Recordpub.com - Sorting out a "crazy quilt' of projects Speaker details downtown plans at Bowman Breakfast

Record-Courier staff report

Talk of master planning efforts to connect downtown Kent with Kent State University drew more than 200 area business professionals to the Kent American Legion Hall on Mogadore Road for the twice-yearly Bowman Breakfast lecture series Thursday morning.

Speaker Alan Mountjoy is a partner at the Massachusetts-based urban design firm Chan Krieger Sieniewicz. Kent hired the firm in 2008 to assist in balancing the development projects proposed and under way in the downtown area.

To do so, Mountjoy spent the past eight months working with planners from KSU, the Portage Area Regional Transportation Authority, the city and private development firms on projects including the Kent Central Gateway multi-modal facility, a hotel and conference center, Fairmount Properties’ mixed-use development and a proposed 20,000-square-foot university welcome center just east of Haymaker Parkway.

“All these projects make a bit of a crazy quilt, if you will, of possibilities in between the town and the university,” Mountjoy said. “It was really our job to look at this and say, ‘how can we calibrate all these proposals.’”

Mountjoy designed a master plan for the Commonwealth Flats in South Boston for the Massachusetts Port Authority. The Boston project included two years of design review on developer proposals during the master plan build-out. Mountjoy currently lectures at the Harvard Office of Executive Education on urban design.

He addressed several topics in detail at the Bowman Breakfast.

First, Mountjoy talked about linking paths along the Cuyahoga River, including the Portage Hike and Bike Trail, with Kent State University and its Esplanade through multiple routes. He also discussed the planned re-emergence of Erie Street — severed in the 1970s by Haymaker Parkway — as a retail-rich link between the city and university.

Parking must be a common resource, Mountjoy said, and should include attractive pedestrian facilities combined with the multi-modal transit facility, which is planned to rise at the northeast corner of Erie Street and South DePeyster Street.

Across from the transit center, a hotel and conference center would stand west of Haymaker Parkway opposite two university buildings, including the 20,000-square-foot visitor center, and compliment the city and university gateway.

A key planning element would be to preserve the Campus Link neighborhood between Haymaker Parkway and South Lincoln Street, Mountjoy said.

“That could be a very attractive neighborhood if it’s treated correctly,” he said. “It’s important to stabilize it and ensure that it improves over time through selective in-fill and selective replacement of buildings, retention of buildings and fixing up of buildings.”

Mountjoy said the development frame work created will allow each individual project to proceed at its own pace as land, funding and other key elements come together.

“What you see before you is in fact not exactly a plan, per say, because many of the elements will continue to evolve over time,” Mountjoy said. “But we do feel we have created a frame work by which the city can test, and judge, a variety of proposals ... that allow(s) the city to decide how to spend its resources in the process of making this vision a reality.”

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