Inside the Edison Board Room on the fourth floor of the Luminary Hotel in downtown Fort Myers, architect Matthew Leger laid out his vision in front of about 30 business owners and stakeholders to make the city below them more walkable.
The Hendry Street Pedestrian Mall would provide a walkable corridor from downtown Fort Myers to Midtown, the 240-acre area just south that currently includes the Fort Myers Police Department and City of Palms Park, former spring training home of the Boston Red Sox.
“It’s an ambitious project,” Leger said Thursday morning, giving the same presentation he gave to the Fort Myers City Council last month. He works for PDS Architecture.
Parts of the project would be as simple as closing Hendry Street to cars and building a timed crosswalk for pedestrians to safely cross Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
“I’ve gotten to explore, experience and analyze cities across the coast,” Leger told the group. “What I found was all the successful cities all had a pedestrian walk. They’re essential to a city’s business district. It’s where you find the most restaurants and hotels.”
Hendry Street seemed to be the most logical way to flow walkers between downtown and Midtown because the city owns pivotal pieces of the land to where eminent domain wouldn’t be as big of an issue as compared to closing Jackson or Broadway streets.
The challenge would be getting the Hendry Street business owners to buy in on the concept, said Fort Myers City Council member Lin Bochette, who attended the presentation.
“There’s a lot of brainpower in here,” Bochette told the gathering. “It’s good if you can remind the staff and remind the council of where you want to go. We can start the energy of seeing what’s possible.
“We need the downtown merchants to get behind this. We want to make this how you guys want it to happen, not how the city council wants to have it.”
The stakeholders included Kevin Schoensee, managing general partner of STS Property Development, which owns the Patio de Leon building off Hendry Street. That building includes Downtown House of Pizza, Wild About Popcorn and the Cigar Bar. Patio De Leon LLC bought the buildings for $3.4 million in June 2015, property records show.
Those businesses all benefit from closing the adjacent streets for special events such as Art Walk and Music Walk on various Friday and Saturday nights, Schoensee said. Those nights were like an experimental lab to see if the walkable concept would work. But he’s just not convinced that atmosphere could be replicated every day.
“I think it’s a great idea to explore,” Schoensee said of the walkable street. “I think we need to close the streets downtown more often. I just don’t know if it’s something that we should do all day, every day.”
Nils Richter, a downtown Fort Myers developer since 1999, hopes the business community would rally around the concept. He said he believed the linking of downtown and Midtown would create a catalyst for more development. But the time to act was sooner instead of later.
“We’re kind of at a watershed moment,” Richter said. “We have so much interest now from investors and developers. We’ve got to plan for the next decade.”
Leger noted his favorite slide of his presentation: a rendering of citizens walking about the intersection of Union and Hendry streets, which is on the Midtown side of Hendry. There would be a synergy of public and private interests combined.
But Leger’s plan goes beyond just a crosswalk and a walking mall. It has several phases, and its goal is to improve not just walking but also biking. Plans are in the works for the John Yarbrough Linear Park bike path to connect across Colonial Boulevard and continue north to Canal Street. Leger envisions eventually connecting that bike path to Midtown and downtown Fort Myers.
“It becomes safer for everybody,” Leger said. “You can turn a negative into a positive, just by taking cars out of the equation.”
