Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Be good stewards of Mill Mountain
From the RoundTable blog
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Mike Kennedy
Kennedy is president of the Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation.
One day soon after moving to Roanoke in 1995, I decided to walk to the top of Mill Mountain from the house my wife and I rented in Old Southwest.
As the sidewalk ended and Walnut Street became the Fishburn Parkway, I wondered if there was no better path to the mountaintop. As cars whizzed by I kept having to get off the road and into the weeds to avoid getting hit. I never walked that route again.
Some years later the Star Trail opened, and it has been a favorite of mine and my family's ever since.
Now we have another proposal involving Mill Mountain, and many Roanokers believe it will be not only the greatest advance in recreation, but in economic development that our city will have seen in many years.
Build a restaurant atop Mill Mountain, the argument goes, and customers will beat a path to its doors. But best of all, those youthful members of the creative class will flock to the Star City.
I'm doubtful.
Every decade or so, someone comes up with the idea to put something on Mill Mountain. "It's not pristine wilderness," the argument goes. "So why not add something else?"
That begs the question: When will we ever decide we've got enough development atop the mountain?
To further develop the mountaintop with a restaurant and the additional parking it would require is to risk destroying its character. The project's promoters have said they would seek the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED certification for the project. However, building new construction on previously undeveloped land, away from other developed areas not served by public transportation and requiring in excess of 11,000 square feet of paving for the planned 70 parking spaces runs counter to many LEED principles and goals.
LEED concerns aside, there's already enough traffic on the Fishburn Parkway to ruin the road for hikers and cyclists. Now increase that with a restaurant and suppose that maybe half those driving away from it have had one or more drinks. I wouldn't want be riding a bike on that road.
There will be traffic. Valley Forward has run its plan past some restaurant chains, and they say the restaurateurs like the idea. They wouldn't like the idea if they didn't think they'd get the traffic.
The folks at Valley Forward are trying to lure new blood to the area, and I salute them for their effort. I just happen to disagree with this plan.
Perhaps it's a question of vision. What do you want Roanoke of the future to look like? I have some definite ideas what I don't want it to look like.
From time to time business takes me to Charlotte, N.C., a city that must be a developer's dream. Every once-vacant lot seems to have its own crane and rising framework of steel.
But Charlotte is not a place I particularly care to go. It is a sprawling, auto-choked city where nothing is close to anything else. Even leaving is hard. Hit the interstate at 2:30 on a Friday afternoon and it can take you well over an hour to go 30 miles.
So what of our city and its beloved mountain?
Here's an alternate idea. Put a good coffee shop at the zoo as part of an upgrade to the existing snack bar.
Want a restaurant and meeting space with a view? Buy Buena Vista, the antebellum brick mansion in Southeast that the city now wants to unload. Fixing up an existing building in an already developed area on a public transportation route is light years greener than spoiling forest land where buses cannot even go.
So how can we attract those young creatives? Well, we have a pretty good downtown and some cozy mixed-use neighborhoods. But that's true of many cities.
What makes us nearly unique is our location between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny mountains. The Blue Ridge Parkway is to our east and the Appalachian Trail to our west. McAfee Knob, 16 miles away, is perhaps the most beautiful spot on the whole of that Maine-to-Georgia footpath. We are stewards of the legacy entrusted to us by the Original Landscape Architect. Let us not screw that up.
Soon we will have several new faces on city council. We should very carefully consider what kind of city we want to become and communicate that to council.
