There is an old expression that says: "If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail."
For downtown, there has certainly not been a failure to plan. The questions for the Tucson community might be, "Did we fail to plan wisely or strategically? Did we fail to follow our plans with action? Did we plan too much? Did we create plans to help us chase money, or did we use money to implement our plans?" And perhaps, "Should we thank our lucky stars that we failed to follow through on some of our plans over the years?"
Architect, artist, and former downtown restaurateur Bill Mackey is assembling downtown master plans for an exhibit that may help answer some of those questions this fall, showing in the empty former McLellan's store at 63 E. Congress St.
The exhibit opens on Friday, October 2 (4:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m.) and shows the next evening during Club Crawl, from 6:00 p.m.-10:00 p.m., as well as on subsequent Saturday evenings throughout October.
In "Plus or Minus 92: Downtown Master Plans, 1932-2009", Mackey and colleagues will be exhibiting a retrospective of master plans that includes macro-plans for the entire downtown area, area plans, and site-specific plans. Some plans were more philosophical or topical than geographic. Some became the basis of public policy for decades; others collected dust on a shelf. Before there was Rio Nuevo, there was El Centro; before that, urban renewal, and before that - the list goes on.
Right now, Mackey is tracking down artifacts of the voluminous planning that Tucson has inflicted upon itself over the last seventy-five years. He's collected nearly 100 plans, not all of which could be called "master plans", and hasn't yet selected those that will make the show. He has spotted some trends already, plans that reflect the values and priorities of their times.
"In the 1970s, the federal money was there for housing, so that's evident in all the planning to grab federal funds and build housing," says Mackey. "Now it's all oriented towards transportation, so the planning reflects that."
While it's easy to imagine such an exhibit taking snide swipes at plans that went awry or were never implemented, Mackey wants to devote at least some of the exhibit to "success stories." He has not yet divulged those, although a worksheet that he shared with his committee of Julie Ray, Rachelle Diaz, and Kimi Eisele suggests that one could also do an exhibit on downtown success stories that had no formal planning behind them. Fourth Avenue, for example, has been conspicuously absent from official government-sponsored plans; despite that, or perhaps because of it, Fourth Avenue is the most consistently vibrant part of downtown.
Mackey's research has taken him to the archives at Pima County's Planning Department (very fruitful, he says), the City of Tucson's Department of Urban Planning and Design (not so much), the website of the City's Transportation Department (very useful), the collections of architects such as Rob Paulus, Poster Frost Associates, and Burns Wald-Hopkins Shambach, and those of historians such as Alex Kimmelman. He's also consulted some long-time planners and historic preservationists, such as J.T. Fey, Brooks Jeffery, Bob Vint, and Jerry Kyle, and taken some suggestions for where to look and what to look for from this writer.
Mackey would like the show to run as long as possible, or until a tenant displaces the exhibit's space, which is being graciously provided by building owner John Wesley Miller.
