TULSA: OUR NEXT 100 YEARS
Mayor / AIA Conference on City Design
January 18, 1996
Speaker: Mayor Joseph P. Riley

Introduction by Mayor M. Susan Savage

Mayor M. Susan Savage: Many of you have listened to him talk about the fabulous work he has done in his own city and know the source of inspiration he has been to many of us who have worked and learned through the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National Endowment for the Art City Design Institute. But let me tell you a little bit about Joe Riley as mayor and Joe Riley as the individual. And one of the things I learned about Joe last night is while today is Tulsa’s birthday, tomorrow is his. So we wish him a happy birthday tomorrow.

Joe Riley is widely considered to be one of the most visionary, most effective governmental leaders in the United States. In the U.S. Conference of Mayors organization, we consider him really to be a mayor among mayors. He is a standard for so many of us. He has served as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the first mayor from his state to be so honored. He also served as chairman of the National League of Cities Urban Conservation Task Force and chairman of the Cities Task Force of the Southern Growth Policies Board. He is an honorary American Institute of Architects member and a recipient of the AIA Jefferson Award.

While president of the Conference of Mayors, Mayor Riley co-founded, along with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mayors’ Institute for City Design. And I must tell you, having been a participant in that a year-and-a-half ago, that for mayors who are in positions of guiding development, guiding public policies and guiding a process, it is one of the most useful workshop-conference resources I have had the pleasure and the honor to experience. Inviting Mayor Riley to come to Tulsa so that we can hear from him has been a goal of mine since I attended and heard him speak in San Antonio.

In 1990, Mayor Riley was named South Carolinian of the Year. The world watched his leadership at work during the highly visible crisis of Hurricane Hugo. But one of the things that makes Joe Riley a standout is his leadership skills, with the day-in and day-out ability to bring people together to work collaboratively, selflessly, and productively for the greater good of the community. He’s had an extremely creative approach to public housing and providing efficient, attractive, scattered-site living space for low-income families. And the work he has done in Charleston is considered a model for inner cities and won a Presidential Design Award.

Mayor Riley is a graduate of The Citadel and the University of South Carolina School of Law. He and his wife, Charlotte, have two sons, Joe and Bratton. Mayor Riley is also a runner. I don’t think he made it out along the River Parks system today, but next time he comes back to Tulsa, we’ll make sure he gets out along our trail system.

It’s a great pleasure to present to you today Mayor Joe Riley of Charleston, S.C.

Speaker: Mayor Joseph P. Riley

Mayor Joseph P. Riley: I am here to talk about the American city, and why we must love it, and how we go about doing that. And doing that, I will talk about my city, the City of Charleston. If somebody will start dimming the lights (for slides); and as already was said, those of you who have not finished eating, please stop. [laughter] Continue to enjoy your meal and the dessert.

Charleston is a very old American city. It was a city built before the elevator, as Jonathan mentioned, and a city that was preserved in mothballs as a result of the economic devastation after the Civil War. When the Industrial Revolution was occurring, and when the Oil Boom was happening here in Tulsa, there was no yeast of economic development in Charleston. So a city built largely in the 18th and 19th centuries, a city built on human scale, was preserved, and entered the mid-20th century, when people were smart enough in Charleston to understand the value of what we had, and the need to preserve it.

But Charleston is not a museum piece, and it’s not a movie set. It’s a real live American city with all of the wonderful challenges and opportunities that we face in our country.

And Charleston’s made plenty of mistakes. This was the Charleston Hotel — designed by America’s first architect, Robert Mills — site of the Democratic Convention of 1856. In the 1950s, the city fathers insisted on demolishing it in the name of progress, because what they knew Charleston needed was a motel like this. I mean you, weren’t going to be a great city without a motel. This was the Heart of Charleston, and you had to have a Heart of Charleston or Tulsa, whatever, if you were going to be a great city. And of course, as so often happens, the Heart of Charleston isn’t there any longer, either. We lost a wonderful hotel, and we lost the temporary replacement. We’ve made plenty of mistakes. We need to keep from making them.

We started 20 years ago working in housing in the poor sections of our city, in dealing with the challenge of vacant lots. Every city has them, and what do you do with them? Well, you build housing, affordable housing, for people. In Charleston, houses look like this. They’re frame, largely; they abut the sidewalk; and these are in moderate-income neighborhoods, the result of one of our paying programs. But in the ’50s and ’60s, when they built housing for people of modest means, rather than build something attractive, they built that ugly thing and they put a cyclone fence around it so you would know it was an unsafe neighborhood, if you weren’t sure. And set it back so it bore no relationship to the neighborhood. They stuck it back there! It was ugly as sin! In the name of doing something that worked well.

I remember that when we started working on housing, decent housing for people, a former member of our City Council came up to me and said, "Joe, you’re wasting money, and for those kind of people, it really doesn’t matter what it looks like." And of course it matters. It matters to everyone. The need for beauty is embedded in the human instinct. There is never an excuse for anyone, but particularly a government, to ever build anything in a city that doesn’t add to the beauty of the community.

I knew there had to be a way to build nice-looking housing for poor people, for crying out loud! So we had an architectural competition in 1976. Selected a young architect who back then had the guts to design something that looked like other things. And that’s the yellow house. It was brand new housing. Fit in with the neighborhood. Didn’t cost any more than the ugly stuff. And usually it doesn’t. You could build in one or two or three units.

So, luckily, we had experience when the housing authority called me one day and said, "Mayor, we got the grant for the new housing project, and we’re so excited."

And I said, "Well, we’re not going to build us any more housing projects."

They said, "Mayor, we’ve got this waiting list, you’ve got to do that."

I said, "No. If we’re going to build housing, public housing, we’re not going to build any more of these things. These things have failed. They ignore every accumulated lesson of Western Civilization for the last 750 years about building cities. They ignore the neighborhood, they ignore the street, they ignore individuality. They put people in a complex and visibly stamp on them ‘I am poor. This isn’t a good place.’ They are dismal failures, and we’re not going to build them any more. We’re going to spread them around the city."

So the housing authority, to their credit, finally said OK. They knew I was wrong, but they were afraid to disagree.

Then we started the interesting process of finding places in the city for these. You know, it’s created a nice dialogue in the community because the average American doesn’t wake up in the morning, then turn to his spouse and say, "Honey, you know, I swear I wish we could get us some public housing next door on that vacant lot. You know, we haven’t ever had any of that." So we had to do what Susan does. We worked with neighborhood leaders and we would agree to maybe not so many. Then we hired some architects and told them what we wanted, and they designed some scattered-site buildings, and they were ugly, so we fired them and hired some other architects, and then they got the picture, and this is what we built. That’s public housing. Didn’t cost any more than the monoliths. Same per-square-foot costs.

When I was getting ready to open these, I was at a cocktail party at the home of the president of The Citadel one night, and a domestic servant came up to me, very politely. She knew she just had a few seconds, and she said, "Mayor Riley, I want to thank you."

I said, "What’s that for, Ma’am?"

And she said, "Monday, I’m moving into No. 6, Marion Street." It’s one of these units. And she said, "It’s so beautiful."

And I thought to myself, "Of all these maybe millions of times mayors collectively have been thanked by tenants of public housing, maybe never before had the tenant used the word ‘beautiful,’ and why not?"

When Prince Charles came to Charleston for a big international meeting, the only photo opportunity he wanted was right in front of these, where we were re-planting a tree. Hurricane Hugo had knocked that tree down. Because he felt that was the most important architectural lesson that Charleston, S.C., had to offer the rest of the world: how to build handsome buildings for people of modest means. And it was so interesting. We took him into the apartment to the left there. An elderly resident and her grandson lived there, and here was the prince, the future king of England. (At least, that what it looked like back then.) And here was this lady on welfare, and you know what? There was no foot shuffling. She was completely at ease. She was a marvelous woman. But, what she knew was, she was living in a home of beauty, and she was pleased to be able to show that to this very famous and distinguished visitor.

This unit we built on Cummings Street was in an area where there’d been no investment in a generation. And we had to work hard to get this. These two units of public housing leveraged over 75 units of market-rate housing. Restored some houses across the street, and the city helped with some of these. New construction to the south. Looks like old; it’s new. New construction around the corner. Beautiful public housing became a catalyst rather than a detriment, because of the commitment to urban design, and to making it a place of beauty.

After Hurricane Hugo, these were what we call "freedmen’s cottages." They were the first buildings that the African-Americans built after the Civil War when they were allowed to own property. And rather than demolish them, we understood that it was a building type that was important, and the scale was nice. So, working with Habitat for Humanity, we had them restored. That type, or prototype, helped us when we were working with transitional housing, building houses for people who were transitioning from our shelter for the homeless but weren’t ready to mainstream yet. We hired a group of young architects, and they designed what was award-winning transitional housing for people really moving out of the cart, moving out from under the car on the street. And when we had the ribbon-cuttings for those, it was so interesting to see these people who had been homeless, shelter-bound, move into something again that they knew was physically beautiful. And it is. And it’s become catalytic for the neighborhoods. And normally you would worry about that.

This is a new housing development one of our non-profits did. It is housing for mentally ill people who are able to work in the community, but need some guidance and assistance. This was a corner vacant lot. There were some old houses we restored, and then this is new infill. It’s got a common courtyard. It serves that purpose. Takes care of a population that we need to care for in our city, but again, adds to the physical beauty of the neighborhood.

We’ve resisted the bulldozer at every turn. You know, we started historic preservation in Charleston in the 1920s, and when we started working in poor neighborhoods, we just took that ethic uptown, believing that if it worked downtown, it should work uptown. And you know, cities need memories. Buildings are memories. We all need memories. We need memories, whether it’s a photograph album or memories or stories of grandparents, whatever. But when a bulldozer lazily bulldozes down — and at times they’ve got to go, but when you lazily do it — you rob the memories of the neighborhood or the community and it may take generations to rebuild something like that. We’ve done several hundred of these houses that look beyond repair. Host of different housing programs. Us, non-profits, for-profits, whatever. But it has changed these neighborhoods. These were neighborhoods where people were moving out. Crime rate was going up. Crime rate now is coming down. People are moving in. There’s a sense of pride, of home ownership. Rental, rehab, or whatever, but the heritage and memories of those neighborhoods are intact.

This is one, and as I said, there are several hundred. We can do a lot of "before and after," but this is one. We just had a ribbon-cutting on this last year. A non-profit did it, working with us. And it was so awful, and now it’s so beautiful. These are for very poor people. Rent subsidy. I took these pictures myself, and this thrilled me so much, a wonderful Southern Charleston piazza: It’s a top-floor apartment for a person of modest means, but in a building that’s added greatly to the beauty of the neighborhood.

These were houses that the university was going to demolish to build a parking garage, and we got them to give them to us, and put them on this corner lot on one of these cross-towns we built 30 years ago, which we wouldn’t build now, that cut a swath through the city. But it was a vacant lot and it would help. It was on a little street called Crackie Street, and we had been doing some rental rehab projects with some developers in there. When we had the ribbon-cutting ceremony on those, I’d been studying the street and I noticed this wonderful tree arching out over the street. It actually grows, you know, out of the street. Obviously, no good traffic engineer would let you do anything like that now, have a tree coming right out of the street, but this one luckily was done before they could do anything about it, so it was very nice the way it covered the street. But I noticed this awful-looking house right under it. You can see the top of the branches.

So I went to our building official and my staff, and I said, "We need to buy that, acquire it, condemn it, whatever. We will fix it up."

Well, so the building official called me and he said, "Mayor, that building is beyond repair; it has to be demolished." And fair enough, it was bad enough to where they couldn’t take the electrical meter off the building. It was a structural component.

But I said, "Well, let’s go take a look."

He said, "Mayor, it’s likely to fall down on you."

I said, "Well, let’s take a risk." I found a builder, and we got it restored as affordable housing. And it’s a resurrection ethic, what that says to that street. Crackie Street’s a little street, a modest street, affordable street, but rather than a dying street, it’s now coming alive.

During one of those ribbon-cutting ceremonies, a lady came up to me and said, "Mayor Riley, I want to tell you something."

I said, "What’s that?"

She said, "It used to be when people asked me where I lived, I was embarrassed to tell them ’cause everybody knew how ugly Crackie Street was." And she said, "Now, I can’t wait for people to ask me, because everybody knows how beautiful it is." Commitment to urban design.

This was a house that was hurt after the hurricane, and it really was in bad shape. The utility poles are actually straight. It’s the house that was leaning.

So, the building official put up barricades and he called and said, "Mayor, I just wanted to let you know, we’re demolishing No. 17 Fishburke Street tomorrow."

And I said, "No, we can’t demolish that."

And he said, "Mayor, it’s going to fall and kill people. I’m the chief public safety officer. It’s got to come down!"

I said, "Well, I don’t know that it’s got to come down."

He said, "It’s leaning against the house next door." I said, "Well, what if we moved those people out into a Howard Johnson’s for a few weeks, while we fix the thing back? I mean, they wouldn’t mind that." And it turned out they loved it. It was in summer; they had the swimming pool at the Howard Johnson’s; they thought it was terrific.

So we got a developer, and they pulled the thing back, and it was in pretty bad shape. But that’s what it looked like. Five units of affordable housing, an office on the first floor. And you see, it was on that same cross-town and if you’d lost the corner, then the rest little bit of that neighborhood would have never made it. It would have gone. But we saved the corner and that little piece of public realm. A bit of the sidewalk and a piece of the strip there. It’s doing well. We saved the building, and we saved the neighborhood.

Now downtown was like every downtown in America. It was dying, if not dead. People moved out. All the things we discussed today, and all the things we understand. We worked hard at it, and we all must work hard at it. It’s the hardest thing we do. But the reason we have to work hard at it is, that is our public realm. That is the most democratic space of a city. We cannot relegate the next generation of Americans to living in a community where things are increasingly privatized and where there aren’t the opportunities for mutual celebration. That’s what the marketplace means! That’s what downtown means! That’s why Main Street is so important! You own the sidewalk. It belongs to you if you’re the richest person, the poorest person. You have the same equal enjoyment of it. It will never happen in the malls. The malls are wonderful and they’re convenient, but where the buildings come to the sidewalk, the public buildings, the shopping buildings, the marketplaces and the hearts of our cities are something that belongs to everyone, and at all costs we’ve got to work to save them and to make them more beautiful and to make them more inspirational places. That’s why we work so hard at it. It’s not just about the buildings. It’s about saving the public realm for human beings who need it in their cities. Every city needs a center, and human beings need centers.

Well, our downtown was like everyone else’s and we started with a program to show what the buildings used to look like, and get owners to fix them up. We did a number of prototypes. This is one. A wonderful man owned the building. He’d been a most-generous contributor to my campaign. Shocked that the city wouldn’t let him demolish the building. But you know what? There are no dentists operating on Main Street. You know, you take the tooth out and you can’t put it right back in. Once it goes, it will languish, that vacant space, for a long time, and will kill. Just like a vacant store in a shopping mall. The mall owners quickly replace it. You can’t do it on a main street.

So we got a lot of different grants and fixed it up and put housing over it. We’ve done several hundred units of housing on second and third floors of buildings. So important, as Jonathan mentioned, when you have people, it will change the whole chemistry. The 24-hour neighborhood. Jane Jacobs. We all understand it. It’s very important.

This is the Schwartz Building. It was a prototype. Before and after. This building — Hugo knocked it down, dad-blame it! And with our design guidelines, we were able to get a new one built in its place. The dentist was able to work there because that part of the city had achieved a sufficient level of economic health.

Well, this was the hardest challenge. This was our traditional Main Street. King Street is your main street. That’s King Street. It had 100 percent when I was growing up. Three department stores were right there. And then we had this vacant lot. This is Market Street. Market Street had started coming back. Visitors were coming there, but this vacant lot was like the Berlin Wall. People wouldn’t cross that to get to the main street. So our urban-design challenge was to put enough stuff there — and the right stuff. Enough critical mass so that you would move from Market Street to King Street and energize King Street above and below that.

Now, it’s so interesting. This became very controversial in our city, and a lot of people who were against it would have settled for something dinky. Something little. You know, do anything at the time. And you never do that in a city! You never do that in the heart of the city! No one can. You never can do anything, even if it’s wrong, or just to do something. It’s got to be the right thing, and you‘ve got to know it’s the right thing because you’re dealing with the public realm. So we got the right combination. We insisted that the buildings, as Jonathan showed you, should be to scale on the perimeter, with the bulk of the buildings set back. We insisted on retail with store-fronts on the first floor. It took a long time. It was very expensive, and all of that. But we had the vacant lot, and this is how you looked down on Market Street. A vacant lot to the left, and we were able to get the project done. A huge success. The stores all do more per square foot than the other kinds of stores in the southeast, and its catalytic energy has far exceeded our fondest hopes. In fact, I’ll show you in a minute, but catty-cornered across from here, right now under construction, opening in October, will be Saks Fifth Avenue, on our main street. Twenty years ago, if you’d said you’d get a Saks to come to King Street, people would have talked about involuntary committal, or something like that.

There were two other urban-design challenges here. This is the conference center, part of it. You see the main hotel there — and this is a little detail, but although we need the big plans, we really need to sweat the details, too. The developer — this is the elevator corridor, obviously, in the middle — wanted the pre-assembly space for the conference center on that side because it was close to the elevators. So you move in, and it makes a lot of sense, and you overlook the graveyard. I said, "Well, that doesn’t sound like too much fun to me. It’s a pretty graveyard and all, like that." But more importantly, we wanted that pre-assembly space to front on our main street. Because we’ve got so many buildings in our cities that aren’t real, that are false walls, you need the reality of the buildings and the energy that goes there to translate down to the people on the street and vice versa.

So we told them they had to do that and, to their credit, they re-designed it, at considerable additional expense, and then later said it was one of the smartest things they did because it gave the people inside the building, looking out through these windows, a wonderful view of reality. A wonderful view of a main street, and the energy from there to the street and up the street. It was very important.

A main street is an ecosystem. Just like in an ecosystem, there are plenty of unintended consequences of well-meaning action. So what we knew was, we had created this critical mass. If we just sent the energy down Market Street (that was doing pretty good), we would have failed. We had to send the energy up King Street. So we bricked this one section of King Street, just north of it, where it was kind of hurting. We sold the bricks. You’d get your name on it, $10 a brick. We sold so many, we got the free-enterprise bug and raised it to $25 and kept selling the bricks.

People want so badly to invest, and emotionally invest, in their downtown. Come and see the bricks. We have wonderful events there during Christmas and it’s a great success. This slide is at Christmas.

Right after we opened Charleston Place, I was walking up the street one Sunday after church to pick up some newspapers, and I saw a retired retailer, who lived in the suburbs and whose retail store was in the suburbs, walking down the sidewalk. I said, "Harold, what’re you doing down here this morning?"

He said, "Well, Doris and I went to early church, and she had some things to do around the house, and I just wanted to — uh —." He said, "I’ll tell you the truth, Joe." He said, "I just wanted to come down and park the car and walk around, because it’s so beautiful and I’m so proud of it."

The restored public realm is something. There is a yearning in the heart of every resident of a metropolitan area. They may not articulate it, but they want it. They need it. And if you give it to them, they will rejoice in it.

It’s done all the catalytic things we wanted. We’ve got probably 50 buildings that have been restored and half-a-billion dollars, which is a lot for our community, invested. And that’s the Saks Fifth Avenue that’s under construction.

Design review is important. I know it’s controversial, but it works well in Charleston. This is a building — right around the corner from Charleston Place (not on King Street, but another main street), and a church down there wanted to demolish it for parking. It is not fun to argue with the church. And we all know that if you can’t drive right up to the church, you’re not going to heaven. If you’ve got to walk a couple of blocks, you know, it’s not going to be good. Anyway, to make a corner surface parking lot when it isn’t necessary would be wrong, so we held our line. New bank was formed. They acquired the building, restored it as a new bank building, and we found the parking for the church right down the street. Usually, if you work hard enough, there’s a win-win situation.

Parking is such a challenge in the American city, and probably few things have done more to scar our cities than the wrongful addressment of parking. Well, we had to build a parking garage. This is East Bay Street, right up from the Exchange Building, which is the most historic building in South Carolina, and we were doing this while we were building Waterfront Park. We had to build a handsome building. So we selected some architects, and I said, "Now, this is a very delicate area and we need to make sure this building doesn’t look like a parking garage."

And the architect was very courteous and he said, "Mayor, you don’t understand. In architecture, ‘form follows function,’ and a building is supposed to look like what it is."

And I said, "Well, that’s a terrific concept, but we’re not going to use that at this location in Charleston. We might try it in some other places, but I’d like it to look like a building with the shutters closed." You have a lot of that in Charleston.

And they kept sending renderings with the louvers half-done, and we finally got our police photographer to go around town and take pictures of all the buildings with shutters closed on them. Sent them to them, and I said, "That’s what we want here. We want it, to the eye, to be so gentle." We built it. Won a top award. Frank Hodgell, head of the National Endowment for the Arts, came down to present the award to us. I thought he knew where the garage was. We were going to have lunch before the ceremony. We walked right past the garage. Two blocks past, he said, "Joe, when we get to the parking garage, will you point it out to me?"

I said, "Frank, we passed it two blocks ago."

One of the biggest law firms in the state has their Charleston office on the first floor. You can usually do that. It’s not always necessary. It doesn’t always fit, but the delicate treatment of the public realm, the sidewalk, is important because these buildings can be so harsh and so anti-urban.

This was at Charleston Place, the other urban-design challenge we had. We needed a big parking structure. These were old derelict warehouse mercantile buildings. Rather than demolish them and put the garage there, we acquired the buildings, tore down the back, up to 50 feet. Some of the preservationists said, "That’ll never work. They’re storefront buildings."

I said, "No. They’re not storefront buildings. You can do something with 50 feet in a city." We put the garage behind it. The buildings were restored. All of them, so successful. Restaurants, shops. Terrific. Very attractive. Put the parking behind it. It’s a handsome building in its own right and it worked. It’s a huge success.

This is one of our newest parking facilities that we built near the old Citadel, and it works so well. You know, I read once that Vince Scully, the great architect and writer, was walking across Red Square with Louis Kahn and he looked at St. Basil Cathedral and he said, "Louis, isn’t it so wonderful, how those spires beautifully reach the sky?" And Kahn said, "Yeah, Vincent, and isn’t it so beautiful how the building touches the ground?" You know, the tops of buildings are nice things to celebrate in a city, but no one occupies the city up there. Humans occupy the city on the sidewalk, and it’s much more important what happens at that meeting place than anywhere else.

This is a parking garage, but it is so gentle on the sidewalk, with the openings and the shrubbery. It’s a pleasure to walk by, and I look forward to walking by it. Parking does not need to harm a city. This is a parking lot we built, and one of the nicest compliments we ever got was, when we were building it, a fellow stopped one of the construction people and said, "What’s that new park the city’s building there?"

He said, "Man, this isn’t a park. It’s a parking lot."

We were putting all these big trees in the parking lot. He couldn’t understand why you’d do that. There’s no reason a parking lot’s got to be ugly. There’s no reason anything’s got to be ugly. Well, this parking lot was doing so well, and we’d put it on land we’d leased for 30 years from adjacent landowners. They all came to me and said, "Joe, look, this thing’s going so well, we ought to go ahead and put up a parking garage."

I said, "No, this is nice, a little green space in the city."

And they said, "Well, all right." But I knew, when the lease was up, what they were going to do, right? Well, we, like Tulsa, had just passed a landscape ordinance and a tree ordinance that restricts your ability to cut down trees when they get to be a certain size. So I confidentially had this conspiracy with our Parks Department, and they calculated how much fertilizer you’d have to give these trees to where in 25 years, they’ll be too big to cut down.

And I love parking there. I pay, and it’s great. We’d planted some oleanders. I bought a few of these for the city myself. Lady Banister roses. And particularly, the wonderful flowering peppermint peach tree. These are all in that little parking lot. It’s so beautiful in late February and early March there. It’s an inspirational place. It cost a few bucks more, but it makes a huge difference.

And, as Jonathan was showing you, the citizens have the right, and in fact, it’s important that we understand that in America, it is OK. It’s a democracy. If you don’t like what the Mayor and City Council do, there’s a way to get rid of them, and it doesn’t have to be a firing squad. It happens every two years. So it’s OK, in America, for us to collectively decide what the rules should be in our city, the collection of which is the public realm. It’s quite OK. In fact, it’s so democratic because it influences and affects you.

Anyway, this is an old hotel. They wanted to restore it. They couldn’t. They demolished it and built that. This one is five stories, this one is seven stories. Looks the same. Now to replicate and repeat what’s done is not a good rule in the city. We have the courage to build what we build now, contextually, and make a statement that will be appreciated and, as Susan said, valued hundreds of years from now. But this caused us to study height limits, and we had the preservationists and business community fighting, and, you know, everybody was mad about a height limit. Well, we put it to them and brought it to the table. We hired Hammer Siler George to do a marketing analysis of the envelope requirement of the city. They came back and said, "If you stick with the current envelope, the relative scale, you will have all the square footage you need in Charleston at least until the middle of the 21st century."

So that enabled us to make one of our most important land-use planning decisions, height limit. It varies, but you know, most cities really need six five-story buildings more than they need one 30-story building. Because most downtowns have places that could use those six pieces of energy, rather than one that so often creates a big piece structure.

Now cities are different. But for Charleston, it was just a huge success for us. This is where the old Hotel was and where the Motel was. This is now Nation's Bank Center. Design guideline process and it's a very fine and successful building.

This is a waterworks building. We had done, luckily, and the thing about setting rules is that you've got the right to do it. But also, if you don't do it,... If you don't have the rules, you're usually going to lose. You can't job on somebody and them think that you just scratched your head and just came up with an idea, when they've got this idea. Well luckily, we'd done some design guidelines for this area that said when new construction comes, there is still a lot of housing and you ought to try to have the rhythm of what you build and the scale of what you build take a bow to the residential. So a architect was hired to do this building he designed a wonderful triangular building, which he'd been dying to do for years since he was in architecture school. But it had nothing to do with that part of our city. We showed him the design guidelines, he's a brilliant architect, he said, "make a lot of sense." He redesigned the building. Very contemporary, very handsome, you can't see it, but in the little indentions there are little gardens. It make you feel like the repetition of the single house. But you've got to have rules.

This is a new bank building right next to Charleston Place and when the developers were doing that, they needed a little bit of land to the back. On the back the city had a piece of parking lot and I said, "we'll sell you the land, at appraised value, but we want retail on the street." And they said, No, our client doesn't want any of that mixed use stuff. They don't want any of that." I said, "that's too bad, you know, you've got to read what Holly White said, why Madison Avenue works so well. Every 21 feet there's another storefront. It pull people along. that's what they do in the malls. that's what we do on our nice streets. We spent all this money to tie Market Street to King Street, I'm not going to have you build an office building on a side street that turns a blank wall to everybody." They did it. They came back and said, " you know, that really was a good idea we had on that retail because the rent we're getting per square foot is so much better that on the office." And I said, "well it really was (a good idea)."

This was a terrible fire we had and i went up there that night. this is in the uptown of our commercial district. Almost all minority businesses or businesses with minority trades. It was really struggling. It was close to dying. We knew it had a future. I was afraid the whole block would be lost. The next morning, that's what it looked like. They saved the rest of the block. The building Inspector called me at 8:00 o'clock he said, "Mayor, I just wanted to let you know they were given the demolition permit on the Houston building". I said, "oh, wait a minute now, let's go take a look." He said, "Mayor! That thing is going to fall on the street! It's going to kill people! It's a State Highway!" I said "look...if that thing comes down, do you know what will be there for the next 30 years? A surface, rubble-filled parking lot! It will kill that block! We have got to find a way to save it!" He said, "it'll fall down." I growled and to make a long story short, we barricaded around it. We bought the facade. We put money in it. I got the owner to agree to let us do the facade and he said, "now I'm just going to build a one story building back." I said, "well, that's going to look really stupid! We've got a 2 story facade, we've got a one story building!" He said, "well, there ain't nobody going to want an office up there." I said, "you build it, the city will rent it. We need some office space."

So he built it. We rented it. And we eventually moved out and let me show you, that was framing it up and then that's what it looks like now. we rented and then when we moved out (we had fulfilled our lease), a restaurant company, who's got several restaurants moved their headquarters there. But that saved that block.

Now last Saturday, we dedicated a wonderful business, a few stories form there, owned by an African-American man. We helped him acquire the building and it was so touching and he gave a speech. The gut looks like he's a tackle for the Dallas Cowboys and in his speech, you know, thanking his family, this great big guy started crying and he was talking about the fact that he now had a business and owned a building a street that was going to be so successful. It does have a future, but if this building had been gone, if we'd let it do, that wouldn't have happened. One building can make a huge difference.

Charleston was founded on the water and like many cities, we turned our back on it for important uses. This is an area that had a big fire in the 50's and a guy wanted to build a Venice of the Southeast in the early 70's. Tall buildings, close it off to the public. We acquired it with the threat of imminent domain, it's a long story, but finally, he got a pretty good deal and it was all right. Any city that is near water, the degree to which you can give people access to it, an inspirational access, beautiful access, in part, the degree by which you measure a great city. So we got some help from Jack Robinson and Jonathan Barnett and studied how the city used to be, we saw it as a wonderful opportunity to re-build an edge of our city. We built it and opened it 6 years ago and its a most treasured place in our city now a part of the public realm. People love it. A lot of people didn't want it saying, "public parks bring in the undesirables, cost money" and all like that. Everybody loves it, it's a huge success. It's a very simple place, a thing of beauty is a joy forever, it's very simple, it's not a busy park, we don't have any retail on it. It's a parks for people to come, to the part of life that is the urban experience, and be inspired by it. These little "rooms" we designed were inspired by Jefferson, they were supposed to all be open the way each of the pavilions at Charlottesville are slightly different. I got them to design each one, I even designed some of them myself, they let me. Each one is a little difference, because it 's a pretty big park, we wanted everyone to go there to feel like they can occupy it by themselves or a group. In some of them you go and sit by yourselves, some of the benches organized where you want to be with people, the pavement is different. It works, it really works, its just a extraordinary and huge success. these are swings we designed on the wharf, the swings are so successful, my wife and I walk down there often, the only times we've ever bee able to get into the swings are in February It thrills me to death because it 's so loved and so popular.

Details are so important, we wanted a gravel path on the waters edges. It's soft, the sound, it takes you away. But you know what, they didn't know how to do that. They showed us some gravel, it just looked ordinary. So I rejected that and I then challenged our people to get the right mixture. We did 50 samples. I though the woman would kill me. I'd come back and I'd way no, but we finally got it. It's like grandmas pound cake recipe. We got some from Texas, and others from here and there. But we got the right consistency for wheel chairs, high heals, the right color. It's a tine little detail but its so important. It's the prettiest gravel path in America, we';; give you the recipe for free.

Robert Stern has designed this complex behind it. This is a Lodge Alley. They wanted to demolish those for high-rise buildings It's called Lodge Alley because the first Masonic lodge that was built in American was right down there. We got a wonderful mixed use project, housing, offices bookstores, restaurants, inns, a wonderful mixed-use success.

Street are so important. This is at Calhoun Street, on the one end, a new bridge coming across one of our Rivers coming in, and on the other end of the street, on our peninsula, we're building the South Carolina Aquarium, which is under construction.

One of our preservation organization representatives came to me and he said, "Joe, do you have a plan for Calhoun Street, its going to get all this new development". I said, you know, I don't, I'm kind of embarrassed we don't. So we had a Calhoun Street planning committee and we got everybody together and they came up with the rules. What happens when you do these kind of things like your doing today is, you see things that should be obvious, but aren't obvious. What they said was Calhoun Street could become a great urban boulevard with fine public buildings -- colleges and universities on it and all like that.

We didn't know what Calhoun Street could be, but we had done the study, we had adopted it, we have the rules.

The son of one of my best supporters came forward with the idea of putting a Max Sleep hotel on Calhoun Street. We would have never been able to stop it if we hadn't done the rules. If I had just said, you know, I just don't think that's a good idea, well, what the heck, how do you treat someone like that. But we had done the rules so we fought them, we just won by one vote on the city council.

But rather that a cheap motel we stopped it. Then the county was going to move their main library out of the downtown which would have been terrible. So the city bought the land, gave it to the county, talked them into building the new library. So instead of a cheap motel, we've got the quintessence of the public realm, a new library on our future urban boulevard.

Well the design guidelines also said you've got all these vacant lots, the city owned one, in front of a building like this. It said, you ought to put buildings on the street just like Jonathan said. We never thought of that. So then the school board was going to moves their offices out of downtown. So we said what if we give you the land, we need to do something. So the city and the school board built a new building across the street. It's wonderful, the entrance to the school board's main office is directly on axis with the entrance to the library across the street. Because the community set the rules, rather than a pock-marked street with a cheap motels, we've got a grand urban boulevard. This is Calhoun Street too, Marion Square is on it. That's the old Francis Marion hotel to the left. Just like all hotels like that, it was closed and no one would touch it.

The bank said you're crazy. The college wanted it for dorms, well that's good. But that's on our main street. What our eco-system needed was a hotel to spin those people out and all the wonderful activities that happen, the money in their pockets. So we finally got the banks together, six of them, the loans, everything, it's being restored as a hotel. It's going to be beautiful, we're opening it next month. Having that hotel made the two blocks on either side have had more economic activity than it has had in two generations. The eco-system is very delicate.

Charleston is where the rainbow row movement started. People use to come to Charleston, largely in the Spring, to see the flowers and see some of the old building. That's a flowering peppermint peach tree. I took that picture the Spring before the hurricane and the hurricane killed that tree. It was right around the corner from us.

Charleston is a very delicate city and we had a tourism industry that started from being seasonal to year around. We had all of these visitors coming and we want all of you to come. But we didn't have a plan and we should have a plan. We want you to come, but you should come on our terms. It will make the city more enjoyable for you. So we changed where buses would come and carriages, we pedestian-ized the city. Our tourism since we started has gone from 1.7 million visitors a year to 5 million visitors a year. But the impact on our community has been reduced and its become a more enjoyable experience.

One of the things we needed was a visitors center so we looked in a declining area of our city, an old railroad district, and hired some architects. They came up with a wonderful plan to do come building like that. Luckily the preservation community didn't think it was good and stopped us. So we hired Jack Robinson and he aid, use the old building, they are wonderful, unusual lineal building. so that became our $13 million visitor center. It's wonderful, people pose to have their picture taken in front of the visitors center. Usually you pose to have your picture taken in front of some place you think is pretty. Well, the place is very beautiful, it's worked wonderfully, people park their cars over there. We've got another award winning parking garage, that I don't have time to show you. They get on shuttle buses.

This is another railroad, we had it restored and got the Chamber of Commerce to move in there. They wanted to move out of town. Everyone wants to move out of town, you know what Holly White said, six ways to dullify downtown and one of them is you get things like the county office complex to move out. You've got to fight hard to save them.

This is our bus building, it's the prettiest bus receiving building in America. that's Confederate Jasmine and wisteria growing up the columns. We wanted, when people arrive, to know they were staying in a place that was very special and very beautiful.

The uses, as I mentioned, what happens in a city are very important. In Charleston, we've got something we call the four corners of law, right by the city hall and I'll show that to you. City Hall is on the left, St. Michael's Church and County Courthouse on the right. Then I'm going to take you down the street and look back up the other way. On the left is the Federal Courthouse. Well the federal General Services Administration needed to annex the courthouse and they were going to build a giant building right there. We said you can't do that, they said we're going to leave. We said, no, that would ruin things we've got this old judicial district and so the city went around the corner and bought an old grocery store that tied into the back and gave it to the federal government and we worked with them to move the building back. so rather that a big building on that wonderful transitional space and little parks, they were able to tuck the building back and you park around the corner and there it is, and everybody wins.

We're now working with the county, they're re-doing their courthouse. We're keeping all of those uses downtown. It's very hard, a very great struggle, a lot of energy.

When parks die, a city dies. This is the old Hampton Park. The neighborhood changes, people began to be fearful. No one would go to the park, it had become run-down. The city had kind of turned it back on it. When we started working on this, I found out that even my best friends thought I had lost all my marbles. They knew that no one would go to Hampton Park. The neighborhood was not a good neighborhood anymore. Well, we did a good plan and opened up the park. You can see in through the azaleas, we moved the old band stand into a more symmetrical location, put in a central water feature.

Now, we used to have the rose beds, so we were going to put in new rose beds. I caught them putting the concrete curb in. I stopped them and said, no, we've got to put nice brick edges in around our rose beds. We sold our roses, five dollars a bush, you get to buy a bush and have it planted, get a certificate signed by me. We sold every bush. Its the biggest rose garden in South Carolina. You would get these letters that would make you weep by someone saying, "Mayor, you know Doris and I first courted there and she died last year, it really mains a lot to me". we've got a rose garden, its the safest park in the city, we don't have any crime in that park. Old people, young people, African American, white people using the park. That neighborhood is experiencing the fastest rise in property values of any part of our city.

We tried to get rid of cyclone fences. This is a park in a poor section of town and we're fixing it up. I said, we ought to telegraph to those people that its a special area. That we think its special there even though their incomes are low. So lets put a fence around that park like you find in the nicer parks in the nice area of the city. So we put a masonry and wrought iron fence and then that kind of made up get rid of all cyclone fences. They had put them up indiscriminately, you know for backboards and all like that. We're in to nice fences around all our parks. We design each one--what parks ought to be.

I'll cover this quickly, Jonathan mentioned it, Daniel Island. Extraordinary vegetation and a perfect opportunity to build a gated community. the golf courses, the gate, the security, and all the things that we've seen in America and it would be lovely. A lot of people with a lot of dough from all over would move there from all over and it would be terrific.

But, it would be a lot nicer if it were a public place and it was an urban village. A real community, that was our commitment with the plan. The first start, the sub-division is under construction. Yesterday I met with our park people on the design of the first park which will be underway this year. An office building is under construction, the largest parochial school in the state is moving there. Everything is public and its all of those things that we really know, as Jonathan said, will work. The pedestrian access, the frontage on the street, the retail, the parks, the water's edge access, and all of that--its going to be a great success.

This parks didn't use to have flowers when I was elected, it was right by City Hall. Flowers are so wonderful, I've had people stop me and say if you've got to raise my taxes I don't mind, keep planting those flowers. This is my recipe for a city that working, this is when we had an art show there, you have art, flowers and children paying there. If you've got those things happening at the same time, everything is going to be all right.

Trees are so important. On the right is a parking garage, built before the city really knew how to build really nice parking garages. So I was really kind of saddened by it. So I said, what if we put trees around it. So we planted an oak tree on one side of the parking garage and then at the other end, another oak tree that would come out over the street. Across the small street from the parking garage was a surface lot that the bank owned. So I went to the bank and I said, would you let our city plant oak trees in your parking lot along the edge. The bank said no Joe, we'll loose some parking. So we said, we'll re-stripe and give you some small car space, this was years ago and he said no we've got a lot of old people, they don't know about small car spaces, that wouldn't work. Then, about a week after we deposited about a half million dollars in the bank, the gut called me and said, Joe, you know, the board has been talking about those trees, and we think that could really work. So we got the trees and I was feeling really good. Then, the building to the left was to be built and it was a building we wanted. the owner came to us and said, we got to take the tree out for construction. My people said that's right, so I said, O.K., $700. for the cost of putting a similar sized tree back in two years later, so they gave us some money. But then it started, about one a month, the architect would come and say "the only place the utility vault can go ins there, we can't put the tree back." I said, it's too bad, the tree is going back. Then he'd come back and say, the dumpster service is only going to work on this building if you put it where that tree was. I said, that's too bad, find another place. So I could keep the tree but I know this would happen again.

About, a respectable amount of time that I was no longer Mayor, the new owner would come and say, "we like Joe, but he's kind of weird about trees and wee need to take that tree out. We had to find a way to keep that tree. So, on Arbor Day, we had a great big celebration and dedicated that tree, had a big crowd. To make it last, we had to come up with something so we said that tree was planted to commemorate one of the four walls of the original city. Actually, this is confidential, the original wall was about two and a half blocks a way, but nobody knew that.

We had this ceremony, there's this wonderful plaque there, so everybody will know, we even put a little garden back there. They'll never get rid of that tree. Now I'll tell you why that is important. Years from now, after I'm gone from office and gone from this earth, that piece of the tree will arch out, and the other one will arch out across the street. On an August day, that street will be shaded and there will be a nice breeze, and there will be birds in the trees and squirrels, and the human being that occupies that small part of out city will be occupying a place in which he or she can be at peace. That's why we need that tree. That's why we need trees, and that's why this is so important.

When we started with the waterfront park, in laying the sidewalks, Charleston had these slate sidewalks that were put in a couple of hundred years ago, so we found a blue stone of slate and put it in, but it didn't look right. The reason is that now they cut those stone in a quarry, the edges are so sharp, so it looked like a new patio. So our people came up with the idea of the torch, you just run it around the edge, it just pups off, because the slate is layered, it doesn't scorch it. It gets worn and it looks nice. It's a tiny little detail, but it makes a big difference.

This workman is, almost, on his hands and knees, he's squatting down attending to a little detail. Well, figuratively, that's how we've got to feel about our city. You know, its like the way we admire the infants tiny little feet and tiny little hands, or an heirloom or something that's important to us, that's precious, we give it extraordinary care and reverence. Well, that's how we have to feel about our cities, our gift to civilization. Our cities tell what kind of people we once were. Our cities shape our people.

Well, lets say we all agree about this, what about the average person out there, can we sell this stuff? Well, this is Burrow's Liquor Store, this is where I go when I need to buy alcoholic beverages. It's owned by a fellow who was a couple of years older that me and growing up I was deathly afraid of him. He was one of those guts who started shaving when he was eleven, you know, and was real big, has a switch blade. I'm so proud now, he likes me and doesn't want to beat me up or anything. One day I go in there, you all may relate to this, every person who works in that liquor store has a pistol on, you can do that in South Carolina with permits. So you go in this place, these guys selling liquor with pistols on. I walk up to the counter one day and they kind of converge and I said, oh heck, what have I done now. this is what those tough hombres at that liquor store wanted to talk to me about.

We use to have a place like this at an intersection with nice asphalt place in the middle that with those concrete buttons that no one would ever use and somebody, we were putting a water line through there, one of my friends sent me a note saying, why don't you plant some green stuff while you got it open. I sent the idea to my landscape architects, he thought it was good, came up with a little plan to put some vegetation there. So rather than have that, what we now have is that.

One of those guys with a pistol on said, Riley, that is the prettiest thing that I've ever seen. the other one said, you know where I live Joe, I go three miles out of the way going home at night just so I can ride by and look. another one said, you all irrigated that thing didn't you. the grass and all, and I said sure, the water lines right there. Another one said, I like the way you got the light shining on the oak tree. Another one wanted to tell me how the Charleston Place architecture blended in so well with the old. Another guy wanted to tell me how beautiful the flower bed was two blocks form his street.

The tough guys, pistols on, in a liquor store. Do Americans want beauty in the city? They desperately want it! They crave it! Life is harsh and cruel and plastic enough. Will our people support this? They will support it. They will rejoice in it. They need it. It is our responsibility to give it to them.

Well, if we can sell it out there, is there a moral imperative? Is the pressure raised? Yes... You see, a city has to be a place where the heart can sing. When I was jogging early one morning and we were under construction of the Waterfront Park, we had finished the southern end, a pier, and rebuilt it like it originally was, with stones. And the park was under construction out there. I argued with the architects. I thought we needed a big rail around it, and they said, "No. People won't fall off. It'd be nice to have it flow out to the water, and people might sit on the benches or sit on the stones sometimes." So, one morning I was jogging by there, and somebody was doing, at sunup, just what they said. Sitting on one of the stones, relaxed and enjoying the extraordinary and inspirational beauty. Well, I knew the person. I kept jogging. I didn't want to bother him. His name was Clarence Hopkins. He was an epileptic. He rode a bicycle, swept up in front of a filling station, shined shoes. Lived with his mother. Mumbled kind of funny, and frequently had seizures on the street. People knew him and they would help him. If we put people on a ladder, (which we shouldn't do) but socio-economically, he would have been at the first rung or below, and I saw him a few weeks later and I said, "Clarence I saw you at the park the other morning. Do you go there often?" And he said, "Joe, I go down every day." And I said, "Well, why is that, Clarence?" He said, "It's so beautiful," and he said, "I really like it in the mornings when the sun's coming up and those big ships are coming in."

You see, Clarence Hopkins has never been anywhere other than Charleston. He's never been to the rocky coast of Maine. He hasn't been to this beautiful Heartland. He hasn't seen our purple mountain majesties or amber waves of grain. He hasn't seen the sun set in the Pacific. He's never left Charleston, and he never will. If he is to find beauty in his life, the only place he has to find it is in his city. If we harm our cities, we can leave. We can go on vacation. Send the kids to summer camp. Move out. Whatever. But the Clarence Hopkinses can't. They are so dependent upon us giving them a place of beauty and inspiration. When we had the grand opening for the Waterfront Park, I hadn't seen Clarence in a while and I asked around and found out he'd had a stroke. Found his family; arranged for transportation, a handicap van. They brought him in a wheelchair. The family couldn't really understand why all the fuss was made for Clarence. I didn't introduce him or embarrass him. He had that kind of peaceful look on his face that stroke victims have. He couldn't talk. His cap was a bit askew on his head, but I had him there for me. And I had him there for all of those with whom I had worked on that project as a reminder. A reminder to all of us why we do what we do.

The moral imperative is that we must build great cities of the world for the Clarence Hopkinses and if we do, we build great cities for everyone.

Thanks very much.