Can anything good come out of the city?

Saturday, November 21, 2009 11:20 AM

LATEST NEWS:

Business

The death of downtown Kingston and its prospects for revival

Sunday, November 01, 2009

In part one of this two-part series on downtown Kingston, Julian Richardson, Assistant Business Co-ordinator of the Observer, relieves the images of the once vibrant commercial centre and documents the story of how a city died and the efforts being made to bring it back to life...

The deplorable condition of the dilapidated buildings dotting the streets of downtown Kingston, gives the impression of a hurricane-hit city. A fact-finding drive-through paints a picture of a city under stress.

One of hundreds of derelict buildings in downtown Kingston. It was once the location of T Geddes Grant. (Photos: Karl McLarty)

King Street, the centre of activity, is the only thoroughfare that has some semblance of a clean, vibrant commercial corridor.

Less than a handful of businesses now operate on Hanover Street, decades ago the epicentre of downtown nightlife and a playground for sailors who docked on the seaport. Orange Street, once the embryo of Jamaican music, is now mostly comprised of building shells. Squatters hang clothes from the two-storey buildings on West Street, formerly known for haberdasheries and other retail shops. And Harbour Street, which was arguably the main business area and home to the popular Myrtle Bank Hotel, has become a ghost town, haunted by the many abandoned commercial buildings which remind persons of what this part of town used to be.

A closer inspection by foot is more grim.

The pungent smell of stale urine, marijuana and faecal matter assaults the air as one approaches a section of a large building on Port Royal Street; its broken-down state fails to hide the fact that the building, in its time, was an impressive structure. It appears vacant from the outside, but a peep through the building's wooden entrance gate reveals a man sweeping what looks like a living area on the inside. It begs the question: who's the rightful owner of the building? What type of commercial activity was the undervalued piece of architecture once used for? How many persons did the business employ and, most importantly, what really happened?

Chen... places rise and places fall

The derelict buildings observed by Sunday Finance on this sunny weekday afternoon are just some of the more than 100 identified by the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) in downtown Kingston. Their decay reflects the decline of the district's economy, once the strongest in Jamaica. It is testament to the sad livelihood of the 60,000 residents that live in the district, most on remittances, a few off crime.

"Yuh know how long dem seh dem a go fix up downtown?" asks an elderly man sitting near the abandoned Victoria Pier building, once he recognised it was a news team. "Fifty years now, from mi a likkle bwoy," he answers his own question.

Indeed, it was some 50 years ago, our investigations revealed, that downtown began to unravel.

Francis 'Paco' Kennedy, chairman of the Kingston City Centre Improvement Company (KCCIC), tells Sunday Finance that downtown Kingston, in its heyday, operated on five economic pillars: hospitality, finance, shipping, manufacturing and trading.

Popular restaurants, such as the Pirate Cove, once occupied the now-vacated Victoria Pier.

"It was a completely different atmosphere than now," recalls Kennedy, who started working downtown in 1955, on a summer job with GraceKennedy, the firm he would eventually spend more than 46 years with in a variety of positions.

"You had the wharves, the wholesale district, the retail district et al...Shops were opened Mondays to Fridays from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm and Saturdays from 8:00 am to 12:00 pm," Kennedy continued, emphasising that "there was no crime".

He smiles as he reminisces on those days, when he frequently rode the "number 4" bus and walked the wharves - the most easterly was Harbour Street wharf and the most westerly, the Number One Pier.

Kennedy... has fond memories of downtown

However, in the late 1950s, Kennedy recalls, two things happened which began to change downtown and lay the foundation for its dilapidated state today.

Abe Issa, who was the owner of Myrtle Bank Hotel, bought the Knutsford Racetrack Company and Knutsford Racetrack; subsequently converting Knutsford Race Track into New Kingston.

"Then he went after the hospitality industry and the financial services industry," notes Kennedy. "The first hotel to go up in New Kingston was the Sheraton (now the Hilton), in 1962."

At about the same time that Issa began his venture north of downtown, Mayer Matalon proposed to the then Government, led by Norman Manley, that the development of Kingston should be to the west. He got the go-ahead from the administrators to take over the garbage dump in Newport West and he moved the garbage dump, eventually, to Riverton City. After acquiring Newport West, Matalon built wharves that faced east to west in that district.

"The main problems with the wharves in downtown Kingston was that they faced north to south. Everyday you had the (20 to 40 miles per hour) winds from the southeast, and when the ships are docked north to south, the winds used to bang the ships against the wall," remembers Kennedy.

"Because of that, between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm, you couldn't dock any ships... So, the idea was to build new docks in Newport West," notes the KCCIC chairman, adding that the congestion in downtown was also a factor.

Once New Kingston began opening up, downtown's hospitality and financial services industry moved uptown and triggered that district's urbanisation with the construction of plazas, etc. When the shipping industry moved from downtown Kingston to Newport West, manufacturers and traders moved with them to be close to the docks - establishing Newport West as an industrial centre. The upshot was that the five economic drivers of downtown were all gone and the business district began a slow death. What that left downtown Kingston with was the market district, which is still there today, and some semblance of the retail district.

"The economic underpinning of an area changes over time; places rise and places fall; it's just a part of the natural cycle of things," says Urban Development Corporation chairman, Wayne Chen, summarising what happened to downtown.

The squatting in downtown, according to Kennedy, began after Edward Seaga, then minister of planning and development, embarked on an ambitious redevelopment project in the mid-to-late 1960s.

"There was massive construction and a lot of people were hunting jobs," says Kennedy. "People migrated from rural Jamaica looking for brighter stars and occupied the buildings... Many of them are still there today."

Included in the efforts at redevelopment of the district under Seaga, Kennedy says, were the Bank of Jamaica building, Bank of Nova Scotia, Oceana Hotel (which now houses the Ministry of Health), Ocean Towers and the Office Centre. He notes that many of Seaga's plans stalled when his party lost control of Government in 1972.

The crime which started to plague downtown in the latter part of the 20th century only compounded the problems of the depressed city, Morin Seymour, executive director of the Kingston Restoration Company (KRC), chips in.

"The violence, which peaked at the 1980 election, had a devastating effect on downtown," Seymour recalls. "The period between 1976 and 1980 had intense violence which did severe damage, so, taken together (with the shift in economic activities), it created a real difficult situation for the downtown economy."

KRC was incorporated in 1983 and a major part of its mission - the development of social and economic conditions in urban communities - was directed towards downtown. The building which the company occupies today on Duke Street was recovered from criminals, who captured it from the Anglican Diocese.

"When we came here in 1986, the entire complex was in a state of capture," Seymour recalls. "Nobody from the Anglican Church would come here... the gunmen threatened to kill every single pastor."

The crime, while it may not be as bad as during the 1980s, is still prevalent in downtown Kingston today, and the economy is still crippled. But while some may feel that restoration talks have just been lip service over the past 40 years, there has indeed been some progress.

Next week: What future for downtown Kingston?

Should user fees at public health facilities be reinstated?
	Yes
	No

View Results
Results published weekly in Sunday Finance

Username:
Password: