08/19/86 Special Meeting - Laserfiche WebLink

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City plans call for replacin~ fifties modern Simpson Buick with a 'restaurant row' to complement the civic center. Simpson would move to a new auto center. out a good plan, you get a lot of ad hockery. For example, you're adding more parking, but I'm not sure that that won't be counter- productive to the interlinking of some of those buildings. Hamilton. What I see here is a place that has no real center. Right now, you seem to be about 95-percent auto-oriented. It seems to me you've got to decide if you want a pedestrian environment or not, and if you do, you have to take some actions to promote it. A filling station on one corner of your commercial core and the high school parking lot on another is not going to do it. You've got to analyze the pattern of ex- isting land uses and of parking. And you've got to consider whether Firestone could, in fact, become a pedestrian shopping street. Maybe not, since it is a major highway. If you decide it can be, you need to make clear, through good urban design, which portions are pedestrian and which are not. Then you can set appropriate requirements for use, height, parking, and so on. To get that kind of analysis, it seems to me, you need to do something like what we did in Los Angeles in connection with our centers plan. We identified the specific functions within each of 52 centers, and now we're thinking about wha, t incentives and disincentives we can provide to get more of the functions we want. Dubnoff. If you're going to serve the local community, including the people who don't drive, there's going to have to be some kind of concentration of community ac- tivities. The big problem now is that there's no easy way to cross the strip. In between Heckman. I see some real strengths here in your plans for the civic center area and in the idea of developing automobile centers close to the freeway. But I'm con- cerned about what happens in between. How are you going to deal with the rest? Tust/an. Yes, you have to ask how well the strip functions as a strip. How well can you get around on it by car? And how does it look to the person in the car? Ryan. I'd like to extend the discussion of land planning into the area of design. I was struck this morning by the fact that you don't use the local Southern California land- scaping possibilities in a dramatic way. You have a great opportunity to use those big palm trees in a powerful design way. I saw some huge ones, but there aren't enough yet to define places or mark boundaries. Ifs great that Firestone has distinguishable en- tries at both ends. But they should be more identifiable. Cutes. We're working on that. We have plans to delineate the entrances to the city with palm trees and new signs. Heckrnan. But don't stop with the en- try signs. Carr~ the same theme through to the public parking lots and the signage around the civic center. If you're going to start hammering on people about improv- ing their signs, set a good example yourself. Using some of the taller landscaping in the center of town is another way to make it clear that there's some there there. You already have some good parking lot and site Larser scale commercial and industrial development Is concentrated near the strip's west and east boundaries. Planners want to intenslb/ the o/ltce, retail, and lnstttutional core between the new hotel and Stonewood Shoppin~ Center.