Vital Signs

---

Drawing Forward on Rio Nuevo’s West Side

Innovative Mercado District of Menlo Park Breaks Ground

by James Reel

illustrations courtesy of Rio Nuevo Development Company

fter years of planning for new development on the west side of the Rio Nuevo District, between “A” Mountain and the Santa Cruz River, the time for action has arrived. Bulldozers rolled west across the Santa Cruz a few weeks ago to prepare the land for Rio Nuevo’s debut development. Called the Mercado District of Menlo Park, it promises to be a New Urbanist utopia mixing residential and commercial uses in a historically informed design.

If all goes well, the Mercado at Menlo Park will set the tone for downtown redevelopment by creating places for people to live, work, shop, eat, and entertain and inform themselves. The development will adjoin the area designated for three new civic institutions, and provide a transition into the long-established Menlo Park neighborhood.

The Mercado district comprises the most westerly 13.569 acres of Rio Nuevo’s 62-acre west side. It’s bound by Congress Street, Avenida del Convento, Clearwater Drive and the Menlo Park neighborhood.

The development will consist of eight main blocks for residential, commercial and office use. This is no cookie-cutter suburban design; the planners are emphasizing visual variety in the buildings, which will line desert-landscaped streets that include seven distinct plazas and public parks. All in all, there will be 263 residential units, including bungalows, single-family houses, apartments and condos. Prices range from $80,000-$300,000 for the bungalows to $150,000-$750,000 for the condos and lofts.

The first 10 homes in the three-year project should begin construction in November, with all infrastructure in place by mid-December and commercial building to begin in January 2006, with a completion date of December next year.

If it succeeds, the Mercado will counter the old adage about too many cooks spoiling the broth. The master plan was developed last year in an open, multi-day charrette facilitated by legendary urbanist and architect Stephanos Polyzoides, along with Paul Weiner of Design and Build Consultants and noted New Urban planner Oscar Machado of the University of Miami. WLB, a Tucson engineering firm, committed its staff from the inception of the proposal. Representatives of the science and cultural centers expected to rise next to the development, city planners and members of the Menlo Park Neighborhood Association also had substantial input from the beginning.

“They were extremely invested in researching the context and working with the neighborhood,” says Ann Vargas, project supervisor with the city planning department. “With that, they’re providing a development that actually is visionary while it brings along the historical and neighborhood context.”

“The whole project is about trying to re-establish clearly Tucson’s identity that was lost in early attempts at urban revitalization, particularly the TCC and the bulldozing of the barrio,” says Justin Dixon of Rio Development, the company developing the Mercado at Menlo Park. “We’re not trying to imitate or re-create what was lost; we’re trying to put the architectural precedents together with where we are today to create a neighborhood that distills the best moments of Tucson.”

Those “architectural precedents” were compiled in a code written by Paul Weiner, principal architect of DesignBuild Collaborative. It’s an inventory of Tucson’s historical architectural styles, beginning with the mid-19th-century Sonoran row house, continuing with the post-railroad styles (including the Victorian manner of Armory Park) and the eclectic interwar architecture, and moving on to the eventually more homogenized post-World War II look.

“We were looking for precedents that would be appropriate for developing mixed-use retail and commercial/residential zones,” says Weiner. “The code ended in a heading called ‘Drawing Forward.’ The intention was to encourage people who might be involved in designing the commercial section in the mixed-use areas to evaluate the precedents that have been used over the years by designers in this region to address the question of what is appropriate architecture in Tucson in 2005 in an urban context—to use their experience, skills and imagination to intelligently respond to a modern era in a changing context, archeologically and technologically. We suggested new technologies and materials that can be used not to replicate, not even to emulate, but to begin to think about how to build buildings that would read into the principles of the precedential work, but are honest to the materials and technologies we use today.

“These are universal questions that ideally would influence development in the region, not just downtown.”

One aspect of the development was inspired by the look of Tucson not in the 19th century, but three millennia ago. On the second day of the charrette, says Dixon, participants saw information that the Mercado site had been occupied for 4,000 years, and that archaeologists had discovered winding through the site of the old agricultural village the remains of a 3,000-year-old canal, the oldest yet found in the United States.

Oscar Machado, head of the planning department at the University of Miami, overlaid the map of the canal system and old pit houses with a new map showing contemporary streets and plazas, and that’s what has spurred the Mercado’s decidedly un-gridlike street plan. The main boulevard, in fact, follows the zigzag path of the ancient canal.

“Our street system and plazas represent a physical memory of the site,” Dixon says proudly. “It did bring up a lot of challenges, especially for the lot sizes and shapes. But we’re working with these five fantastic small homebuilders who were more than willing to take on the challenge of some of the difficult lots in order to have a greater character in the project. The homebuilders have done a fantastic job of responding to those challenges.”

The builders are Barry Coleman, Paulo deLorenzo of Innovative Home, Dante Archangeli of Milestone Homes, Tom Wuelpern of Rammed Earth Development, and James and Jameson Gray of Stellar Gray. The latter two businesses for this project have established a special partnership called StreetScene.

“It’s about creating variety and allowing the project to develop organically, not basing it all on a single model like most subdivisions, which have slight variations of the same house repeated endlessly,” Dixon says. “We’ll have very different homes going up, built with different materials by different people with different architects. It will eventually look like it developed over a long period of time.”

Says Wuelpern, “The result is a plan that really reflects Tucson’s soul. It’s eclectic, from railroad houses to pueblo style to the West University Craftsman look to the brick buildings on Congress.”

In general, the plan calls for narrow streets, zero setbacks on the lots, and alley access for vehicles. In the commercial areas, business space will occupy the ground level with residences rising on the second floor. Other features include private courtyards, balconies overlooking the streets and plazas, and a general avoidance of stick-and-stucco structures.

Wuelpern has been a downtown denizen for 18 years, living and maintaining an office there, and over time building 18 houses in Barrio Santa Rosa south of downtown. But he has been gradually frustrated by the dwindling availability of downtown land—the few vacant lots tend not to be for sale—and by the rising costs of material, labor and planning.

“We were hoping for an opportunity to do something more than just one house at a time,” Wuelpern says of his interest in the Mercado, “to make a bigger statement for how a southwestern desert city can exist and provide a vibrant backdrop for its inhabitants.”

Noting that Tucson is one of the last significant western cities to undergo revitalization in the past 15 years, Wuelpern says, “The advantage to coming late to the party is that we can see what other planners have done. So, taking some inspiration from them while we go our own way, we’re using elements of the central Mexican colonial towns, communities that developed before the invention of the automobile. They still function very well for the pedestrians and bicyclists; people come out of their homes and walk next door or down the street to go to the boutique or the grocer. This kind of a neighborhood meets your social and economic needs, and becomes an enriching part of your social fabric, your day-to-day existence.”

Downtown has already been part of the social fabric of the project’s various builders. James Gray, for example, lived for several years near El Charro, so he couldn’t resist getting involved in the Mercado, despite some initial reservations.

“To be honest,” Gray says, “I had a great fear of who might do it—not that whoever did it might not be successful, but that it might not contribute to the sustainability of a real downtown.” But he and Wuelpern agree that they’re fallen in with a group of smart, dedicated, right-minded individuals.

Says Wuelpern, “We’re a handful of small builders who are passionate about working in downtown Tucson. When the City put out the RFP for four teams to design, develop and build this parcel, we put together a team of four like-minded builders with experience downtown and who have all worked with alternative materials. We understood the market and the people who want to live here and the nuances of living downtown and the things that are missing, and by happenstance we teamed up with a developer who is very like-minded. So we were a collection of passionate individuals competing against three or four teams of the standard-business-model-driven large-scale builders. And we won the contract.”

According to Gray, “We came together to create what we saw as the character of Tucson—one- and two-story buildings, cobblestones, various things that are involved in the hidden nature of the barrio; you don’t know what’s there until you open the door. The construction will all be substantial, with thick walls in the front especially. This will not be built out of stick and stucco and painted purple and green to make it just look historic. We’re going to make it solid and a neighborhood full of people attracted to its aesthetics. All cities need something with more character than Speedway and Grant for an identity, and that character is in downtown Tucson, and the potential is enormous. My son and I are so passionate about this that we couldn’t have said no to the opportunity.”

Even the Menlo Park Neighborhood Association is saying yes to the opportunities. Dixon describes his relationship with the association as “fantastic.”

“When we first came in,” he says, “they were very suspicious of us, and rightfully so with developers they don’t know. But we worked to incorporate the neighborhood’s desires into the project; we’ve integrated their neighborhood into the project. It seems like it’s as much their project as ours; they even named the streets. And we continue to work to try and develop cultural uses inside the project that dovetail with existing festivals and parties and traditions from the neighborhood.”

Lillian Lopez-Grant, president of the Menlo Park Neighborhood Association, declares, “We’re absolutely thrilled this is going to happen.

“It’s been a lot of meetings, a lot of heartbreak, all those things that go into a planning process,” she says, “but the people of Menlo Park have risen to the occasion. They know that change is inevitable and it’s better that it be made with our cooperation. We can be the developers’ best friend or their worst enemy. We can make their lives miserable if they don’t listen to us, and they know it. These developers are great people.”

Lopez-Grant hopes these new homes and urban environment will lure her neighbors’ adult children back to the neighborhood, and admits she wouldn’t mind trading in the swamp-cooler house she’s lived in for 60 years for one of the new residences.

Her main concern now, she says, is that the development could cause surrounding property taxes to shoot up. She has been meeting with the city manager and other officials about this. “They’re working on a tax abatement program so folks don’t lose their homes,” she says. “People are already beginning to sweat with the increase in property values.”

Design mastermind Weiner’s chief concern now, he says, is the intrusion of reality into the development. “We’ve been involved in several projects where the intentions have been very high-minded with a sense of responsibility on the part of the developers, but the immense pressure they’re under to balance financial and demographic and architectural concerns are such that many high-minded ideals get watered down and are never realized. I’m already beginning to believe there may be pressure like that in this case; environmental issues and sustainable-development issues like water harvesting and local materials usage require a lot of money to do well.”

Counters Dixon, “So far the plans we have coming in from the homebuilders are exactly within the code, using masonry and earthen materials, real iron and desert vegetation. It’s going to be very authentic. And we’re working very closely with Emily Nottingham and Ann Vargas at Community Services at achieving affordability in 24 units, which is difficult with adobe and rammed earth. We’re working out how that gets subsidized by us, or the city, or grant programs.”

Says Wuelpern, “The rule we’ve set up for everybody on the team is, let’s design and build this so it’s so desirable that we’d want to live here. It’s not a business proposition; we hope it will become a legacy and an attraction for Tucson.”

BACK