, if you looked at just a road map of the city, you would say that Boundary Street, at Bellamy Curve, is where Main Street should have been: it’s where all the traffic is, it’s the direct connection between the main land and Lady’s Island. That’s just where Main Street should be. The fitful beginnings of one are present today. We’re looking to revive what’s there and grow it into a proper Main Street for the residents of Beaufort. We have USCB campus as the anchor and Carteret Street, Bladen Street – and to a lesser extent Charles Street – as the ties back to Bay Street and the waterfront. Let me use an example that’s nearby to explain.

Savannah has its waterfront, where all the tourists shop and dine at the touristy establishments. It has Broughton, which is the shopping street where you can get just about everything one would need day to day, and it’s got Bull and Abercorn Streets, which offer neighborhood scaled boutique shops and cafes. These represent three distinct markets, all of which a single person who wants to spend a day or two in Savannah can experience as their mood strikes them. The important fact is that these distinct attractions and mood-pleasing shopping experiences do not happen on the same street. And no one complains and gripes about walking the distances required to reach them. Walking Broughton Street, that’s a long street. The waterfront, same thing. And Abercorn and Bull Streets, these are long streets. But they’re compelling, they’re inviting, and people are drawn to explore them, just like a person is drawn by a mall layout to walk from one end to the other and back – the distance of one-half a mile or more. Beaufort doesn’t have the population or the tourist draw that Savannah does, but we can do a smaller version of that very easily.


With the campus of USCB as an anchor, the plan aims to kick-start what should have been the Main Street along Boundary Street. The physical design of Boundary has to change from a high speed four-lane through-road to a main street to be successful. It’s got to become two lanes in either direction. It has to have parking on both sides. That way, you can slow down the cars and create the parking that’s required to allow the buildings to press up to the sidewalks. Right now, businesses along Boundary suffer from the fact that cars go too fast and sidewalks aren’t wide enough.

The quick fix is a “road diet,” which shrink the number of lanes. We’ve already talked to SCDOT about this, and they’re very open to it. Imagine that. We were going in prepared to do battle with the DOT, and they threw us off balance by agreeing with us. So we’re going to be talking to them over the next several months, to get that worked out. Initially it can be done with a can of paint as a pilot project. Once in place and working, and as money becomes available, more design-oriented solutions can be implemented to widen sidewalks and provide landscaping and coordinated signage.

It’s wonderful to have a campus in your community. The influx of students, the vitality that that age group brings, the businesses and the shops that they frequent – it’s marvelous. You’ve got to have a balance of age groups and income groups in a town for it to be vibrant. In order to convince USCB that they can grow, we have completed a parking study. Their initial plans call for upwards of 250 additional students. Some of these, and the teachers and professors needed to teach them, will require parking spaces. Right now, they only have parking here, and they’re looking in their Phase 1 to develop classroom space and dormitories, so where is that parking to go? We did a study, and found that as things are now, we have 697 parking spaces, using diagonal parking along Carteret Street, and along Boundary Street, and new parking in consolidated parking lots in and around Washington Street, for example, which would also benefit the churches there. These street widths are wide enough to re-stripe to provide diagonal parking. The parking in Aiken, SC, for example, its Main Street, is diagonal parking.

We envision USCB expanding from their existing campus along Carteret Street to Boundary Street, helping fill some of the new buildings along the Boundary Main Street with campus-related uses and users. These could be built through public-private partnerships and provide offices and future classroom space above dorms and residences. The campus would then be able to provide a range of housing styles for its students and faculty, similar to what SCAD does now in downtown Savannah.

The exercise from this point is phasing backwards. If you know what you want to look like in 50 years or 40 years or 20 years, you step back and say, “When this piece comes in, this has to come in.” Or, “When this piece comes in, that has to phase out.” It’s a study of relationships based on the final goal. And one other thing: Bellamy Curve – what a spectacular curve. We actually want to celebrate that even more than it is now. You’ll see a plan in just a moment, but we would change the pavement type, pavers along the street there, so as you arrive, to form the gateway into USCB and/or the gateway into the Boundary Main Street. We would link the USCB main campus via the Open Land Trust’s current land holdings, down low by the marsh front and then back up onto Boundary Street. Students could then walk without crossing Carteret Street, although we’ve made Carteret Street crossable as well. If you wanted to not have that urban experience for a few hundred yards, you’d be able to walk down, along the marsh, in the quiet solitude of the beautiful waterfront. Or, if you wanted to shop, you could walk along Carteret and Boundary Streets. Remember, good urbanism is all about choices.

The design of Bellamy Curve would include terraced steps of grass, from the road down to the water. From the road, you would see exactly what you see today. Only the paving material would be different. But for those walking along the water you would experience a lawn sloping upward to the road. The space created could be used for outdoor concerts or a place to eat a lunch.

This is an image of some of the infill housing opportunities along Carteret for the campus. This is the



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old Beaufort College building. We propose taking down the old building that wraps it and adding some more square footage that would allow for housing as well as office space. As you travel up Carteret to Bellamy Curve, the buildings would become larger and closer to the street leading up to Boundary Street. On the north side of Bellamy Curve, the existing condo development would eventually be redeveloped – remember what I said earlier about time, right? Twenty years from now, when this plan has succeeded, the existing condos will be out of place – too valuable to be suburban-style garden apartments. It’s a great location for a wonderful inn, spa, and/or restaurant facility, with housing opportunites as well that can be tied in with the campus. Some examples of possible student housing, called “mansion house buildings,” that could be built along Boundary. This represents a building type that could be integrated with the existing building stock of the neighborhood. It resembles a large house but would actually be a six- to twelve-unit apartment building and also provide commercial ground floor space.

We did a tremendous amount of work up in the Pigeon Point and Higginsville neighborhoods, or as they may start to be called, “NoBo,” or North of Boundary, to accomplish two things: first, to provide an ordering mechanism to identify the centers and edges of the two neighborhoods, and second, to determine the infill opportunities that would allow for growth without disrupting the existing fabric. These two efforts had to respond to and leverage the plans being proposed for SoBo, or South of Boundary.

For goal number one we looked at Park Street as the east-west spine, to orient residents and visitors. The corridor connects all the open space, from marsh to marsh, and runs midway between the river to the north and Boundary Street to the south. Let me take you on a ride down Park Street. Here on the eastern shore, we are looking to combine a future Open Land Trust purchase with Pigeon Point Park. Heading west from the park, you would arrive at Basil Green Park, where we envision a redesign to more formally arrange the facilities for convenience and parking. As you travel west along the northern side of the National Cemetery you would arrive

at the western marsh. Decommissioned City property along the corridor would be used as pilot projects to provide infill housing. As a building type, bungalows and small cottages allow you to manage a good bit of growth. And they allow you to do it at price points that are easily available to workforce housing and with footprints that permit you to save tree canopy when necessary. One attribute we can leverage is the very deep lot condition that many of the small homes in these neighborhoods have. We propose to allow owners to build an addition/accessory unit to their house that either comes up to the street if the house is set back deep, or build in the back if the house currently sits close to the street. So they’ll have more opportunity for accessory unit and/or expansion of their house.

Moving south and west to Ribaut Road and the Piggly Wiggly, we wanted to promote the build-out of the “government complex,” comprising the City of Beaufort and Beaufort County, which currently take up the north and southwest quadrants of the new roundabout contemplated for the Boundary Street revitalization. To do so we used the Piggly Wiggly as the anchor for a series of new buildings that would anchor the southeast side of the roundabout and provide space for ancillary businesses that need proximity to the offices of these two government centers. The Piggly Wiggly is the only grocery store in Sector 1, and we hope, with the increased activity and population we anticipate, that its current owners would look to expand and retrofit the existing facility. One of many possible plans would involve a staged redevelopment, with a short term retrofit, followed by an extensive redevelopment at some point in the future. The redevelopment opportunity may look like this, which shows the existing store demolished to make way for parking and new construction along Ribaut Road and Boundary Street, in keeping with the Boundary Street Master Plan, after construction of a new store to the east is completed. In addition to the new construction, the plan calls for reducing Ribaut Road from four lanes to two lanes with parking and widened sidewalks down to the intersection with Bay Street. The intersection with Bay Street would be designed to serve as one of the three gateways into downtown Beaufort, along with Ribaut Road and Boundary Street, and Carteret Street and Bay Street. We’ll get into what the


gateway design would look like and what happens to the banners in the coming months. By narrowing Ribaut Road for this section, we can tie downtown Beaufort to the Hermitage neighborhood in terms of pedestrian and bike access and make the entire area walkable for those doing business at the City or County buildings.

Bladen Street and the two blocks off either side have a number of infill opportunities. The jail, Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) building, and the old School Board building are examples, and we’ve proposed how these sites can be added to and redeveloped over time. This is an existing project happening now called “Midtown.” It provides for some interesting opportunities as they relate to community gardening. With the relocation of the existing garden run by the Open Land Trust, we can incorporate it with the new housing and start to promote urban agriculture.

The redevelopment and infill along Boundary and Bladen Streets will do more than enhance the two corridors and provide jobs and needed housing – it will reinvigorate the NWQ. As discussed earlier, healthy neighborhoods require active, vital commercial corridors. One leads to the other. If either is in distress, both become distressed. The NWQ will not succeed unless these streets redevelop. It’s not a matter of how much attention or money is lavished there. It will not nurture a revival unless these corridors are redeveloped.

All the work that has been completed over the last three months has generated a long list of projects. We compiled them all onto the Sector 1 Map to see what the vision would be in 20 or 30 years. This illustration shows all the infill and redevelopment we are proposing. This series of images shows the staging of development along the lines of a realistic build-out for Sector 1. As I mentioned earlier, just this quick effort would grow the population by about 2,500 without changing anything about what Beaufort is. To fulfill what Beaufort needs to become, to be a prosperous and resilient community, it can support many times this number.

But Sector 1 is but one of four Sectors comprising the City of Beaufort, which itself sits in a regional system

of towns and the County. Let’s talk about the regional system. How do you get someone to be here for more than a day? How do you inspire them to move here? You link up with your neighbors so that together you can offer more than just what you have. Here’s Port Royal, and the old port at Port Royal. It will be redeveloped eventually and it will be their downtown addition and waterfront opportunity, an opportunity similar to what Beaufort has now, and what we are looking to complete. But Port Royal also has a beach called the Sands, surrounded by a State park. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to walk or bike all the way up – from downtown Port Royal, by the Beach, through the park, to the Hospital TCL campus, to Beaufort’s new boardwalk, to the Marina and downtown Beaufort, across the bridge to Whitehall, down all the way to the Beaufort Yacht and Sailing Club, continuing down and across the new bridge, and back to Port Royal?

As you can see by these plans and images, we have created a vision for a community that is walkable and mixed use; that reinforces its urban character, but also celebrates the natural context in which it sits. We leverage nature and the work of the OLT to raise awarness of its importance in order to celebrate the history and aspirations of the people of Beaufort and Beaufort County. As we plan the remaining Sectors of the City we will be weaving together the visions we’ve established in Sector 1 to support and promote the planning of all the new projects that will be identified in the remaining Sectors. A quick snapshot of what’s to come: The water taxi, Rails-to-Trail – look at the rail line and how it passes through the Old Depot area here, and the proximity to downtown. Depot Road, which goes up to the old depot, was the connection – the commercial connection – of the city back to the rest of the world. The rail line came down to Beaufort at the depot and then down to Port. The boats came in and unloaded their supplies. There was actually a low road along the marsh front, down at the bottom of the Bluff that followed the curve of the bluff. They would carry heavy goods, and so forth, that they couldn’t get up the Bluff.

We haven’t shown this yet, but the tie from downtown to the Old Depot area and the Rail-to-Trail opens up all the amenities and development we have shown you



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tonight to a significant portion of the biking and walking population of the County, too. Master planning the The TCL/hospital area – again, right off the Rail-to Trail – would permit many to commute to work if they so choose and when the weather cooperates. Such an integrated and extensive system provides options and opportunities, for residents and visitors alike. You can see we’ve done many studies showing shared bike lanes and sign-only bike lanes. We want the whole city to be bike-able. Dedicated bike lanes and trails, sidewalk expansions and additions will be identified.

But you can’t tie all this together effectively without a good transit system. This could be implemented next year; it could be implemented ten years from now. The opportunity to do it sooner rather than later exists, and it should be taken. We’re looking at how this is unfolding, but one proposal is to get people to park in certain strategic locations – the existing Town Center area off Boundary Street is one – and use that with a reliable and predictable bus service to get to important areas around town. To be attractive, the transit would need to be quick, reliable, and frequent. Coordinated with boat docks/marinas, and water taxi services, the transit system becomes regional and robust.

Now that you’ve seen all the work I hope some of are thinking of volunteering as champions for a few of these projects. We’ll be preparing a booklet of the entire Civic Master Plan and a separate booklet that prioritizes the action items and objectives. Some of you may ask, “How will any of this be implemented even if the money and champions come forward? We still have to deal with the existing Ordinances.” You are correct to think that. After all, the upcoming adoption of a County Form-Based Code which the City is participating in, is the reason for OCI and all the work you see tonight. We needed to prepare the City to use the Code for great things, but we also need to prepare the City to implement the Code. I briefly went over the problems with existing zoning and its negative impacts on traditional and historic places. We want the new Code to encourage new development while preserving the old. As already discussed, the Form-Based Codes use the Transect, which is based on building types and how their designs change from rural to urban settings.

Here is a draft zoning map showing the existing zoning and the proposed Form-Based zoning. As we receive the new code from the County, we will be calibrating it to Beaufort and the Civic Master Plan we have envisioned. In addition, there are numerous policy issues that we’re addressing in terms of zoning and permitting, along with incentives to help encourage development in the most needed areas. These technical documents, the most boring but the most necessary, are what we at OCI will be working on in the coming months.

All in all, I hope that’s a pretty compelling vision, and worth the time of a few champions, and powerful enough to make visitors think that Beaufort has its act together – and would be a good place to move to. That’s the end of tonight’s presentation. Feel free to stay and ask questions of the teams and the work pinned on the walls. We’ll be notifying you of the dates for the next Sector workshop and presentation in the next couple of months. Thank you for coming.

Civic masterplan sector1-appendixd

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Transcript of Civic masterplan sector1-appendixd