With a population now estimated at 80,000-plus, Largo grows ever larger, and city officials are determined to extend that growth trend.<\/p>\n
Almost all municipalities are pro-growth in varying degrees. Largo\u2019s most specific aim is to grow its downtown neighborhood with more apartments and retail, and a ginormous new City Hall.<\/p>\n
Construction in all three of those areas is ongoing, with work on the City Hall complex and a new strip center directly across the street \u2014 a few lots down from the mayor\u2019s chiropractic offices \u2014 nearing completion. All these concrete examples of the city\u2019s growth ambitions share something not uncommon for downtown projects but eminently lamentable nonetheless: little to no street setback or greenspace provisions.<\/p>\n
Welcome to Manhattan, the Ugly Version.<\/p>\n
For anyone who thinks my judgment of these projects\u2019 collective aesthetic sounds too harsh, drive a few blocks west on West Bay Drive, below Seminole Boulevard\/Missouri Avenue. In addition to being plopped atop the passing traffic, these structures seem constructed solely to make Stalinist architecture look good by comparison.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll note in passing that Pinellas School District\u2019s new conference center, situated two blocks south of the strip center on a residential street, also sits almost curbside and is similarly unlikely to win many architectural awards. But let\u2019s leave any grumbling about school district planning for another time.<\/p>\n
Sticking with Largo\u2019s recent projects, it\u2019s hard to know who among the city\u2019s current officials would be best to blame for the apparent lack of architectural taste or planning prowess \u2014 though the buck tends to stop at City Commission, and the city Planning Board certainly has a voice in such matters. The problem is, city officials\u2019 decisions often are constricted by provisions of Largo\u2019s Comprehensive Plan, a long-term municipal code framework that\u2019s effectively a subset of similar codified plans at the regional and state levels.<\/p>\n
Still, don\u2019t I remember hearing that where there\u2019s a will there\u2019s a way?<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s start with the City Hall monolith known as Horizon West Bay, a cutesy name premised on its prospective inclusion of sundry retail and restaurant tenants, in addition to the city brass and their hard-working minions. My reaction: Good luck with that. I lived for many years in Los Angeles\u2014 a city of similarly questionable taste in planning matters \u2014 where its longstanding goal of \u201ccleaning up\u201d downtown Hollywood resulted late last century in the wedging of a behemoth shopping mall in an historic strip of Hollywood Boulevard that\u2019s home to the venerable Grauman\u2019s Chinese Theatre \u2014 above which this largely failed shopping center now towers, sadly dwarfing the building and its famous-footprints sidewalk.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, let me also acknowledge that my carping over all of the above may strike some as nothing more than Monday morning quarterbacking. To which I only can say in defense that I had held out the hope that my worst fears would be proven wrong once the projects took shape. Also, there would seem to be some tiny chance that by grumbling now it will give pause to somebody in city government, seated behind a shiny new desk high above West Bay Drive, and more careful attention will be given to the design and aesthetics of future city projects and not solely the prospect of a fattened tax base.<\/p>\n
Carl DiOrio is a semi-retired journalist who lives in Largo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With a population now estimated at 80,000-plus, Largo grows ever larger, and city officials are determined to extend…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":95214,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[17494,17481,4085,482,596,202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-95213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-column","tag-editorial","tag-largo","tag-opinion","tag-pinellas-county","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}