Studer Community Institute

Updating the vision for downtown Pensacola

January 16, 2014
/ Shannon Nickinson
/ community-dashboard

Want to know where Andrew Jackson slept in Pensacola? There’s an app for that. Developed, it turns out, by the University of West Florida. It’s called Next Exit History, and if you download it (for free), it will use your smartphone’s GPS to point you toward cool, unusual or interesting historic locations that are near you -- wherever you happen to be. It was just one of the ways the ways the UWF Historic Trust is trying to increase the marketability of what Jerry Maygarden called “the one thing that is genuinely ours, and its our history.” Maygarden, president of the Trust, was joined by Brendan Kelly, interim vice president of university advancement, Mayor Ashton Hayward, John Myslak and Alan Gray at session this week updating progress toward revitalizing downtown Pensacola and building on that brand. The forum was hosted by Pensacola Young Professionals, which chose three things from the 2012 URAC report to focus on as priorities. PYP chose three things from the report as their key areas of interest -- simplifying the land development code, boosting cultural heritage tourism and increasing the availability of affordable housing in downtown. Cultural heritage tourism, Maygarden says is a huge potential growth market for the local tourism industry. Linking that to the education and research aspects that UWF offers is an incalculable asset. “You need people who can reach back and see where the story started,” Kelly said. “There are not a lot of cities that get to reach back 500 years.” Hayward ran through an outline of progress on the original study’s action items, including painting and repairing the tarp at Cecil T. Hunter Pool; listing the Amtrak train depot with Beck Properties for possible development; cleaning up gateways to the city; getting a grant to do landscaping in front of the unattractive chain link fence on Alcaniz near the Carlton Palms; reduction in parking requirements that will make infill housing easier to build; and the implementation of a “one-stop” meeting every Wednesday in City Hall where would-be developers can ask questions about city permitting, planning and the like. A big setback was the rejection by City Council on Jan. 9 of changes to the city’s land development code that would have set parameters for development of the former Main Street sewage treatment plant site and other properties in a new Maritime Redevelopment District that would stretch from Main to A to Garden streets. Myslak, an original member of the URAC commission, said he is looking into ways to get the special overlay district back before City Council to try to persuade them to give it a try. Also still on the to-do list, Hayward said: Opening Government Street to through traffic and possibly working with the city housing department to develop housing for the site of the old Blount School. The old school -- which took up a full block between Chase and Gregory streets and C and D streets -- had become an eyesore when private developers who bought it from the Escambia School District failed to keep up with the property. It was demolished in 2012. All of the panelists stressed their desire to make the city’s downtown walkable, inviting, and attractive to residential development. Maygarden, who lives downtown near the Barkley House, encouraged those in the audience to embrace the virtues of downtown living -- even the noisy ones. “There is a wedding outside of my house every weekend from” spring until fall, he said of the popular venue for such affairs. “You learn to put on your coat and tie and say you’re a friend of the bride and join the party.” He cast one of the items on URAC’s to-do list -- getting a CSX to establish a “quiet zone” for the train whistle in the downtown -- in another light. “That train is the sound of a cash register,” he said. “It is the sound of the economy moving.”

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Updating the vision for downtown Pensacola

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