Carbondale’s Town Center project is something of a dream come true for a mountain town struggling to maintain the kind of affordability that allows for a wholesome community. Thanks to the anonymous donation of 14 neighboring parcels (1.4 acres) surrounding the Thunder River Theatre in December of 2021 (in addition to the Chacos Park/Fourth Street Plaza land), Carbondale has a unique shot at creating a mixed-use development to address as many needs as possible.
Crucial to the project’s planning and funding success, the Town is partnering with Artspace, a national real estate development nonprofit that conducted a “Space to Create” feasibility study in Carbondale in 2017. Other partners chosen for the project are JV DeSousa Architecture and Planning, Bldg Seed Architects, Land+Shelter, Connect One Design and Sopris Engineering.
The design process is now underway with a focus on public outreach. Residents and visitors may have noticed bilingual information booths at First Friday, Our Town One Table and Sopris Park concert events. An online survey (also in Spanish) closes on Sept. 14 at midnight (www.surveymonkey.com/r/bonedale). Meanwhile, Heather Henry of Connect One Design has been meeting with a variety of community stakeholders over the past few weeks.
According to Henry, some 80 stakeholders were initially invited, including nonprofits, private businesses, religious organizations and local governments. Of these, around 20 signed up for a focused meeting to provide detailed input. In all, Henry estimated that more than 300 responses online and in-person were collected during this first information gathering stage.
“I think there’s a certain segment of the community that really likes the outreach process and really wants to be involved in all things about Carbondale,” stated Ramsey Fulton, principal and design architect at Bldg Seed. “And there’s other segments of the community that are harder to reach.” For this reason, all partners will welcome feedback and ideas all through the project.
Next, there will be two community charrettes hosted at the Third Street Center, on Sept. 20 and Sept. 27. The first will focus on programming needs — be they a dance studio or rehearsal space, an expanded theater, stores or something entirely different. The second charette will get more into the physical design of the building. Some aspects of the nonresidential portions will be intentionally left undecided, Fultson said, given the likelihood of new needs emerging or former needs shifting before a physical building can be completed.
The current timeline predicts that 2024 will be devoted wholly to fundraising, with actual construction beginning in 2025 at the soonest. “It is a big, complicated project. It will take time to make it happen,” said JV DeSousa. “A lot goes into making a project like this real.”
Henry explained that the term “charette” refers specifically to an intense design process around a deadline. The word, she explained, literally means “cart” in French and comes from a time when projects would receive input via a person pushing around a cart where rolls of paper with ideas could be deposited. “We use it in that way,” she said, “a short iteration of honing ideas.”
“We try to start every project with a design charrette where we come to it with a blank page, to create solutions with the community,” DeSousa continued. “It’s an opportunity to quickly put together solutions that can be vetted across stakeholders.”
Both all-day charrettes will begin with invited participants distilling community feedback, and both will conclude with an open house from 5:30 to 7:30pm for the general public to weigh in. “What we really want to do is curate people that understand the design process, understand the regulations, understand the building process,” said Fulton. Other participants will include samplings from different parts of the community, like representatives of the immigrant population invited by Valley Settlement.
Fulton recognized the history of the property, which formerly housed a trailer park called Bonanza with primarily Latino residents. “This is bringing affordability back to the land that had already housed that part of our community,” he said. Bonanza was scraped from the land in 2002 and several factors prevented redevelopment from taking place, with the exception of Thunder River Theatre and the building that now houses Backbone Media.
There are certain restrictions that the Town’s Historic Commercial Core zoning imposes. Namely, all street-facing, ground-floor areas, the central promenade included, must be commercial/nonresidential. Given the public focus of this project, those spaces will likely serve a common or creative purpose.
“One of the major themes is how to build on what’s here,” said Henry. “Fill a few of the gaps, find efficiencies where our creative industries need it, and not just build for sake of building that might result in dilution or risking the success of our existing organizations. That’s a theme we’re going to heavily bring into these next few weeks.”
Stay up to date with the project at www.artspace.org/towncenter and www.carbondaleconnect.org/town-center