img-1024.JPGIn Louisville, the Muhammad Ali Center, a big new performing arts and educational center, opens today. In San Francisco, the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park was torn down, its Mission-inspired home recently reborn as a modern, copper-wrapped building topped with a twisting tower. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has been showing off its $92 million expansion. Denver has a new opera house and is expanding its primary art museum as well.
"You're trying to improve the quality of life for your residents and win some distinction for your city," Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper told me a few days ago, when he was here in Washington to be honored as one of Governing's Public Officials of the Year.
img-1069.JPGNo doubt there there have been other recent opportunities for ribbon cuttings. (If I've missed any, please post a comment.) But it was impossible on a visit to Atlanta last week to miss the construction, with big facilities going up in both the city's downtown and Midtown areas. (And, if Mayor Shirley Franklin gets her way--the city council voted the other day to approve a new taxing district but will have to vote again--there will be lots of new building along the city's outer Beltline as well.)
Earlier this month, Atlanta's High Museum of Art attracted 30,000 folks to the weekend opening of its more-than-doubled facilities. Basically, they've taken one building and made it into three (plus an educational and office center). You're constantly walking from one that houses mainly paintings into another that now holds a big show of architectural models and other representations of buildings by Renzo Piano, designer of the High's expansion.
I didn't get a chance to see the "collection" of the new Georgia Aquarium, as it doesn't open until Wednesday. Built with $200 million of Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus's money, it will apparently be the largest indoor aquarium in the world. That's a lot of fish.
img-1066.JPGThe building is certainly nondescript, a low-slung affair that stretches as far as the eye can see. It currently fronts a massive hole in the ground that by 2007 will be filled with a vastly expanded Coke museum.
The aquarium's main entrance is directly across the street from Centennial Park, built for the 1996 Olympics, but by all appearances the aquarium will do more to revitalize the area, just down the hill from the downtown, than those games did. There are still some Philly cheesesteak shops, seedy bars, a mission and a chiropractic clinic facing the Aquarium, but many neighboring buildings bear "sold" signs and the marks of incipient development.
As with stadiums and convention centers, there are skeptics who wonder whether megaprojects generate enough ancillary development to justify their costs. "They can actually hurt in the long run," says Mark Muro, of the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program. "The key to revitalization is building high density, mixed-use communities at a human scale."
