Downtown – Royal Oak, Michigan

Isaac Kremer/ November 4, 2007/ Uncategorized/ 1 comments

Royal Oak has always been an affluent suburb in Metropolitan Detroit. The Detroit Zoo is located nearby. Oakland Community College has a Royal Oak campus. This attracts a significant number of visitors. In recent years the construction of several large mixed-use buildings transformed the downtown further making it a destination for people seeking walkable urbanism with the safety and predictability more typical of a suburban town.

Leading the march of density is the residential skyscraper the Fifth Royal Oak. There are twelve residential stories, each with their own balcony. A nod is made to the pedestrian scale through the blank walls of the base that approximates the scale of a traditional multi-story downtown building.

This strategy of a parking base is evident on a smaller scale with this building that has retail ground floors, two-floors of semi-enclosed parking and four stories of residential above this. Unlike theFifth, this building is more explicitly residential above what appears to be a level base parking garage. This perhaps leaves the possibility of converting the second and third floors for housing at a later date. Tenants on the ground floor include Cold Stone Creamery, bd’s Mongolian Grill, GameStop, and noodles&company.

In the Life and Death of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote a chapter, “The Need for Old Buildings.” She suggests that every neighborhood needs a mixture of new and old buildings to allow for a variety of uses, income levels, and even an ecosystem of ideas within a neighborhood.

Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. By old buildings I mean not museum-piece old buildings, not old buildings in an excellent and expensive state of rehabilitation–although these make fine ingredients–but also a good lot of plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings.

If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction. These high costs of occupying new buildings may be levied in the form of an owner’s interest and amortization payments on the capital costs of the construction. However the costs are paid off, they have to be paid off. And for this reason, enterprises that support the cost of new construction must be capable of paying a relatively high overhead–high in comparison to that necessarily required by old buildings. To support such high overheads, the enterprises must be either (a) high profit or (b) well subsidized.

If you look about, you will see that only operations that are well established, high-turnover, standardized or heavily subsidized can afford, commonly, to carry the costs of new construction. Chain stores, chain restaurants and banks go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawn shops go into older buildings. . . . Well-subsidized opera and art museums often go into new buildings. But the unformalized feeders of the arts – studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and art supplies, backrooms where the low earning power of a seat and a table can absorb uneconomic discussions–these go into old buildings. Perhaps more significant, hundreds of ordinary enterprises, necessary to the safety and public life of streets and neighborhoods, and appreciated for their convenience and personal quality, can make out successfully in old buildings, but are inexorably slain by the high overhead of new construction.

As for really new ideas of any kind – no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be – there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

This strategy of parking podium with residential floors above is again expressed in main north. Here is a floor of retail, two level base parking levels and then six floors of residential with what appears a penthouse seventh residential floor level in the corner tower. Once again the businesses here are to be expected for new construction: World Gym and Hollywood Video.

Public parking takes many forms in Royal Oak. The most expensive structured parking makes an attempt to blend in with the context of the surrounding neighborhood. This is done through architectural articulation in the form of towers to break up the horizontal levels. Another uses a false front cornice to make the parking deck appear as if it is a traditional building facade even with individual openings that roughly approximate windows. Where this strategy fails, however, is not making adequate use of the space above the buildings as in the example of the private development with residential on top. This raises the question of whether Royal Oak would better be served with freestanding public parking decks or a parking podium with residential or other uses above?

The public parking lots are abundantly available an very clearly signed. Some have shorter duration while others longer. Again, the issue is whether a surface parking lot is the highest and best use, or if greater intensity development could occur, transforming these surface lots into mixed-use buildings?

Finally, we get to buildings that are more pedestrian friendly and urbane in scale. Main Street Lofts is a multi-story residential building on a single story parking podium. The floors above it have “lofts.” Recreating this feature common in industrial buildings is an interesting way to create larger-sized living spaces.

Urbane Apartments at 310 W Sixth is a more traditional construction. Gone is any obvious parking podium. The building has traditional details and is closer to the street and sidewalk with a pedestrian scale. An attempt at ground floor retail is made. Finally, gone are the space age balconies on every unit, jutting out like metallic teeth. Instead, a false balcony with a glass panel and railing against a bank of windows is utilized to create a connection with the outdoors. In relation to the larger scale development that we started at, Urbane Apartments truly are more urbane and better integrated with the setting.

We will take a brief detour from our narrative to look at the humble alley. Often overlooked these provide valuable service, both for accepting deliveries and disposing of waste. More evolved downtowns have found ways to transform alleys and turn them into pedestrian amenities, taking a utilitarian space and making it yet another way to explore the built environment. Cady’s Alley in the Georgetown district of D.C. is an exemplar. That transformation has not yet happened in Royal Oak, at least not in 2007 when we visited.

Getting even more granular, one area that Royal Oak has done very well at is banishing the garish newspaper distribution boxes and replacing them with combined units.

From the new we now turn to the humbler older buildings that provide a valuable function supporting a diversity of uses. Unlike newer construction with their almost exclusive reliance on chain businesses owned outside of town, older buildings can and do support more modestly scaled locally owned businesses. A few examples include a smoke shop (Royal Smokers), a salon (Rene’s Hair Shop), a bar (Goodnite Gracie), a Sunday brunch joint (D’Amato’s), a pizza and subs shop (Tania’s Pizza), and professional offices (LPL Financial Services).

Another even more modest example has two floors of housing above and six compact storefronts on the ground floor. Two are vacant speaking to the underlying economics of this particular building being a challenge for whatever reason. The smaller scale businesses are evident with a corsetry company (Ivy’s Custom Corsetry), on online trading business (NetTrader), a barber shop (Widgren), and a shoe store (Lift Footware).

Anchoring the identity of Royal Oak as being a suburban area with amenities found in larger cities are the presence of several theaters and arts organizations. The Main plays art films on their multiple screens. Stagecrafters, a live theater troupe, plays in the Baldwin Theater. And the Royal Oak Music Theater is another venue. In 2004 Worldwide Entertainment rescued the theater from obscurity and after merging with AEG presents, the Royal Oak Music Theatre became the Detroit area’s preeminent club-style, concert venue – attracting world-class musicians and performers such as: Adele, The Black Keys, Lady Gaga, Eric Church, Ariana Grande, Fleet Foxes, Aziz Ansari, Kendrick Lamar, Amy Schumer, Elvis Costello, and others.

A number of iconic locally owned businesses further cement the reputation of Royal Oak as an artistic and creative center for metro Detroit.

One final building shows a harmonious balance between the scale of the building, size of the storefronts, and mix of businesses. A conscious effort is made to cluster several fashion related businesses here – shoes and jeans. These create a cluster due to their close proximity. The consistent signage while keeping each storefront unique, helps to train the eye where to look. Finally, the treatment of the facade above the storefront level is consistent, not detracting from the stores below. This is an example of what other buildings should aspire for in Royal Oak or anywhere for that matter.

Wayfinding signage is basic blue and white and sticks with directionals to major public buildings and parking.

Banners also create an identity and sense of place.

Another way that Downtown Royal Oak supports businesses is with a simple posting letting people know which businesses are Open Sundays.

Streetscape tends towards the severe with concrete. Backless and handleless wood benches don’t encourage people to linger. Clearly time has been spent between trees being planted and now because the tree wells are still there but the trees are long gone.

Despite being in one of the most automobile dependent regions in the US, the train tracks provide a valuable connection to the outside world, particularly for those who choose to live without cars.

As we were preparing to leave one view really summed up Royal Oak for us. In the distance were the steady march of the multi-story mixed-use and residential buildings, while in the foreground are surface parking and low-scale single story buildings. One might expect it is only a matter of time until the less intensely utilized spaces become repurposed with something more appropriate for the setting. One hope is that Royal Oakers will seriously consider what has worked and what hasn’t from an urbanism and walkability perspective when redeveloping some of the last available areas.