The Bakersfield (California) City Council and the Bakersfield Police Department are working together to revitalize the city’s downtown with grant funding that has been approved for 2018.
Three officers from BPD’s Impact Unit will be assigned during 2018 to provide downtown patrol on bikes and present a sense of safety for those who will be supporting downtown businesses. These officers will work with the community and business owners in an effort to promote downtown Bakersfield as a business and community-friendly hub.
Their main objective is to help enhance the image of the downtonwn as safe and enjoyable place for locals and visitors alike.
City Council member Andrae Gonzales with BPD officers. Photo by Melissa Puryear.
BPDs Chief Lyle Martin said, “We want to make downtown a destination, not some some place people just think about. We want people coming downtown. We’re going to make things safe. The officers here are very approachable and we want to make this a community effort.”
Council member Andrae Gonzales added, “We want to see more people on foot walking from place, to place by improving the police presence we’re able to do that. We’re able to really encourage a lot more people to visit downtown and to roam around.”
Of course, it will take more than the comforting presence of friendly police officers to revitalize this long-struggling downtown. That’s the job of Making Downtown Bakersfield, a coalition of the California High-Speed Rail Authority and the City of Bakersfield.
Last year, the coalition presented renderings of what the revitalized downtown might look like. The overall reception was enthusiastic, but some citizens expressed concern that it was too focused on new buildings and demolition. “It looks too modern,” Mary Helen Barro, 79, said during the presentation.
One of the renderings depicted pedestrians and bicyclists using Wall Street to cross Chester Avenue, which included a clock tower in the median. “I’m very excited,” she said, “but what I’m afraid (is) I didn’t hear ‘preservation’ enough.” She said she doesn’t want to see architectural treasures demolished or sent to a museum. “I want to leave them in place and enhance them,” she said. “Modern buildings to me have no soul.”
She’s right to be concerned. Over the past two decades, the “New Urbanist” movement has been a mixed blessing for many historic downtowns. On the plus side, New Urbanism designs are mixed-use and pedestrian-friendly. On the minus side, they tend to not respect what’s already there, becoming a new version of the demolition-happy “urban renewal” disaster of the 60s and 70s. The result is often sterile and hyper-commercial: primarily national chain stores with little of no retail age diversity or local merchants.
Bakerfield’s downtown revitalization project will include Old Towne Kern, which is considered to be a part of the downtown area to some people, according to Gonzales, and this is certainly an area that he would like to see revitalized in the future.
Renderings courtesy of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM).
See Bakersfield.com article by Dorothy Mills-Gregg.
See full article by Melissa Puryear in Bakserfield College’s The Renegade Rip.