(Originally published on www.TucsonCitizen.com on September 1, 2009) Last Friday afternoon as I approached the corner of Scott and Congress on foot after leaving work a block west of that corner, I had a strange feeling, knowing that when I reached that spot I would not be able to resist the urge to look south towards where the former Santa Rita Hotel was undoubtedly gone, the last vertical section of which had likely been torn down that day while I was working.
Sure enough, there was an eerie void where portions of the hotel had stood just hours before. Later I drove around the Santa Rita block, and marveled at the oddness of being able to see the Odd Fellows Hall (Barrio Food and Drink downstairs, Etherton Gallery upstairs) on 6th Avenue from Scott, and to see the back of Chicago Store from 12th Street.
(For photos of the last days and hours of the Santa Rita, as it met its wrecking ball, visit the new website of Zocalo magazine, to which I contribute articles. Publisher Dave Olsen has posted several photos that he took. www.TheZMag.com)
A security guard was stationed at the 12th St. entrance to the chain-link fence surrounding the demolition site, preventing souvenir-seekers from grabbing treasures from the pile of rubble. My collection of bricks from torn-down century-old buildings would have to do without a Santa Rita representative.
Of course, the Santa Rita as it stood last week wasn't quite a century old. The oldest parts were built in 1917, the 1904 portions of the original structure having already been obliterated by subsequent renovations. But the building still had character, and reportedly, lots of ghosts. For years, the ghost tour company Lost Souls Paranormal featured the Santa Rita as the anchor of its Downtown walking tour.
During the first half of the 20th century, the Santa Rita was Tucsons most elegant hotel. Paradoxically it also hosted cattle auctions in its lobby. Tom Mix spent his last night on Earth at the Santa Rita before crashing his car 48 miles north on the highway to Florence.
I know that I am expected to celebrate this conversion of a shuttered hotel to a modern office building as a step towards progress that Downtown desperately needs. Within a few years, a shiny new TEP headquarters building will rise from the cleared-off rubble. TEP will bring its employees over from the ground floor and some upper floors of the UniSource Energy Tower, Tucson's tallest building, at 1 S. Church Ave.
Apparently downtown will enjoy a net gain of daytime employees due to the influx of TEP employees from other parts of the city. TEP will leave behind space at UniSource that a commercial broker such as Buzz Isaacson will undoubtedly find new tenants to fill eventually, and the UniSource Tower will be renamed again. It was called United Tower and Norwest Tower, and probably some other names, since it rose in 1986.
What makes me melancholy about the whole thing is that there was a plan for the block a few years ago that hit all the right notes; due to the economy, unfortunately, the project went into the tank. The existing building was to be spared, renovated, and converted to a boutique hotel. The rest of the block was going to be condos, parking, and an AJs store. Pathway Development had construction documents prepared and moving through the Development Services process, but then the financing evaporated and so did the deal. Architect Kevin Howard had designed the new construction to be somewhat of an homage to the original Santa Rita Hotel; my vintage postcard collection had been loaned to him to use as inspiration.
Wouldn't that have been cool? Old building meets adaptive reuse, with new construction taking the place of asphalt? Housing to increase downtown's resident population; a hotel to boost downtowns tourist and visitor population (all of whom would eat out at downtown's restaurants and cafes); and a great grocery store that would have been the answer to years of community whining about why downtown doesn't have a grocery store and no one will buy a condo downtown until there is one.
I have no idea what Tucson Electric Power has in mind for the architecture of the new building, but it would be nice if there was some architectural gesture to that which had given way to make room for it. The Broadway frontage should have some commercial space, restaurant or retail. Well probably see another coffee shop; probably not another barber. (Downtown now has five barber shops or salons within two blocks of each other.)
I was involved with the early outreach efforts in the planning of the Scott Avenue improvements in the spring and summer of 2008. The street looks nice, but I disagree with the removal of all the on-street parking between Broadway and the Children's Museum. It was great that the businesses and stakeholders were listened to, but when each one said they didn't need parking in front of their building, the city took that as license to remove ALL the parking. No one interviewed members of the general public, who may find it convenient to park on Scott one day. Like when they are attending/visiting professional theater, the Fox, nearby museums, funerals, nightlife on Congress, or mass at the cathedral.
Just four years ago, when we produced the Congress Street Master Plan (with fabulous public participation and the expenditure of over $300,000 on five months of work from some fine consultants), we reached some consensus that Downtown's north-south cross streets such as Scott were important reservoirs for on-street parking because most of them are too wide for the traffic that uses them. You could put in diagonal parking, create lots of on-street parking capacity, and calm the traffic at the same time. Oh well, who remembers these things but me?
Sadly, and avoidably, there is no funding now to do the same quality of streetscape improvements to Congress Street that was done for Scott Avenue. That's a topic for another time, but the City did the improvements to a secondary street and then ran out of money to do the work on Downtown's most important street.
Notably absent from the Scott Avenue outreach was the HSL Properties company. HSL, the owner of the Santa Rita block until July of this year, wasn't outreached in the planning for Scott Avenue. In fact, when I suggested we interview HSL, I was discouraged from doing so.
So now TEP has its new side-street landscaped for free; I guess TEP doesnt want parking on that side of its block.
