Maybe next year for Downtown

You can call Downtown St. Joseph a work in progress. You can call it a phoenix rising from the ashes. But you can’t describe Downtown St. Joseph as the city’s central business district.

Not anymore. That designation evaporates when the last bank shuts its doors for good.

Commerce Bank already announced plans to vacate its Downtown branch at 328 Felix St. Now, U.S. Bank is closing its branch at the Robidoux Center, located across from the Buchanan County Courthouse at 415 Francis St.

Once upon a time, you could do all your shopping in Downtown St. Joseph, but those stores long ago fled for the East Hills Shopping Center and other parts of town. But Downtown still retained a function as the city’s commercial center with banks, government buildings and even a hotel or two.

In case you’re keeping score, the banks are gone, the federal building is a ghost town and you can’t provide enough public incentives to get a hotel to come Downtown. The Robidoux Hotel was razed for the building that U.S. Bank is vacating, so it seems we’ve come full circle.

Not that the sun always shines on the east side of town. With the exception of chronic homelessness, Downtown St. Joseph remains better off than the Belt Highway in some ways.

A walk through Downtown reveals no vacant K-Mart buildings and no payday loan stores – both of which signal a community’s economic decline. The East Hills Shopping Center, with all of its vacancies, is doing a good impression of Downtown St. Joseph in the 1980s.

But it still seems Downtown – even with the bars, restaurants and apartments -- is a work in progress. One step forward and two steps back.

This editorial isn’t a criticism of Downtown and the people who promote and seek its renewal. With its history and architecture, Downtown is the one thing that makes St. Joseph different from the cookie-cutter suburbs in Kansas City. Its development should be a priority for this community.

What this editorial does criticize is the unvarnished optimism that “Downtown is back” when the reality is a lot more complicated. It brings to mind how every spring someone says “this is the year” for the Royals – even when they don’t make big free-agent signings.

The Royals were good this year, a little above average, and fun to watch at times. But you didn’t see them in the playoffs, did you?

They’ve got a ways to go before the reality matches the rhetoric. Just like Downtown.