BY LUCY MAY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
After six months of study, an Indianapolis developer todaywill try to sell Cincinnati City Council members on a plan to put a Nordstrom department store on Fourth Street and a family entertainment district on the city's prized riverfront.
It could be a tough sell.
Local developers and residents -- along with council members -- have questioned whether it's worth jamming the riverfront with movie theaters, shops and restaurants to lure a coveted Nordstrom downtown.
But Cincinnati Economic Development Director Andi Udris thinks it is.
Nordstrom won't locate downtown without the intensive riverfront development, said Indianapolis developer Herman Renfro, who for six months has been working with Faison Associates of Charlotte, N.C., to create a plan for the city. Likewise, the riverfront tenants won't commit without Nordstrom.
Mr. Udris worries that if the city doesn't lure Nordstrom downtown, the store will go to the suburbs, and all downtown retail will suffer.
He wants the city to move quickly so riverfront parking garages can be built in time for the opening of the Bengals' new Paul Brown Stadium, avoiding a riverfront even temporarily full of parking lots.
But critics of the plan being pushed by Mr. Udris and City Manager John Shirey argue the bigger risk is rushing into a riverfront development. If such an intensive, commercial development fails, they worry, Cincinnati's "front yard" would be jammed with empty, hulking structures.
Downtown Cincinnati Inc., the downtown advocacy group known as DCI, argues that parking garages could be built later, closer to downtown, and avoid the riverfront rush.
City Council could decide as soon as Wednesday whether to move forward with Mr. Udris' plan or take a slower approach that would welcome alternative plans.
It may come down to which worst-case scenario is worse.
Mr. Udris won't talk about Nordstrom by name. But he said if the "fourth, unique anchor" goes to shopping rival Kenwood Towne Centre instead of Fourth Street, the city could ultimately lose Saks Fifth Avenue, threatening all of downtown retail.
"And all that investment the public's made will basically go down the tubes," Mr. Udris said.
But John Boorn, chief executive officer of Madison Marquette Realty Services, describes a scenario he thinks is just as scary. "We could do it, spend all this money, and it doesn't work if the developer can't get tenants or the tenants can't get business," said Mr. Boorn, whose company brought Tiffany & Co. to Fountain Place.
Or maybe the businesses do well and all the downtown foot-traffic moves south, away from the city's other businesses, he said, adding, "Is that a success?"
Mr. Boorn thinks council should wait on Mr. Udris' riverfront development plan and create a broader plan for all of downtown, something that DCI also has suggested.
Council members will discuss riverfront development today when Mr. Renfro presents his plan to council's Community Development Committee. Mr. Renfro's exclusive rights to develop the plan expired Monday.
Committee Chairwoman Bobbie Sterne, who has been receptive to the administration's plan, said she hopes council will vote on the plan this week, but it's difficult to predict.
While the Renfro-Faison plan has been discussed as something distinct from downtown's core, Mr. Udris said it's simply the lastest piece of a complex downtown retail puzzle that the city's economic development department has been assembling for years.
Giant, outdoor mall
The riverfront development would create the southern anchor for an urban retail district that's laid out like a giant, outdoor mall. The anchors would include: Lazarus at Fountain Place, a proposed Maison Blanche at Fifth and Race streets, the existing Saks Fifth Avenue at Fifth and Race streets, Tower Place Mall at Fourth and Race streets, the proposed Nordstrom at Fourth and Race streets and a 14-screen movie theater south of Third Street across a soon-to-be narrowed Fort Washington Way.
The district would be small enough to be walkable but large enough to give shoppers the "critical mass" of retail they demand, Mr. Udris said.
He envisions all those businesses being connected by Cincinnati's skywalk system.
What customers want Mr. Udris insists his plan -- both for riverfront development and for downtown retail as a whole -- is what customers want.
Indeed, experts outside Cincinnati say the plan sounds promising. So promising that Tamara Zahn, president of Indianapolis Downtown Inc., said she hopes the critics win.
"In Indianapolis, we enjoy a lot of shoppers from Cincinnati. So from our standpoint, we would love to see the naysayers defeat the project," said Ms. Zahn, who credits her city's Nordstrom-anchored Circle Centre mall for kick-starting downtown.
Urban entertainment districts, such as the one Mr. Udris proposes for the riverfront, are expensive to build and require constant activity to be successful, warned Michael Beyard, the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Land Institute's vice president of strategic development.
But built correctly, they can bring more visitors and greater activity for all of downtown, he said.
Bill Chidley, chief creative officer of the Dayton-based retail consulting company Design Forum, said the city must make sure that smaller shops between the large anchors succeed so the large department stores don't "become islands with no man's land in between them."
But here, many critics have charged the city administration's riverfront development plan is a rushed job that could ruin forever one of Cincinnati's most precious resources -- the riverfront.
During public hearings last fall, residents and business owners took the microphone one after the other to urge City Council to move slowly and get more community input before developing the riverfront.
Eric Doepke was among them. An architect and member of the city's Riverfront Advisory Council, he wants to make sure the city includes riverfront parks and open spaces as more than an afterthought.
But all the public's criticism and concern "seems to have no effect on the direction or the velocity with which this decision is being made," said Mr. Boorn, whose company has designed other urban entertainment districts and would have liked to offer a plan to the city, too.
Mr. Boorn said it's easy for out-of-town developers and retail experts to say Mr. Udris' plan sounds good because they don't understand Cincinnati or its terrain.
The grade drops significantly between Fourth and Third streets and all the way down the riverfront, Mr. Boorn noted. That will make it more difficult to lure shoppers back and forth between the riverfront and downtown, he said.
In the end, city council will simply have to make a judgment, said Mr. Beyard of the Urban Land Institute.
"None of this is a science. It's all an art," he said. "That makes it exciting. It also makes it a little scary because you can't prove to anyone it's going to work."
