Decide first what our downtown should look like

Decide first what our downtown should look like



Publication Date: 05/06/09

The St. Augustine City Commission faces a quandary in deciding what this historic city's downtown should look like.

Is it Spanish Colonial or turn-of-the-20th-century commercial?

At issue is a proposed new commercial building for the northwest corner of Cathedral Place and St. George Street.

St. Augustine City Commissioner Don Crichlow, an architect, has designed a two-story brick building to look kind of like the former Bishop's Building that stood there for some 60 years.

While it is an appropriate design for a downtown, it is not for St. Augustine's downtown, which is mostly Colonial Spanish and Second Period Spanish in architectural style. The proposed new building, with all due respect to the architect, would stick out. It is the wrong style, in our opinion.

But there's a wrench in all of this that allows such a building design in the first place. It is a 2003 resolution by the City Commission adopting varying styles of St. Augustine's architecture to prevail in the city's historic preservation districts.

The resolution was designed to allow for the varying architectural styles in the Historic Preservation District 1, a residential mix of styles south of the Plaza de la Constitucion. Unfortunately, the city's Historic Architectural Review Board and the City Commission decided then to extend those new guidelines to HP-Districts 2 and 3, which are residential-commerical mixed-use areas.

What a mistake. The rules say a person deciding what a new building should look like could choose a style within the "view" of the proposed new building. In this case, it is a design of a building that used to stand there. Don't a lot of downtown buildings only look like what used to be in our city? Why not make it Spanish in style?

The City Commission -- without Crichlow, who recused himself from the vote -- unanimously agreed that the building's design is out of place. Mayor Joe Boles said, "I want a Second Spanish Colonial city."

The plans have to go back to HARB later this month anyway because HARB tabled the design approval pending various concerns of the project. Given the city's concerns, we suggest Crichlow and Danny and Kaspit Schechter, the proposed building's owners, rethink their plan and the design.

We encourage more commercial areas in our downtown. The city needs it for the benefit of its tax base and the community.

But we think everyone close to the project should step back and listen again to the words of City Commissioner Leanna Freeman. She posed, in our view, the first question the City Commission has to answer: "Is there some value to replicating what was there? Or do we want colonial?"

The answer will set the tone for downtown St. Augustine's look well into the 21st century.

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