Time for downtown Iowa City to evolve

In the past few months, the doors have closed for the final time at a handful of Iowa City bars.

They said it would happen after City Councilors passed, and voters affirmed, an ordinance banning 19- and 20-year-olds from the businesses after 10 p.m.

They were right - although the adjustment has come much more slowly and less dramatically than some would have had us believe. I've yet to see a single tumbleweed cross the Ped Mall, for all the talk of 21-only turning downtown into a ghost town.

No, four months after one bar owner's clever “Death of Downtown Iowa City Party,” the city's heart seems to be beating just fine. And I don't mean to sound callous, but that's life in business: evolve or die. But evolve into what? So far, there's no real consensus. That's got some people worried, but not Iowa City City Manager Tom Markus.

“Everybody's in a hurry to backfill those spaces, but to me there's a lot of homework that needs to be done,” he said when he sat down with members of The Gazette editorial board this week.

“I think there are still a lot of opportunities that we haven't explored yet.”

Markus is still finding his feet here, but he said one of the things that's surprised him about Iowa City is how often growth has just seemed to sort of happen.

What we need is a plan, he said, using data and stakeholder input - a common vision of a newly evolved downtown.

Failure to do so will lead us down the same road we went down the last time downtown underwent a major shift - when retail shops closed in droves from the impact of big box retailers and the Coral Ridge Mall, he warned us.

No one seemed to give much thought back then to what would come next, and look where it got us: a proliferation of “big box bars,” as Markus calls them, and a dramatically altered downtown.

Contrast that with recent plans for areas like Towncrest or the Riverfront Crossings District - a flooded-out light industrial district that planners hope to turn into a urbanish, sustainable mixed-use neighborhood.

Who'd guess, looking at the shi-shi character renderings of green space, chic apartment buildings and little bistros, that the area's current tenants include a defunct wastewater treatment plant and a handful of auto shops.

I like to call the area - bordered by Burlington Street to the north, and extending to Gilbert, Highway 6 and Riverside Drive - SoBur.

I don't mean to get ahead of myself - SoBur is still just a vision.

Just the kind of vision that will help our newly sober downtown evolve.

Comments: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net