Wichita closes large downtown parking garage. Does it spell trouble for Old Town?

It has been a rough summer for Old Town Square, once considered the crown jewel of Wichita’s bustling downtown revitalization effort.

First, its anchor tenant — the Old Town Regal Warren — closed for good. A week later, two people were shot to death inside the adjoining public parking garage.

Now, citing safety concerns and a lowered demand for parking, the city of Wichita has barricaded much of the Old Town Cinema parking garage, one of downtown’s largest free public parking areas. The garage’s surface lot open, but the second and third floors of the garage are closed indefinitely.

The city installed concrete blocks at the bottom entry ramp of the Old Town Cinema parking garage earlier this month in the aftermath of the murders, part of what the Wichita Police Department has called a “place-based police strategy.”

The now-vacant garage remains open to foot traffic and is becoming a popular refuge for homeless people looking for privacy and shade from the summer heat.

City officials insist the blockade is temporary. But they have no timeline for what comes next for a 444-stall parking garage the city spent $5.2 million to build less than 20 years ago.

Unless another theater operator takes over the former Warren, it will likely require a massive renovation before it can reopen. The building has been listed on the open market since late July, and the Wichita Business Journal recently reported that it has had multiple showings without any buyers.

“I know this isn’t a permanent solution,” said City Council member Maggie Ballard, whose district includes Old Town Square. “There are a lot of moving parts . . . but I feel like we had to do something because we were doing nothing, and this is what happened (referring to the homicides). So maybe it’s not the best approach, but we had to do something.”

Ballard, who sits on the Old Town Association board, said the nonprofit organization has been asking police since at least February to do something to address noisy and dangerous driving inside the parking garage, which has long been a draw for drivers and motorcyclists who get a kick out of turning donuts, squealing their tires and trying to drift around sharp corners.

“The only complaints that I get from the Old Town Association is that there’s cars drifting and the motorcycles are going crazy on the second and top floors,” Ballard said.

Debra Fraser, president of the Old Town Association, said the squealing tire noises at the parking garage have scared nearby apartment residents.

“It had just gotten to a point to where residents who actually live there in nearby apartments were scared,” Fraser said. “The noises that they were making were literally causing fear and police had gone and stopped it several times, but then it just happens again and again.”

Old Town Square includes multiple housing units at the Historic 1910 Lofts, which has a gated parking lot, and The Lofts at Old Town Square, which has its own private, underground parking garage. (The Eagle’s newsroom is also in Old Town Square.)

Fraser said The Wave, a concert venue on the other side of the railroad tracks that is partially visible from the top level of the garage, has also had concerns about people throwing things and watching shows from the upper level of the garage.

“It just seemed that every use of that level of the garage — the bad uses were really outweighing the good of it being available,” Fraser said. “To my knowledge, no, there’s not a plan yet. There will have to be one.”

Mayor Brandon Whipple said he’s confident Police Chief Joseph Sullivan will soon come up with a plan to reopen the garage.

“Overall, you can’t just leave an asset indefinitely closed,” Whipple said. “We’ve got to have a plan to reopen it. Even if that plan is something as simple as monitoring our cameras more closely.”

New problems in Old Town Square

Upkeep at Old Town Square and its parking garage has seen been slipping since most of the businesses in the square were closed during the COVID crisis.

But the kind of routine maintenance from years past never returned to what had once been a carefully manicured Old Town Square.

Some of its curbs are crumbling. The neon lights of the theater that once lit the entire square are out. The shine on the theater’s marquee has more than dulled: the clear coat is gone, the paint is fading and, in some spots, has weathered to the undercoat. It’s a matter of time before it starts to rust.

Inside the garage, you’re greeted by a mix of smells, no matter which way the wind is blowing — the exhaust fumes of idling cars, the sharp odor of sun-baked garbage, the ammoniacal whiff of urine, the musky perfume of railroad smoke.

It looks like it smells. Layers of mismatched paint covers graffiti on the walls. Tire marks stripe and swirl the pavement black. Old light bulbs fizz and flicker.

Then there are the cast-asides. The empty bottles in crumpled brown bags, the Styrofoam to-go containers full of rotten food.

Last year, a gunman opened fire on the parking garage’s glass elevator. The city replaced the glass, but someone broke it again. Instead of replacing the glass, the city duct taped it back together and shut down the elevator.

An Eagle reporter shared documentation of the problems with Ballard, who said she is “shocked and horrified,” particularly by a photo of a man who appears to be intoxicated sprawled out in the garage.

Ballard said she worries that blocking the parking garage could become its own public safety concern.

“It could be potentially dangerous both ways,” Ballard said. “It’s obviously dangerous because there was a double homicide there, but now it could be potentially dangerous because there’s not cars driving in and out and checking often, and noticing things if something is wrong.”

Trouble for Old Town

Old Town Square isn’t the only section of Old Town that is going through changes as the city of Wichita focuses most of its attention on development focused on Douglas Avenue.

City Nightz, a popular night club near First and Washington, permanently closed earlier this month under pressure from the Wichita Police Department after a mass shooting inside the club left nine people wounded.

The public art scattered throughout the district could also soon be gone, after the Wichita Arts Council decided it didn’t have enough private funding to support its Sculpture WalkAbout after 15 years.

Chase Billingham, an urban studies researcher and professor at Wichita State University who lived in Old Town Square about a decade ago, said major violent crimes and drivers squealing tires in the parking garage are not new to the area.

What’s new, he said, is that the city appears to no longer see Old Town as its primary downtown destination — directing much more time, money and attention on development along Douglas Avenue. Newer developments, such as Naftzger Park a few blocks away, have duplicated and overtaken Old Town Square’s role as a main attraction downtown, he said.

Without swift — and continuous — action, Billingham said he fears Old Town Square is destined to meet a similar fate as Century II, Naftzger Park prior to its redevelopment, the Wichita Ice Center and the former downtown public library — city projects cherished when they were new, not properly maintained over time, and then declared obsolete or in need of a massive and expensive overhaul.

In the early years of Old Town Square, the city of Wichita won awards from the American Planning Association for the 20-block neighborhood in downtown. The APA noted that the district had created a “new identity as downtown’s hot spot.”

“Old Town Square was not just an entertainment district,” Billingham said. “It also was the main place for civic gatherings, for protests, for places that people could come together in the center of the city.”

Fifteen years after the award, the city appears to have moved on.

“The decline in Old Town Square has been remarkably rapid,” Billingham said. “The closure of the movie theater and garage really seems like a nail in the coffin.”

Billingham said the change of focus away from Old Town comes as the city retires the tax increment financing district that helped build it. TIF is an economic incentive that targets blighted areas for redevelopment and uses any property tax growth in the district to pay for improvements.

Local governments often justify TIF districts under the “but for” theory that the redevelopment wouldn’t have happened without public incentives and that the properties will go back on the tax rolls after the district is retired.

“If — as the TIF district is retired — we see that this area is already rundown, which was essentially the justification for creating the TIF district and doing the project in the first place a couple of decades ago, then I do think that it makes us wonder about the long-term viability of TIF-funded projects of that nature,” Billingham said. “And we have a bunch of them.”

City Hall says it has no concerns about the staying power of its TIF districts.

“We created the TIF to spur development — development happened,” city spokesperson Megan Lovely said in a statement.

Public investment in Old Town Square

It hasn’t been all bad news for Old Town Square recently.

Old Chicago, Sabor, and Yo-B Yogurt and Burgers continue to do steady business in Old Town Square, as does Lucinda’s, a boutique clothing, accessories and gift shop.

Just outside the square, other new businesses continue to pop up, such as The Arcade, a popular family-friendly business at Third and Mosley where children and adults can play unlimited video games on traditionally coin-operated machines with a $10 to $12 wristband.

The entrance to Rock Island Studios is being renovated. And two new restaurants have opened in the square since the pandemic — Sushiya in the former Hana Cafe space and Bocatto Eatery and Pasta in the former Mimi’s Old Town Mexican Restaurant.

The city originally invested $9.5 million into assembling the land, building the garage and developing an open-air plaza with a splashpad to help turn Old Town Square into a family-friendly downtown destination.

Twenty years later, that investment added roughly $6 million in assessed valuation to city, county, state and school district tax rolls. The city’s share of new tax dollars collected in the district is under $200,000 a year, according to the city’s data.

So, on paper, the Old Town Square investment was a success, Billingham said.

But without an anchor tenant such as a movie theater, he said, Old Town Square now has more in common with a suburban strip mall than an urban center.

At the same time, the city has invested in newer entertainment development on the suburban fringes of Wichita, such as Top Golf and Chicken N Pickle on the far east side and a planned pickleball complex in south Wichita.

The city is not considering any new public incentives for Old Town Square.

“At this time, we are not currently entertaining any other incentives but we have heard of interest in the building, although have not been made of aware of anything formal happening yet,” Lovely said in an email. “The movie theater business obviously faced a significant shift after covid, but that is a central space to our downtown, a beautiful building and we believe it can be filled.”

Billingham said he doesn’t think Old Town Square requires additional economic development dollars to improve. What it needs is upkeep by the city, he said.

“What’s required for public investment to generate long-standing use by the public is regular maintenance, doing the day-to-day work of keeping up with the investments that the public is paying for,” Billingham said. “And the city seems to have a track record of moving on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

“Old Town Square was a real triumph in the first decade of this century. But since then, we’ve seen the city moving on to Naftzger Park, to the west bank and the baseball stadium and River Vista and to the east bank and the ideas surrounding the Riverfront Legacy Master Plan,” he said. “These all have the potential to be shiny new attractions for Wichita, but in the meantime, we continue to allow the existing investments to degrade.”