Progress Report: Central
Evening, February 24, 1996
Day One
by Mike Greenberg

Quite a lot of flesh has grown on the Central team's scheme since Saturday morning. The main themes, as stated by team member Larry DeMartino, are connecting the city with the river and creating a neighborhood context that ties in with nearby Central Catholic and Providence high schools.The scheme revives an older and very intriguing idea, hatched by DeMartino in the 1980s, of diverting flood waters into a new channel, roughly superimposed on the original river channel, that would start at the expressway, snake west of the San Antonio Museum of Art and then parallel St. Mary's Street before returning to the main channel at 9th Street. Family housing (probably of townhouse scale) would flank a portion of the restored original channel and serve as an appropriate neighbor to the two high schools. DeMartino says the diversion channel would help keep the main channel in this area from flooding, thus fully opening up this reach of the river for development.

The corridor between Broadway and the river is still conceivd as intensive mixed use, including a large hotel and high-rise apartment building flanking 9th Street at the river. The roughly triangular chunk of land bordered by the river, the I-35 expressway, Jones Avenue and Broadway would be consolidated into two large parcels for mixed-use development, including one on the scale of Rivercenter, with a water plaza connecting this project with the river. Jones Avenue would be slightly rerouted, bending southward at the museum entrance to meet St. Mary's Street a block south of the existing (and confusing) intersection.

Quibbles: The southern half of the block of Broadway opposite Maverick Park is shown as park linking Broadway visually with the river -- in itself, a good idea, but at this location the proposed linkage may conflict with the need to give Maverick Park a clearly defined edge on all four sides. The scheme also could be improved, in my view, by continuing Avenue B north of Jones Avenue into the proposed mixed-use projects at Broadway and the expressway.