"What can we do to help?" was the general response of hoteliers who attended a presentation on the Waterfront highway project Wednesday by the St.Thomas-St.John Chamber of Commerce, according to Jose Ortega, architectural consultant on the chamber's project.
About 30 members of the St. Thomas-St. John Hotel and Tourism Association showed up to see a vision of what could be on the waterfront – cafes and artists' stalls, bike and running paths, a gathering place for tourists and residents with shade trees and landscaping from Havensight to Frenchtown.
The chamber made a similar presentation in May at Haagensen House for chamber members and has made other presentations to Rotary Clubs around the island.
The chamber hopes to put a stop to Plan 8, the current plan to fill the harbor and put a four-lane highway around the Legislature building.
Mary Gleason, who has seen the presentation several times, said, "It would be wonderful if they could do what they (the chamber) envision."
Gleason said, "Plan 8 would be a disaster, just another thing like we went through a few years ago where the waterfront highway was widened. It was disastrous for business."
Torgen Johnson, a graduate of Harvard and a member of the team that designed the new Coral World, walked attendees through a slide show of what is and what could be.
What is, Johnson maintains, is a 20-foot-wide strip of valuable land that is now being used for overflow parking.
What could be was conjured up with slides of successful waterfront projects elsewhere.
Johnson told the group that at a waterfront conference in Boston last week, he learned of a project in Bilbao, Spain, where the waterfront was revitalized, a major museum built and a community turned into a tourist Mecca from a primarily industrial setting.
The return on the community's $90 million investment was, in only one year, $210 million in tourist dollars.
Johnson showed a series of telling slides of the current state of the waterfront on both sides of the road. The slides showed vehicles parked on the apron, bases for lamp posts that are being used for dumping garbage, and a concrete bunker-like structure that is supposedly a planter.
He pointed out a number of times that as residents, we drive by never noticing these things, but said the visitor’s eye view is different.
He also pointed to the lack of sidewalks and general confusion for pedestrians trying to navigate the waterfront.
Edward Thomas, president of West Indian Co. Ltd., who has also seen the presentation before, said the meeting Wednesday was very informative.
"I understand and support the chamber's efforts," Thomas said. "It is the wish of most people not to build a four-lane highway."
But, he added, "There are still key issues that need to be addressed," and they mostly involve traffic flow.
Congestion is the single largest detractor in the cruise ship business here, he said. But Thomas is aware of studies that say building bigger highways doesn't solve the problem.
The solution, he said, lies in a combination of water buses; traffic flow changes, including changing the flow to two lanes going west in the morning, two lanes going east at the end of the day, and changes in Mandela Circle's traffic flow; and the cruise ships staying in port later.
The chamber, with the blessing of Gov. Charles W. Turnbull, is sponsoring a workshop in November to come up with an alternative plan for reducing traffic on the waterfront.
