Street of dreams

Sunday, Jan. 28, 2007 | 7:30 a.m.

We hear so often that there's no culture in Las Vegas, what with the neon overkill of the Strip, and the metal, stucco and asphalt of strip malls walling Fremont Street, Horizon Ridge or Maryland Parkway.

It's true. It's who we are. It is our culture.

But wouldn't it be nice to have something organic, a place full of coffee shops and bookstores and restaurants that doesn't have the feel of a pressed-and-starched outdoor mall and - here's the important thing - would not be on the Strip?

A place for us, just like Such-and-Such Street back home?

Within two weeks local officials are likely to take the first step toward creating such a place. The Clark County Commission is expected to approve a $600,000 demonstration project to narrow a small section of Maryland Parkway from six to four lanes as it passes UNLV, trying to turn a drive-through neighborhood into a place where people could stroll, shop and eat.

But no, it is not expected to go over well with everyone - particularly not drivers who rely on the Maryland Parkway arterial. What's more, if the neighborhood begins to catch on, that street eventually could be whittled to just two lanes.

For now, it's an experiment. But advocates, including property owners in the area and UNLV officials, say they are confident it can work. As evidence, they point to Tempe, Ariz., home of Arizona State University and a quiet stretch of road known as Mill Avenue.

Once Mill Avenue was a major roadway through blight, just off the ASU campus. Today, you can't imagine ASU without Mill Avenue, a bustling neighborhood of restaurants and shops.

You can't see Tempe - you wouldn't see it - without Mill Avenue.

Sitting in a Starbucks on Mill Avenue, Steve Neilsen points to photos on a laptop screen, then points outside. You look at the photo, then look out the Starbucks window and think he might be lying. The change isn't just dramatic, it's unimaginable.

In 1970 Mill Avenue was a six-lane state highway and the main entryway, north and south, to Tempe. It's a street of immense historical importance to the city, as the founding father built the town's first mill there in the 1800s. It also borders the western edge of ASU, founded in 1885.

By all rights, Mill Avenue should have always been a hub for both students and residents to congregate. And 100 years ago it was that place.

Then flight to the suburbs happened, stores closed and crime moved in - as it has in every city in the country, including Las Vegas. "No parent would ever let their student, their son or daughter, walk that area alone at night," Neilsen says.

Now retired from his position as Tempe's community design and development director, Neilsen arrived a few years after the city tried but failed to get enough votes to move City Hall away from Mill Avenue.

"See those windows?" Neilsen says, pointing to heavy metal grates hanging along the walls of buildings in the 1970s photos.

But there aren't any windows.

"That's right," Neilsen smiles. "That's because the state demanded that buildings next to the highway put those grates over their windows to prevent flying stones from shattering them."

Another photo shows a dark brown building, without grates because it doesn't pretend to have windows. The words "No Place" are etched neatly into the facade.

"I like to include that slide, because it's emblematic of what we had," Neilsen says. "No place. A place no one wanted to go."

It's also one of the first places that Neilsen and Dave Fackler, Tempe's former Development Services Department director, bought using eminent domain to force the owner to sell to the city. Today, a multistore, two-level, caramel-brick commercial structure sits in its place.

About a block south of the old No Place is an intersection former Mayor Neil Giuliano called "Tempe's living room." And not just because the Starbucks here on Fackler Square, as it was renamed in 2003 to honor Fackler, is full of couches and tables and a steady flow of students and city employees mainlining their daily jolt. It's a living room because you feel like you can relax here. It doesn't feel like a city. It feels like a campus in a village.

"It's real nice down here," says Karina Lange, a 22-year-old ASU junior majoring in business. "There's a lot to do down here."

With a nod to Las Vegas, she smiles and says it's like Tempe's "mini-Strip."

"It's really significant to the life of the college," says Lange, who left the verdant shire of Eugene, Ore., to live in the desert.

It's almost impossible to imagine that Mill Avenue, which was first narrowed to four lanes, and now down to two with curbside parking, was anything other than this tree-lined, laugh ter-filled hub of taverns, restaurants, coffee shops, bookstores and gift shops.

Tempe Police Sgt. Don Yennie was a new recruit assigned to the area in the early 1980s. "There were pool halls, there was a huge trailer complex at University and Mill where the Chase building is now, and a liquor store," Yennie says. "There was a Whataburger."

Yennie nods and looks off to one side, remembering more.

"The Depot Cantina used to be an old railroad depot," he says. "It's phenomenal now to go in there. I remember there were times we'd show up and we thought the building was going to burn down. It was vacant and transients would set fires on the concrete floor to stay warm. I used to walk in the place and it was just a dump. Now it's a really successful business."

The neighborhood is alive. "In the summer, we have more people than there are places to park," he said. "We have motorcycles - not gangs - but people on bikes will come down to hang out."

You walk the 15-foot-wide sidewalks, beneath shady ficus trees whose thick green leaves stand out against the mellow brown of most building facades. You want to hang out, too. There's a Borders bookstore and a used-and-antique bookstore within a block of each other. Starbucks sells its coffee but you find at least two more places advertising chunka-mocha-latte-carameled things, too. Water fountains gurgle. The traffic ambles by. Within a year or so light-rail cars will stop a half-mile away.

At night you can walk for blocks around the area without fear. Even as bars such as Hooters and Gordon Biersch and Z'Tejas teem with students and what appear to be 50- and 60-year-old alumni, some of them wearing the tie-dyed T-shirts purchased at the Hippie Gypsy, a take-me-back place of all-things '60s at Mill and Sixth.

Let's make one thing clear, however. Mill Avenue is not perfect. This isn't the controlled confines of, say, a Fremont Street Experience. There are empty stores, even in relatively new buildings. Right across from the Starbucks is a two-story, boarded-up building that remains a thorn in the side of city planners.

But in a way, that, too, makes Mill Avenue appealing - this bustling place is real, not controlled, not faux - it's organic.

And to think, Yennie recalls, commuters howled in the 1970s when told Mill Avenue would be narrowed. They said they would have no way to get through the city, the traffic jams would be horrendous.

"I worked the area and I know," he says. "And we've clearly seen that people have adjusted and traffic adapted accordingly."

Still at the Starbucks, because that's where everyone always still seems to be, a middle-aged woman is vibrantly talking about walking "up and down Mill five or six times this morning!"

Outside, students loll across the street. Cars putter by. Could this really be Maryland Parkway in five, 10, 15 years?

Back in Las Vegas, stand at the south end of the Maryland Parkway stretch, at the intersection with Tropicana Avenue. On the four corners are three gas stations and a Del Taco .

Going north, you find a McDonald's, an In-N-Out Burger, Pizza Hut, a chain restaurant, a couple of strip malls, then another strip mall, a Starbucks, a car wash, another strip mall, a gas station, another mall with almost none of its stores occupied, a church and day care, some nondescript buildings, a bank, a Long John Silver's fast-food outlet and another gas station.

You don't have to memorize. Just say "fast-food joint, gas station, strip mall," and repeat it several times.

After you say it once or twice heading north, you reach the UNLV campus, on the west side of the street.

Not that you'd know it by looking. A parking lot separates the new student union from the street. The same goes for a lot in front of the main administration building. Nothing indicates you're at the campus, no sign, no main entrance.

Crime is a problem, too. A few months ago, a store clerk in one of the strip malls was shot in the head - he survived - over a few dollars in his cash register. More recently, a tweaker desperate for drug money stole a laptop from someone at gunpoint in daylight in front of aghast coffee drinkers. Hang out anywhere around there and you quickly grow dead to the army of panhandlers at Flamingo Road, in the parking lot behind Chipotle and all parts in between.

And if you want ugly, there's The Promenade, a once-popular three-story mall that is now home to, most prominently, a Kinko's.

Businessman Michael Saltman owned it, then sold it, then got it back in foreclosure.

"I neglected it," he says. "I admit that."

Today, he's the leading advocate of converting Maryland Parkway. He has spent two years pushing what's become known as the "Midtown" project. He stands to make money off of it, obviously. But he says that is not his motive.

Saltman is 64. He says he has made enough money to sit back and not lift a finger the rest of his life.

Besides, Tempe wasn't built in a day, he notes. Maryland Parkway, as he envisions it, might not happen for decades, even if it starts today.

"I've been to universities around the world," says Saltman, owner of Vista Group, a commercial real estate development and management company. He is a university donor and trustee of the UNLV Foundation. "They mellow and balance communities, they create a rise in the creative class, they make us a higher and better people.

"And overall, not just at UNLV. I think its time has come to be a larger part of the social fabric of this city. And am I determined? Yeah, man, I am."

Earlier this month, Saltman presented renderings of his vision of Midtown, or at least 2,700 feet of it between Dorothy and Cottage Grove avenues. The drawings were on display at the Tam Alumni Center on the UNLV campus.

Saltman says the project would be anchored by the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs, a $93.7 million UNLV structure being built with money donated by the Greenspun family, owners of the Las Vegas Sun. (The Greenspuns' American Nevada Corp. and Saltman have also partnered to buy an aged apartment complex on the far north end of campus, which they plan to turn into student housing.)

The new Urban Affairs structure will be beautiful. But could it really be the start of a renaissance?

Saltman's answer is hard-fast: If they did it with Mill Avenue, we can do it with Maryland Parkway.

"The similarities are really hard to dismiss," he says.

Like Arizona State University, UNLV is a commuter school. With about 50,000 students, ASU has about 6,400 beds on campus; UNLV with almost 30,000 students has about 2,000 beds.

In both places, thousands of cars flood into and out of the campus five days a week.

And before Mill Avenue came to be, ASU and Tempe were really more of a place to race through, as Maryland Parkway is today.

But make no mistake, Tempe is not Las Vegas and Maryland Parkway is not Mill Avenue.

For starters, Tempe government is decidedly "liberal" and has taken chances and spent money, even when the payoff wasn't immediately apparent or guaranteed. Even with an estimated 20,000 strippers populating Clark County and every manner of vice catered to here, this is not a liberal county. We may implode buildings at will, but we don't like a lot of change.

On the plus side, UNLV is a campus in a valley teeming with more people than it knows what to do with, many of those looking to do something, anything, other than go to a casino. That could benefit something like Midtown.

As part of Saltman's groundwork leading up to a presentation before the County Commission on Feb. 6, he talked last week to the Nevada System of Higher Education's regents. They were enthusiastic.

"I was excited about this when I heard it the first time," Regent Dorothy Gallagher says. "And it is just getting better."

Saltman is encouraged, but hardly resting.

"Even if it doesn't pass the county, I won't stop," he says. "I mean I get it. It's hard to change a street, man. It's hard to change a community. And with that kind of traffic flow, man, who knows? I just hope people see what I see."