Bridgeport’s Heart is Beating Faster With List of Downtown Projects From Mayor Ganim
Speaking to BRBCl, Ganim places the city center at the center of the city’s priorities with theater redevelopment, Steelpointe, and Downtown North.
I kind of let Joe Ganim run my Monday for me, as it turned out.
Today was the mayor’s weather-rescheduled date to make his annual address to the Bridgeport Chamber of Commerce, one of the component units in the Bridgeport Regional Business Council.
But Ganim didn’t arrive with a low-key speech, like last year, when he was all but trapped in sorting out a $20 million deficit while setting up a new administration. Today, it was an optimistic and confident Ganim who strode to the podium — stepping carefully, as the Holiday Inn’s downtown ballroom was crowded and the footing was difficult among all the closely packed chairs.
Ganim brought a bright video, a wealth of news beginning with a $100 million plan to redevelop the building containing the Majestic and Poli Palace Theaters and Savoy Hotel — pending an agreement during the next few weeks with a yet-to-be-disclosed developer — and a surprise invitation for luncheon guests to spend a few minutes after lunch looking at the long-shuttered beautiful theaters.
Did I take up the mayor’s offer? Oh my golly, who could resist?
And while catching my breath and snapping photos inside the Majestic Theater, it occurred to me: I’ve been trying to launch this blog about downtown and Joe Ganim’s casserole full of baked downtown news was just the dish I needed to serve up a decent few posts.
I’m even writing this post on Monday night from a corner at the bar of Brewport Bridgeport, the stylish and spacious new custom pizza and home-grown beer restaurant downtown. Ganim praised the restaurant in his speech and I realized I had yet to try it, even though I had visited it before it opened. So, here I am, writing this post on my iPad.
Thanks for the dinner recommendation, Joe!
Before I go into my review of the downtown developments that Mayor Ganim discussed today, I’m going to serve up my own bitter aperitif for the mayor’s casserole. To stay with the food analogy, it’s this: The G2 Administration is working hard to make Bridgeport a livelier city. We have a three-course meal. But we don’t know the cuisine.
To take the Brewport Bridgeport example, I can have pizza and beer in a corner restaurant in any part of the city, or even at home. I can eat frozen pizza with a Bud Light, or at a bar on Fairfield Avenue in Black Rock. But here at Brewport Bridgeport, there’s a high-tech feel and both the pizza and especially the beer are Bridgeport products, baked and brewed here, conceived here, uniquely — well, of here, in Bridgeport.
That’s probably one of the reasons Ganim recommended Brewport Bridgeport to his listeners. (It was a lusty commercial of the sort that got Kellyanne Conway in trouble pitching Ivanka Trump’s clothing line at the White House; fortunately, mayors are under no such restriction.)
Should the Brewport Bridgeport theme become a theme for downtown? A modern industrial look, clean but metallic, sharp and creative, with a strong mix of graphics and friendliness? This is what I miss in Ganim’s vision: his idea for what the pieces will form when they come together.
I think it’s important to have an end goal for the look and feel of development downtown and across the city, to an extent. Let’s say Joe runs for re-election (as he said at a recent fundraiser) or runs for governor (as he suggests with his interest in qualifying for public campaign funds despite his felony conviction). How will he describe the Bridgeport he is building? Is it a collection of building blocks — or buildings on blocks — or is it a living thing, a unity?
Fundamentally, Bridgeport, including its downtown, is different from other cities close to it. It is younger than New Haven and Hartford, and it has neither the educational center of New Haven nor the governmental center of Hartford. It is too large to compare to the string of Naugatuck Valley and Housatonic Valley cities to its north and doesn’t feel as landlocked as Ansonia, Derby, and Waterbury (though I think Waterbury may be Bridgeport’s closest development cousin in Connecticut). Bridgeport’s port, a value often overlooked, reminds me more of Norwalk and New London, though while New London is a deep-water port like Bridgeport, Norwalk is not.
I say “port,” but actually Bridgeport has three ports in Bridgeport Harbor and its river and creek navigable tributaries, as well as Black Rock Harbor and the upstream industrial harbor along Cedar Creek.
Bridgeport’s port made the city an intermodal transit center when sailing ships at the Pequonnock River wharves combined with the young New Haven Railroad. Then Bridgeport became a factory city. What binds its history, to me, is the story of business and innovation. It’s the spirit of Barnum, Howe, and leaders to the present day (David Carson, for example.) It’s a city of intense diversity and while it does not deliver as well as it should — hamstrung by national and state policies — Bridgeport is a city of dreams and dreamers, innovations and innovators.
Bridgeport’s downtown, to me, can be developed as an innovation center in a city of innovation, a creative center in a city of creativity, an arts and entertainment center in a city of arts and entertainment, a business incubator in a city that incubates business, an invention center in a city of inventions, an education center in a city of education, and a housing center in a city of homes. Downtown Bridgeport can be the summation of the idea of Bridgeport itself.
That’s our cuisine for development. We’re a fusion downtown. It can be a fusion of business, creativity, innovation, and opportunity. In rebuilding Downtown Bridgeport, we’re creating a renewed center for a city with those longtime Bridgeport themes. What’s old is new again. That’s the meaning of renewal, isn’t it?
You might ask about government in Bridgeport, especially downtown. Bridgeport is a large city, and it has a large government presence. But Bridgeport is not a government center, other than for Fairfield County courts. In Bridgeport, government is a means, not an end. Self-government with high integrity can be the special sauce that holds the fusion together. That, and creative development financing, I must add.
If nothing else in Connecticut looks like Bridgeport, where should we look for the benchmarks we need to judge our speed and progress? I’d suggest other revitalizing industrial centers, especially those cities with strong water presences: Manchester, New Hampshire; Lowell, Worcester, and Springfield in Massachusetts; Yonkers, Rochester, and Buffalo in New York; Newark, New Jersey; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago in Indiana; and the surprising renewal that is Detroit, Michigan. I hesitate to add cities outside the Northeast-Midwest economy, but the textile industrial mill city example of Greenville, South Carolina, is too good a renewal example to ignore.
To me, every city in the paragraph above has more in common with Bridgeport’s story than New Haven and Hartford. We need benchmark them only because they operate in the same dysfunctional state financial and political climate as Bridgeport. But we cannot replicate them because fundamentally, we are not like them.
I apologize for wandering off into theory and the dreamland of a cityscape that tells a Bridgeport story. Let’s return to Mayor Ganim’s announcements and see where it all leaves us:
THE DRAMATIC NEWS
THE DOWNTOWN NORTH NEWS
THE STEELPOINTE NEWS
THE WATER STREET NEWS
THE LAFAYETTE CIRCLE/FAIRFIELD AVENUE NEWS
THE MCLEVY GREEN NEWS
THE NEARBY NEWS
WHAT WAS LEFT OUT: Arts Scene with City Lights, Kuchma’s new development, mention of smaller downtown businesses, retail, changes in the port, Port Auythority, services by DSSD, NCAA success (and other events), a summation of hotels and apartment units to be developed , and name of theater developer in transparent city.