Urban Success Story, With Hint of Unease for Poorer Residents

WHITE PLAINS

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times

Downtown White Plains has undergone an unusually swift redevelopment in recent years under Mayor Joseph M. Delfino.

The heart of the downtown here spreads out like an oddly shaped T — from west to east for a half-mile along Main Street, and from north to south down a shorter stretch on Mamaroneck Avenue, where new restaurants, pharmacies and wine stores seem to sprout by the day.

The steady drone of cars, once an aberration of sorts within the city’s nucleus, is now intrinsic to its fabric. And pedestrians, a rarity after dark just a few years back, stroll around at all times, amid the concrete-and-glass towers that rise like shiny exclamation points into an otherwise barren skyline.

“I like to say that I live in a small city with a big-city vibe,” said Jordan Bachelder, 29, a financial adviser who traded a rental studio apartment in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan for a one-bedroom condo here in 2004.

“I guess you can call it the suburbs,” he added. “But with all that’s around, it doesn’t feel like the suburbs to me.”

Nine years ago, when Mayor Joseph M. Delfino was first elected, downtown White Plains felt somewhat abandoned, its commercial arteries pockmarked by shuttered shopfronts, dollar stores and crumbling facades — echoes of the recession that had upended the local economy in the early 1990s. At the time, the area’s most memorable landmark was the vacant site of a former Macy’s department store, a cavernous hole at the corner of Main and Mamaroneck.

Today, downtown is a study in contradictions, a place where brands as popular as Wal-Mart and Target and as exclusive as Trump and Ritz-Carlton occupy prominent spots in a newly developed strip spanning four city blocks. It is a place where luxurious condominiums stand near public housing projects that are home to many of the city’s working poor; and where mothers chat in Spanish at a Dunkin’ Donuts, while young professionals tap on laptops in a Starbucks on the opposite side of the street.

“Our dream was to design a city that if you lived here, worked here or visited here, you didn’t have to go anywhere else,” said Mr. Delfino, a Republican who is now in his third term as mayor. “I think we’ve met that objective.”

But the pace and depth of the transformation, arguably the most remarkable traits of the downtown renaissance, have also been a source of concern to some low-income residents, who fear that they may be pushed out as the area gentrifies.

“I love the way downtown looks, but is there a place for working people like me in the new downtown? I don’t know,” said Darryl Jenkins, 53, who has lived at the Winbrook Houses, a downtown public housing development, for more than 30 years. “It seems that all the homes that have been built so far are for rich people.”

White Plains sits about 30 miles north of Times Square and 30 to 50 minutes by train from Grand Central Terminal. It has about 60,000 residents, but the population quadruples during the day, as thousands of people come to work and shop in the city. The office vacancy rate now hovers below 7 percent, he added, down from a high of 34 percent in the last decade.

The plan for the new downtown, which Mayor Delfino began working on almost as soon as he took office, borrowed from some of the same elements that cities including Boston, Chicago and Madison, Wis., had used to awaken their dormant cores: a mixture of retail, residential and entertainment projects that turned the area from a passage to a destination.

The city took the first steps, in ways big and small: It installed new lamp posts, planted flowerbeds and trees, gave out grants to help landlords spruce up their properties and bought a machine to loosen up old chewing gum stuck to benches and sidewalks.

What is perhaps most unusual about the plan, though, is how fast it has unfolded, given that few developers seemed inclined at first to invest in a downtown that had yet to turn a corner.

In 2003, downtown White Plains saw the conclusion of its first significant development, a 5 million project called City Center, which replaced the abandoned Macy’s store. The complex includes a Trump Tower, where some condos have sold for more than million; luxury rental units in a doorman high-rise; several chain stores and restaurants and a multiscreen movie theater, the city’s first since the early 1990s.

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