Perhaps the most egregious awnings on 34th Street. Maybe the bottom one has some utility — but the other two?

Recently, I gave a tour of downtown Jamaica to a major retail developer. It was his initial close look at the downtown while walking. We met in a restaurant, and when we walked out on the sidewalk, the first words out of his mouth were, “The streets looks awful. The signs are terrible.” Nothing is more of an obstacle to downtown revitalization then poor storefront presentation – and nothing is more difficult to fix. Nope, not even street vending is as hard as trying to improve as retail signs, storefronts and the merchandising visible from the street.

Malls are able to have high quality signs and retail presentation because of their unitary ownership. Leases give mall owners review rights for retail presentation and have a long list of rules regarding their signs, storefronts and displays – and mall owners tend to enforce those rules. Downtowns have multiple owners, and even more individual retail tenants. There is little incentive for any landlord to enforce the sign provisions in their lease, since the woman next door isn’t enforcing hers and all you really want is your monthly rent check. Why alienate a high rent-paying tenant, who pays every month, over a trivial issue like how his store looks?

Typical old 34th Street retail presentation.

For downtown management organizations and local development corporations working to improve how the street wall presents itself seems sysiphisian. First, your landlord stakeholders really don’t want you pissing off their tenants. The tenants know their businesses and small retailers regard their businesses as fragile. They don’t want to mess with what works. Their garish neon signs, paper ads in the windows and racks on sidewalks are what they have always done, and their business has always produced a profit – “so, please leave me alone and let me do my business.” And who are BID managers with their fancy city planning degrees to criticize successful local merchants? Maybe they once worked a cash register when they were in high school, but really, what do they know about retailing? This is the classic case of The Tragedy of the Commons – a race to the bottom where each store does what they think is in their own interest resulting in an aggregate effect that hurts them and even more, their landlords. In fact, retailers’ interests are not congruent with those of their landlords. If a downtown generates more sales per square foot, landlords will change more rent and retailers’ profit margins will be squeezed. As Paco Underhill has documented, many successful, long-time retailers operate on unproven assumptions about what works in driving sales. They don’t really know what produces results in their stores – but they are loath to change anything when they are making money.

Retail storefront in Manhattan before improvement.

One of the initiatives we pioneered at Grand Central Partnership was a retail improvement program, the brainchild of the talented Norman Mintz, the industrial designer, who had been the successful downtown manager in Corning New York. The program was, and continues to be, led by my good friend Dan Pisark – who knows more about this stuff than anybody. The initial program model was to provide free storefront design services to midtown retailers. Very few showed interest. We then enriched the program by offering in addition to pay half the cost of storefront renovations. That also found few takers. Such programs have proliferated and continue to fight an uphill battle. Even those programs that offer to provide free design and pay 100% of the upgrade cost have difficulty finding interested store owners. This is truly a very, very difficult problem.

That same storefront after improvement.

Government regulation isn’t of much help. Zoning rules dictate where flashing neon signs can and can’t be. Building department regulations often govern letter size and projection limits. But materials, typeface selection and color go to the heart of design quality and aren’t capable of being constrained by government. Interior paper and other signs, roll down gates and piled up merchandise inside the store are nearly impossible to control and contribute to a sense of disorder and visual chaos in many downtowns. Building departments, which generally have insufficient resources to do their important work protecting building safety, don’t really want to get involved in matters of aesthetics.

Vine Street in Cincinnati.

But working with local government can prove valuable. One of the most effective things we did at the 34^th Street Partnership was to work the Department of Transportation, which had jurisdiction over the sidewalk, to ban projecting canopies affixed to the sidewalk. In 1992 the street was literally overwhelmed with projecting structures that retailers saw as advertising for the their businesses. Some were gigantic. Most were garish. None was for protection from the weather for customers. Many blocked great looking historic facades. Because DOT had authority over streets and sidewalks, those canopies were subject to the agency’s rule making. We persuaded DOT officials that the canopies served no useful public purpose, were often obstacles to pedestrian flow and were generally eyesores. DOT published a rule in the City Record banning poles holding up the ends of the canopies from being affixed to the sidewalk and limiting the distance awnings could project from buildings (some of which cantilevered yards over the sidewalk). They waited the requisite period. They held the required public hearing (at which only we, the retailers we had enlisted to support the change and a few medical practitioners trying to defend their signs appeared). Thirty days later, the ban became effective and the streetscape was transformed. The impact was amazing. The opening up of the view corridor along 34^th Street vastly improved the visual experience of shopping there. Since all of the canopies came down, no business suffered from a competitive disadvantage. It was one of the most dramatic downtown improvements I have experienced.

Main Street. Corning New York

New York State has an excellent Main Street program that subsidizes downtown retail façade improvement across the state, but the resources are limited and the state imposes no minimum design standard – so the outcomes vary. New York City has (incorrectly, in my legal view) determined that neither BID revenues nor City capital funds can be spent on private property – hamstringing the ability of NYC BIDs to work on this issue with their own dollars.

Typical Jamaica Avenue retail presentation

Downtown managers need to be sure that the design professionals with whom they contract to assist them in this work are familiar with best practices in Main Street improvement – which unfortunately is not always the case. Those Main Street program dollars are precious and it is important to make sure that they are effectively spent. What we have seen is that when a relatively small critical mass of landlords or retailers upgrade their signs and retail presentations, other property owners and merchants feel obliged to upgrade as well. This creates a virtuous circle. Getting to that critical mass should a higher priority for downtown management organizations.

A lovely structure in Jamaica with a terrific first floor banking room — covered in signs — almost all of which were compliant with New York City’s Building Code.

This work can be terribly slow and frustrating – but in my experience no other work is more important to attracting high quality retailers to downtown and improving the downtown experience for pedestrians. National retailers care about how their brand is presented and don’t want to have it tarnished by association with a retail strip they regard as substandard – whatever the economics and demographics of the surrounding community. Innovative small retailers and start-ups selling unique or unusual items want to be associated with a quality environment. Only by getting a handle on how existing merchants present themselves to consumers can these new companies and developers interested in making large capital investments in bigger format spaces be attracted to downtowns.

Jamaica Avenue storefronts. The facade on the left is a New York City landmark.