As another example of SteelStacks’ position as a model creative placemaking project, Tony Hanna pointed Gadfly to this “how-to” 2017 article (the precursor of the “how-to” manual we mentioned last time), “Five Steps toward Implementing Creative Placemaking.
SteelStacks is cited under step #3, the business case. “demonstrating the stakeholder benefits.”
Look at the distinguished company SteelStacks is keeping in the article — The Parks at Walter Reed, D.C.’s Monroe Street Market, the 303 Artway In Denver, the Union Market District in Northeast D.C.
Tony also provided a link to a 2012 article — “Smokestack Lightning: The Rebirth of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania” — that enables us to take a trip down Memory Lane, all the way back to 2004, when Mayor John Callahan presented ” Bethlehem’s design challenge” to the Mayors’ Institute on City Design in Chicago, a group Gadfly first heard about reading Jeff Speck this summer.
“Among the most memorable — and prescient — feedback [Callahan] received” at MICD “was to leave the blast furnaces as they were.”
And the rest is history, as they say.
So cute is Mayor Callahan’s dream future recounted in the article: “I always had this dream, when I first made the decision to run for mayor, that there was going to be a time in my life when I could load up the grandkids into the car and drive around Bethlehem 30, 40 years later and point to a few things that happened while I was mayor.”
At SteelStack the kids will have to look up.
These two brief articles are worth your perusal.
And worth thinking about how Wind Creek seems to be taking another path to making place.
Which is where Gadfly started this thread yesterday.