Downtown Columbia looks forward

By Temple Ligon

In early 1996, I heard from Rev. Pete Cannon, a Presbyterian minister who ran an international student services program across Pendleton Street from the business school. He also had recently bought and renovated the old Security Federal Building in the 1200 block of Washington Street. He was interested in what I had to say as to his building’s future feasibility and that of his property across the street, all the land between the Arcade Building and Sumter Street.

Pete understood what I was telling him, and he hired me on the spot to develop designs for downtown opportunities, especially for his own.  He accepted my fee structure and he offered me a rent-free office on Washington Street. I had been living in Charleston for the previous year or so, and Pete asked me to consider a move back to Columbia. My outsider status would make the promotion of the concepts a little tougher than necessary.

We held regular meetings in his office on Washington Street, and we became fast friends. Pete read what I had just written for the Columbia Star on the future of downtown Columbia. This was 20 years ago, remember, and I told Pete about the wasted opportunities in downtown’s parking garages. Street level should always be retail and the top level should always be housing. The best looking parking garage was the one you couldn’t see, the way they built them in Paris. There much of the parking is underground and what isn’t underground is surrounded by buildings blocking the view of the always unattractive parking garage.

While I laid out feasibility sketches and street plans, Pete and I put together the beginning of a business improvement district (BID), a strategy promoted by me when I ran for mayor in 1990. By the end of 1997 we were knocking on doors downtown trying to push property owners in our direction of at least thinking about what could happen over the next 20 years. By 2002, five years after we began, we had an architectural scale model of all the buildings, existing and proposed, from Pendleton to Hampton and from Marion to Assembly. Included in the proposed inventory were the tops of garages where we wanted to see housing. We also fit six green clay tennis courts on top of the Marriott garage, along with a new YMCA and its 50m. lap pool, movie houses underground, and an expanded Arcade Building so the walk-through was possible from Lady to Washington and from Main to Sumter, forming a cross-axis pedestrian highway just like the Galleria in Milan, where Arcade developer Edwin Wales Robertson got the idea.

Should minor league hockey return, we had the perfect placement for four levels of underground parking and an above-ground arena, all on the back half of the block facing the Richland Library. The underground parking fed pedestrian tunnels to the art museum, Richland Library, the city offices at the corner of Washington and Main, and the Marriott/office (now apartment) tower complex across Main Street. In the winter, hockey season, the team took occupancy of the indoor ice while the kids got the outdoor rink on Main Street between Wells Fargo and what was built as First National by T. I. Westin. In the off-season, warm weather, the kids got the indoor ice rink.

The BID happened, and Nelson Mullins took occupancy in a Holder development project first seen on our model as a hotel and parking arrangement.

One of our biggest regrets was the Columbia Museum of Art’s set-back entry, always removed from automobile access, something seen as a mistake the night the building opened. I don’t think there’s an art museum in America with such a problem entry.

Twenty years later, that’s still true, but now we have finally found a kindred spirit in developer Don Tomlin, who was president of A. C. Flora High School in my senior year.  The front-page story by reporter Sarah Ellis in today’s (May 7) State reads, “Developer envisions apartments atop six city parking garages. “

Tomlin’s first move will be to place housing on top of the city garage at the corner of Assembly and Lady, serving the BB&T Building, formerly known as the SouthTrust, the Affinity, and initially the AT&T Building in 1987.

A new parking garage today should run about $50 per square foot and $20,000 per space, figuring on 400 square feet in total area per parking space.  If the argument that a good-looking garage is one you can’t see wins out, building parking underground is about 50% more, or $75 per square foot and maybe $30,000 per space.

Tomlin won’t have that discussion because he’s building on top of existing garages, but he might when and if additional garage parking is required to meet every need from both the current customers and the eventual occupants of Tomlin’s new housing on top.

Anyway, glad to see it happen. Good for downtown.

Pete Cannon passed a few years ago. Too bad he can’t see it, at least not with the rest of us.

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