Fresno’s Fulton Foolishness
The mess that is the Fulton Mall’s ongoing deconstruction — converting it back to a vehicle-welcoming Fulton Street — shows no sign of coming to an end.
What makes that interesting is that, back in February, the Fresno Bee ran a piece under the headline, “Fresno’s painful remake of Fulton Street should be done in May.”
Not only was the project “on schedule” and expected to be completed “sometime in May,” the Bee reported, but business owners were hoping it would be “sooner than that.”
Sorry. Not only won’t things be completed by the end of this month — it will be several more months, at the earliest, before cars can once again travel up or down Fulton between Tuolumne and Inyo streets.
The nearby picture — which I took May 22 — shows the mall, in pieces and piled up, as it looks between Fresno and Tulare streets. Much of the original mall still needs to be jackhammered, and the replacement process cannot be accomplished quickly.
Now, anyone who spends the 10 minutes or so it takes to walk from one end of the mall project to the other will see this. However, that walk seems impossible for anyone at the Bee to take, or else, surely, some reporter — of the few still left at the paper — would have undertaken it and gone back to his or her editor with word that it was time to update and revise the project completion story.
Of course, with the Bee continuing to downsize and destroy its print edition, perhaps the only reporters left standing are those for whom walking is either far too difficult — or far too boring. You know what I mean — it’s an age thing.
But that aside — notice, in another photo taken May 22, what the two block “completed” part of Fulton Street looks like. Look how narrow the “new” street is. Does it look “inviting”? Also notice the buildings on either side. Do any of them look like they house businesses that are “enticing” to folks who live in North Fresno? After all, those are the people who abandoned downtown as a retail center decades ago. They’re the ones with money — money they must bring back downtown to make it viable again.
As I have said before, I invite you to walk the mall and take an honest look — not a Chamber of Commerce look — at what’s there. You will see storefront after storefront, either vacant or with iron bars in front of the windows. You’ll also find inexpensive shops stocked with cheap items that shoppers with little or no money might be induced to buy.
What you won’t see is the inside of all those handsome, tall buildings constructed in the 1910’s and ’20’s. They’re largely vacant inside. Nobody’s there.
Now, I’m not a downtown hater. In fact, I’m on record as supporting the demolition of the Fulton Mall and the re-opening of Fulton Street. No, it won’t lead to any kind of renaissance for downtown, as downtown PR people and the Bee would like you to believe. But doing “something” is better than doing “nothing,” in my view — and the mall and downtown are disasters, so why not attempt a new approach? (Though in this case, it’s a matter of tearing out the very mall that was built decades ago to keep a fading downtown alive. Yes, we are coming full-circle.)
I was at the dedication of the Fulton Mall on that September night in ’64 — a teenager who looked at the clean, new mall and had high hopes that it would be a game-changer for “my” city. And, perhaps, I will attend the future dedication of the Fulton Street re-opening.
And, yes, I know that whenever that happens, the PR folks and the Bee will be gushing over downtown’s “rebirth.”
Sorry, again. Re-opening Fulton Street — a very narrow Fulton Street with marginal businesses on either side — won’t change the facts of life for those shop-owners — or for those Fresno residents who live Up North and who simply won’t trek downtown.
Those north-of-Shaw or north-of-Herndon residents still won’t make that drive because downtown cannot give them what they want — and what they want is a Fig Garden Village or a River Park or a Fashion Fair, with mid-to-upscale stores, no visible homeless people and few worries about their safety.
I wish “fixing” downtown were as easy as tearing out a mall, letting cars drive down a street, or perhaps even putting up a small soccer stadium. But downtown’s fate was decided decades ago when city leaders approved Fashion Fair, which drove businesses and home builders north — the farther north, the better.
There truly is no real “fix” for downtown Fresno, but no one in political life — or at the Bee — has the guts to say that. No, they’ll just keep peddling their foolishness about how this street re-opening is just what’s needed to jump-start downtown’s “rebirth.”
That’s not only foolishness — it’s absurd.