As the 18-month-and-counting saga of the Triangle enters Act III — no pun intended — the players are working from a completely new script by different authors, and they hope this time they’ll bring the drama to its climax without getting jeered off the stage. Speaking of Act III, the movie theatre by that name — a flashpoint of community opposition to the proposed Triangle Square shopping complex — got killed off at the end of Act II, along with most of that “suburban strip mall” of Central Austin nightmares. When last the state-owned parcel between 45th, Guadalupe, and Lamar was in the headlines, the Austin City Council had denied its blessing to Cencor Realty’s thrice-revised shopping center plan. This punted the action to an ad hoc special board of review, dominated by state officials, with the power to overrule the city and grant Cencor permission to build the least popular Austin development since the Barton Creek PUD.
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This is where you, the citizens, come in; on Thursday, Sept. 3, at 7pm at the Texas School for the Blind, across from the Triangle (and the site of last November’s high-minded but so far ineffective community “charrette”), the aforementioned big-stud architect, Peter Calthorpe, will lead a community design workshop (significantly not called a “charrette”). Calthorpe’s mission is to present two alternatives for the assemblage’s input and/or judgment.
Both alternatives will, to the dismay of many north central Austinites, include the much-maligned Randalls supermarket that dominated the earlier Triangle Square plan, as well as a Barnes & Noble, another anchor tenant. However, the Randalls itself, and the total area devoted to retail/commercial uses, have shrunk significantly; current stakeholder visions for the Triangle call for at least half, maybe as much as 70%, of the project to be residential.
The stakeholders include — along with Cencor and the two remaining anchor stores, whose leases with Cencor and Texas MHMR, the actual owners of the Triangle, cannot be broken without starting the whole process over — the state, the city, Capital Metro, and a quartet of neighborhood and community reps from the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association, Neighbors of Triangle Park, and Brentwood and Rosedale NAs, all of whom are meeting via teleconference with Calthorpe weekly; this past week, they all decamped to Calthorpe’s studio in Berkeley for a two-day brainstorming/arm-twisting session.
As of yet, this band of stakeholders does not actually include a residential developer, which is a cause of some concern. The consensus choice of most concerned, including Cencor, is Dallas-based Post/West Properties, nee Columbus Realty; they are perhaps the only developer in the Southwest who has actually built viable mixed-use urban-template residential developments (i.e., stores below, apartments above in the same building, as opposed to “multiple-use” projects like Central Park).
Calthorpe is likewise nearly the only practitioner of his kind, and he was also — much to the amazement of the community stakeholders — a consensus choice of both the black and white hats in the Triangle drama. While Calthorpe is usually lumped in with other apostles of the New Urbanism, his portfolio differs from those of his cohort in its near-single-minded focus on pedestrian- and transit-oriented development (which makes him attractive to the Triangle neighbors) and in its extensive experience creating and reviving shopping centers (which appeals to the state and Cencor). Indeed, Calthorpe’s is the brain behind the foremost existing New Urbesque project to feature a supermarket — a complex in San Diego which has underground parking and escalators specially designed to accommodate shopping carts, and whose grocery store is the most successful location in California’s largest supermarket chain, Ralphs.
Even with this pedigree, it’s still a little stunning to realize that Calthorpe has completely cleared his schedule just to work on the Triangle, with an exceedingly tight turnaround time; the state review board gave the stakeholders 90 days to come up with a plan, and nearly half that time has already elapsed. What was, in its previous incarnation, roundly reviled as a characterless strip mall now promises to be the most noteworthy architectural project to be proposed in Austin in at least two decades, one that could leapfrog the city into the front ranks of progressive planning and, yes, Smart Growth.
That, however, presumes that the community likes what Calthorpe shows them better than anything Cencor proposed previously, which is not as sure a thing as it seems; when the Genesis Group, arbiters of the November charrette, presented their high-density mixed-use vision for the Triangle, it was far from universally acclaimed in the surrounding neighborhoods. Since then, those neighbors, or at least their de facto leaders, have fairly abandoned the notion of an undeveloped, status-quo “Triangle Park,” but then, it was a dissonance between the neighbors and their leaders that spawned this drama in the first place. Nobody really wants to keep fighting over the Triangle, but nobody wants to simply surrender either, which makes the stakes for the next month of planning very high. On Sept. 3, the war room at the School for the Blind will likely be the hottest ticket in town.
This article appears in August 28 • 1998 and August 28 • 1998 (Cover).