In 1973, Saratoga Springs was more than a little worse for wear: Sidewalks were crumbling, the few remaining elm trees on Broadway were dying, flophouses and shuttered buildings were not uncommon. Strip malls sprouted up in spots where glorious buildings from the city’s golden age had been razed. Visitors—what few there were—would have been hard-pressed to detect any promise of the distinctive landscaping, cleanliness and well-kept buildings that Saratoga boasts today.

Despite its dramatic turnaround, however, for the most part the physical structure of Broadway is similar today to what it was in the 1970s, testament to both the city’s “good bones” and to citizen activists who prevented destructive urban renewal from continuing. Behind the well-appointed pretty surface that’s seen today was a swell of volunteer man-hours and citizen initiative. For all who want to help keep the city moving forward, that legacy of a time when citizens could and did shape the town’s future is a key bit of history to know.

“At that point we had 22 empty storefronts and all of the upper floors were vacant in Saratoga, and it did not look anything like what it looks like today,” says Bob Bristol. At the time, Bristol was a young landscape architect who had moved to Saratoga Springs and set up his firm, the Saratoga Associates. Curious about the blight, he started chatting people up at cocktail parties, questioning why downtown was like a ghost town and asking what—if anything—could be done about it.

Turns out, Saratoga’s sorry state was the result of a decline begun decades earlier. By the 1950s, the city had lost much of its traditional reasons for being: It wasn’t attracting the summer crowds anymore, the state wanted to close the spa bath houses, and racing’s future in Saratoga was in jeopardy. Several fires had ravaged whole sections of Broadway, and only some of the buildings were replaced; others became parking lots. According to Saratoga resident, civic-design expert and author, Jim Kunstler, when he arrived in town in the early 1970s, Saratoga had been through “an orgy of destruction” and suffered badly from disrepair. “All of the physical evidence,” he says, “seemed to indicate that its day was over.”

Bristol’s conversations caught the ear of Newman E. “Pete” Wait Jr., then president of the Adirondack Trust Company. In 1973, Wait invited him to a meeting of local businessmen and major property owners in the bank’s boardroom, asking Bristol to tell them his thoughts. Bristol did, and they asked what they could do to help. Bristol asked for some start-up cash to cover expenses, and then he told them, “I need you guys to drop out of the picture, because right now you’ve been doing everything for this community and everyone’s intimidated by you so no one speaks up.” Incredibly, they listened, and instead of a top-down approach to improving downtown, a citizen-based initiative, spearheaded by Bristol, rallied the community within a matter of months.

The hope was that the project, tagged the Saratoga Plan of Action, could pick downtown up off its skinned knees to see what could be done about resuscitating it. (The initiative was originally called the Saratoga Action Plan, but SAP wasn’t an appealing acronym, so it was changed to SPA.)

Let us do it: citizen planner Bob Bristol.

Bristol and a group of volunteers hosted more than 50 community meetings that winter to introduce their plan, and to ask citizens what they wanted Saratoga to be. During the meetings, Bristol would take people on photographic walks through the community, first showing pictures of the ornate tops of buildings and asking people to guess where it was. Most people couldn’t until he showed the bottoms, when they would see familiar signs and boarded-up storefronts. At the end of the presentation, Bristol says, he would ask, “ ‘Which do you want your community to be?’ And it wasn’t meant to do anything other than alert people.” The seeds of change were slowly sown, and the volunteer effort grew in numbers.

“We started this process that really was building confidence in people that they could do something about their community,” Bristol says, sitting in his office, high in the former YMCA building overlooking Broadway.

They took four surveys through the community to determine what people used downtown for and what they wanted from it; they surveyed businesses, consumers, downtown residents; they surveyed by election district. Bristol and Joe Dalton, the longtime head of the chamber of commerce, spent that winter making presentations at meetings or tea parties in volunteers’ homes, building support in each election district.

Still within that first winter of 1973-74, the Plan of Action volunteers renovated the first floor of a vacant building using mostly donated materials, and opened a storefront office that was staffed voluntarily all week long. Next, the planners held three weekends of the “design game,” in which about 100 people were split into groups, each representing different downtown concerns (such as preservation or development), to hash out what downtown ought to look like and how it should function. The game was played with a 14-foot scale model of Broadway with removable buildings, and each group had a different color marker that would be placed at the buildings it was interested in saving or scrapping. When conflicts arose the group would hold a mass vote, showing a photo of the building, explaining each side and the majority ruled. If buildings were agreed upon to be destroyed, they would be removed, and UAlbany students photographed and recorded the changes chosen.

The design game’s results were compiled, and a new vision of Broadway was drawn up as plans. The question remained, however, as to how the goals would be achieved, so back to the game boards they went—this time to the implementation game. The idea for the implementation game was to hold a mock version of the city planning processes and try to chart out the course of development and change to the city the same way the real developers and city officials would. They elected a model city council, planners and developers and played what was like a modified version of Monopoly in which one hour of play was equal to one year of action. They charted ideal streetscapes, made policy and people struck mock deals. Participants began to see what could be accomplished and to learn what potential roadblocks to success were. And that was just one winter.

‘Downtown really just didn’t have a clue,” says Bristol, who says that at that time the politicians were not trying to solve downtown’s problems. “They pretty much felt that downtown was gone. There was probably only one council member who had any type of vision of what downtown should be, and he was vocal, and that was Tom McTygue.”

By the next election, the mayor and every council member except McTygue had been replaced, and McTygue has served as public works commissioner almost uninterrupted for the last three decades. “Since that time,” Bristol is fond of saying, “no one has ever run for office in this community without a pro-downtown platform. They wouldn’t dare.”

By the spring of 1974, it was time for direct action. So the downtown shops held sidewalk sales for the first time, and the Plan of Action volunteers decided to take on some aesthetic improvements to the city. In the games, everyone wanted trees downtown again—just a few sad-looking elms remained—so guerrilla planting was planned as a joint venture between volunteers and McTygue’s Department of Public Works. They borrowed concrete cutters from Niagara Mohawk to use late on a Saturday night, and DPW workers donated their time to cut holes for 13 new trees.

On a Sunday morning the volunteers were out planting trees. Figuring City Hall surely would object since they hadn’t asked permission, the tree-planters chose Sunday because churchgoers would see them working and no city government officials would be on the job. They also called all of the media outlets and told them about the event; when reporters asked what city government thought of it, Bristol says volunteers replied that the citizens were taking over the city.

“That made a big bang,” says Bristol. “All of a sudden the elected city officials didn’t know what was going on because any night we wanted to we could just load the council’s chambers with several hundred people. So we were just inundating the council because they had been nonplayers, except for Tommy.” McTygue recalls those early days of hard work fondly, and as the real beginning of his stewardship of the town’s public presentation, something he takes great pride in.

The citizen activists “stopped the idea of urban renewal pretty much dead in its tracks,” McTygue says, with a little laugh. “I just wish it had come a little sooner.”

From the late ’70s to early ’90s, ideas originating with the Plan of Action trickled into the city’s planning. There were programs to rehabilitate the delicate building facades downtown, and grant money was acquired. People began to buy the once-decrepit buildings, and slowly the errors of urban-renewal efforts and inappropriate-looking buildings started to be chipped away. The town played two more versions of the Plan of Action’s games (they called this round Next Step). The city created its first comprehensive planning documents to chart out the city’s future, with downtown at the core of any new development.

The Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation was founded, and became the guardian of the city’s historic architecture. In 1996 the city won the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Great American Main Street Award. By 1999, Saratoga Springs, under its comprehensive plan, would strive to become a “city in the country”: a strong and central downtown surrounded by plenty of open space so as not to jeopardize either the business district’s history or the rural roots surrounding it.

Part of this shift came from private investors who saw, and liked, the results of the citizens’ initiative. “We saw the vitality here, loved the community spirit and just knew we wanted to be a part of it,” says Jeff Pfeil of his and his wife’s reasons for moving to Saratoga Springs 10 years ago, and bringing their real-estate development company with them.

Spa City booster: developer and resident Jeffrey Pfeil.

Beyond just relocating, the Pfeils began another phase in the life of Saratoga’s development. Downtown had begun its rise and the old buildings were filling up, so to forward-thinkers like the Pfeils, new development on empty lots started to look possible.

The Pfeils proposed to fill a vacant lot on the east side of Broadway between Phila and Spring Streets with a new private building; first floor retail, and office space above that.

Pfeil says the only heroic part of the process of his building at 340 Broadway was that it was “the first new private building of any significance whatsoever in 50 years in the downtown. Nobody was doing it because it was a big investment and downtowns weren’t popular with lenders, they weren’t popular with retailers—there were a lot of things working against us, that was the rogue part.” They invested their life savings in the building and had some support from Adirondack Trust. But it worked, and drew a lot of attention downtown.

“When we got here there were still a few empty storefronts, but downtown was doing OK,” Pfeil says. “There were still several holes where buildings had burned down over the years or been demolished.”

Two of the city’s grandest hotels, the United States Hotel and the Grand Union Hotel, had been turned to rubble. The Grand Union “dominated the scene like a colossus, its great mass rising above the elms of Broadway, and stretching about an entire city block,” writes local architectural historian James Kettlewell in his book Saratoga Springs: An Architectural History. It was demolished in 1953 to make way for a parking lot and, as Kettlewell points out, ironically replaced with a Grand Union grocery store and strip mall. This site, the block of Broadway between Congress and Washington streets opposite the park, is one of many that citizens wanted to reclaim for better development.

Eight years ago, Pfeil says he really wanted to get rid of that strip mall, then inhabited by Sneaky Pete’s nightclub. “It was such a blight on downtown, it was so inappropriate for what Saratoga was that we just wanted to see that thing torn down,” he says. “In order to do that we got a hold of the developers, offered to be their leasing agents, found tenants that made it feasible for them to build the new buildings and that accomplished getting the old building torn down.” What you see there now are retail establishments the Gap and Banana Republic topped with rental apartments, Kinko’s and offices around the corner, and a third building (in progress now), which will house Talbot’s, Ann Taylor Loft and Ayco, a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs.

Saratoga’s residents like to debate the merit of the chain stores’ arrival in the city. Some argue that their mere presence is compromising to the character of downtown. Some believe that high rental prices deter average residents from opening up shop downtown, which dilutes the potential for locally owned businesses to capitalize on Saratoga’s growth. Still others believe that these large stores with mass appeal generate foot traffic that might not have been there before, and hopefully those consumers will pop into the mom-and-pop shops that have a real investment in the community.

“By adding these tenants to downtown, we’re keeping shoppers downtown and attracting shoppers to downtown that otherwise would just go to the mall,” says Pfeil.

“That’s what we tried to get across back in the beginning of the Plan of Action: You are not going to be a mall, do not compete against the mall,” says Bristol. “Every city that’s tried to make the equivalent of a mall in downtown has failed. But what’s happening now is a lot of the national chains are finding that the historic downtowns are particularly valuable markets to be in. So you’ll find things like we’re seeing here, folks like Gap who go in.” Still, that mixture is a delicate one.

Pfeil says the chains help get the buildings financed and that none of the national chains has displaced any local merchants: They’ve all gone into new space. Saratoga’s city planner, Geoff Bornemann, says it’s the private sector that stimulates the town and always has.

“It’s nice to have that mix, but we don’t want to become an Anytown,” says Dennis de Jonghe, an artisan jeweler who has been in downtown since the 1970s. “Saratoga, like a lot of historic communities, what people don’t realize is how fragile that character and that charm that everybody comes here for [is].” He finds it somewhat ironic that people are attracted to Saratoga’s historic charm, due in no small part to serious preservation efforts, and “the very reason they want to be here can jeopardize what made it successful.” De Jonghe cautions that Saratoga’s identity is as vulnerable as ever.

‘Growth happens, and it’s not necessarily good or bad from a preservation perspective The question is really, how do you set design standards and then implement design standards so that new development that goes on integrates with the existing built environment?” asks Carrie Woerner, executive director of the Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation. “One of the things that’s true is that people come to Saratoga Springs because it has beautiful historic architecture. There’s something special when you walk down the street, so it’s important that what new building goes in there complement the old, not overpower the old.”

One of the other notable changes since downtown’s darker days in the 1970s was that people are living in and near downtown again. And much as Pfeil’s first building showed that new retail and office space could be filled and successful, Bob Israel’s Franklin Square Associates, owner of many historic rental properties in town, had something residential up its sleeve. On a long parcel of land on Railroad Street, one block back from Broadway, Israel proposed building luxury condominiums with retail and office space on the ground level.

Because “nobody had built an apartment building like that in Saratoga Springs in 100 years,” Kunstler says, people thought there was no demand for it and the condos wouldn’t sell. “He demonstrated that there was in fact a huge market for people who wanted to live in apartments in a traditional main-street town. So that set off a whole flurry of people constructing more apartment buildings.” Israel sold most of the units not long after he broke ground.

“I think just the fact that we’ve gotten six or seven pretty good new downtown buildings in the last five years is a tremendous victory for the town,” says Kunstler. “It has established the fact that many different kinds of people want to be located downtown, including wealthy people in apartments who are going to pay a lot of taxes and patronize a lot of businesses, and businesses want to be here.”

One of the unfortunate consequences of these condominiums and higher-rent apartments in town is that Saratoga Springs has something of an affordable-housing problem. The city is making overtures at addressing the problem, but as McTygue says, “We’re losing the diversity this community was built on—we’ve become a Mercedes community.” He says young people used to move away from town because there weren’t any jobs for them here. Now it’s jobs as well as being priced out of town. Plus significant numbers of people who do work in town do not live in town simply because they cannot afford to.

The young families who were lucky enough to buy fixer-upper first homes a few years ago in the right neighborhoods find their property assessments have more than doubled, as the town’s property values have skyrocketed. Many think if they hadn’t bought when they did, they would not be able to own in Saratoga Springs.

There is also a lot of development spreading beyond the traditional business district, particularly down the Route 50 corridor toward Wilton and parallel to 50 on Excelsior, where several new hotels and a subdivision are in progress.

‘This is a traditional American town that’s in relatively good shape compared to most other places in America,” says Kunstler, which is not, however, to say that he goes easy on the town he calls home or anyone else’s for that matter. “Most other traditional main-street towns are in terrible condition: They’re economically dead, they’re culturally moribund, they’ve been forgotten, passed over, left behind. Most of small-town America is like Hudson Falls. . . . Binghamton is like a former Soviet provincial town, it’s so bombed out, and there wasn’t even a war there.”

Today most signs point to a healthy city trying to balance its character against the opportunities for growth in the downtown area. Broadway was much more densely populated 100 years ago with taller buildings with massive footprints, and rebuilding some of that density is what developers and planners are aiming for currently.

“I like that it’s an exceptionally diverse city in terms of types of businesses and uses. People live, shop, worship and certainly play downtown,” says Woerner. “I think that’s all to the good.”

Broadway has become a year-round shopping destination. Summer visitors don’t just come for the horses anymore, they come for the town. McTygue says the city’s residents tell him how much “they enjoy their visitors and relations to come to Saratoga Springs in the summer months. Our own city residents enjoy the beauty, cleanliness, and safety of the downtown business district and Congress Park. It’s a destination.”

As McTygue says, “litter breeds litter,” and so too with development. Smart growth is not something that is easily achieved, and Saratoga Springs will have to continue its balancing act to determine how to make the city a livable, viable place for diverse groups of people with diverse needs. Still, Saratogians of all ages have been strongly involved in civic issues, and many of the residents who worked on the Plan of Action remain in town as active citizens. Among them: Bristol, who chairs the city Planning Board; Bornemann, who was a staffer at the Saratoga Associates during the SPA days; and McTygue, who still runs Public Works.

“It’s amazing,” Pfiel notes, “when you realize a grassroots effort like that, that started a long, long time ago, and a lot of the same people are still around and dedicated.”

ahahn@metroland.net

Saratoga CALENDAR

CONGRESS PARK (Saratoga Springs, 587-3241). Sat: Weapons of Mass Percussion (2 PM). Tue: Ernie Williams Band (7 PM).

Saratoga SHOTS
By Martin Benjamin

“Together we won the Triple Crown!” exclaimed Dorothy Knowlton (right), pictured here with her husband Jack Knowlton and Mary Lou Whitney at Tuesday’s Center for the Disabled Benefit at Siro’s. The Knowltons are owners of Funny Cide, who won last year’s Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes; Whitney owns Birdstone, winner of this year’s Belmont Stakes.

Spotted in Saratoga
By Ashley Hahn

Where: 7th Annual Dachshund Derby at the Racetrack’s Open House; Sun. (July 25)
Who: The Dorazios
From: Scotia
What are you doing here?: Casey (the pup) is “doing tail-wag, and find the treat. . . maybe.”
What’s the best part about Saratoga?: “The restaurants, just the atmosphere—laid back, casual and everybody having a good time.”
If Saratoga was a movie, what would it be called?: (Casey arfs) Splendor in the Country

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