REST IN PEACE BILL TORREY

A TRUE GENTLEMAN IS IN HOCKEY HEAVEN

From the time I was 10 years old and my dad worked at the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio, I knew I wanted to be a reporter.  I thought I was going to be a sports reporter, but when I got out of journalism school I gravitated toward covering urban affairs.

While covering that beat for the Columbus Dispatch in the mid- to late-1990s, I got to go on a tour of NHL facilities, because local leaders were bringing at NHL expansion franchise to Ohio’s capital city.

By far the kindest, most accommodating person was Bill Torrey. I knew him well, or I should say I knew about him, from watching the New York Islanders win the Stanley Cup every year of my four years in High School in suburban Northeast Ohio.

Cable TV was a brand new thing in our town and a New York superstation broadcast the Islanders. I became a fan before the winning and got so into hockey, I bought a Strat-O-Matic hockey game to take on the role of Islanders Coach.

Torrey, as GM then President, was the architect of those great teams with Dennis Potvin, Mike Bossy, Bryan Trottier, Billy Smith and Clark Gillies.

My tour of the NHL was to write stories about the impact expansion teams had on their community. Torrey had led the expansion Florida Panthers when people thought NHL teams in warm weather cities was absurd.  Within a few years, his team was in the Stanley Cup final.

Our interview was set up for a game day in Sunrise Florida, where the Panthers played after moving from downtown Miami. This was before the internet and smart phones.

I figured I’d meet some public relations intern and a rookie marketing/sales type and that would be it.  But in the bowels of the new arena, out came the familiar bow tie wearing Torrey.

He offered me food from the spread put out for the media.  I declined. He pecked at a sandwich and indulged my questions – some maybe on the money, perhaps some totally off the wall and out of left field.

Thoughtful, kind, respectful answers were given. All the while, I was praying Dispatch photographer Tim Revell was getting me in at least one of the shots, so I’d have a keepsake of me working in action, interviewing a Hockey Hall of Famer.

I started asking my questions rather rapidly, sure that this legend of the game and very important man in the Florida Panthers franchise would be yanked away from me any moment by some PR official.

Not at all. The kind man told me he had all the time that I needed.  His thoughtful responses made it very easy to tell Columbus – a city too close to Cleveland and Cincinnati to ever have its own pro sports franchise till the NHL came calling – what joy was in store when the Blue Jackets would take the ice in Nationwide Arena.

When I moved to Miami in 2000, I looked up Mr. Torrey.  We stayed in touch and he offered me advice when I was reinventing myself after a 13-year career in newspapers.

His kind, firm, always positive words kept me on focus as a worked in public relations, public service, then marketing. I hadn’t bothered him for a good decade by the time he passed away Wednesday evening at the age of 83.

Bill Torrey was a great man. He was a good man.

He earned enough accolades to fill a room, but he was humble, thoughtful and warm with a youngish reporter more than two decades ago.

Personally, I’m pretty sparse on my vision of the afterlife.

But as I think warm thoughts about the bow-tied architect of the Islanders and Panthers franchises, I know Bill Torrey is in hockey heaven today.

KEITH MYERS -- URBAN PLANNER PROFILE 3

KEITH MYERS

By Steve Wright

With offices in Pasadena and Winter Park, Florida, the MSI firm also is active in public park, city master plan, resort, town center, industrial to mixed use and amusement park design.

Myers’ next project is converting an 80-acre former grocery chain warehouse complex in an inner-ring suburb into another Nationwide-developed urban center with ground floor retail and office or residential above.

“I consider myself an urbanist: New, Old -- it does not matter to me” Myers said. “I do love some of the research and the passion of the New Urbanists, if I don't always agree with the dogma.”

“When the New Urbanists first banded together, there was a distinctive mission. In 1980, few people cared about creating great urban space. The rules were stacked against it and the attitudes of bankers, engineers, planners and politicians were even worse. It was a crusade. One that I think has been largely successful,” Myers continued.

However, Myers cautions against the Congress for New Urbanism becoming to rigid.

“I worry that the Charter is too narrow and that those who explore outside its boundaries are dismissed as 'not in the club.’ Not a healthy outlook,” he said. “Curiosity is the first sign of intelligence. Curiosity gave birth to the NU movement, and it is the only thing that will sustain it. Rhetoric and rules won't.”

Wright has written for a living for 25 years, with nearly 5,000 published articles. He lives in historic Little Havana and is very active in Miami’s urban issues. He and his wife of 20 years also are involved in making new and old towns more accessible for people with disabilities.

KEITH MYERS -- URBAN PLANNER PROFILE 2

KEITH MYERS

By Steve Wright

The contrasting styles shaped a designer who literally built a neighborhood where there was none in downtown Columbus Ohio – a capital city sprawled in every direction with over-engineered one-way streets aimed at getting cars out of the urban core and off to the farthest flung suburbs as quickly as possible.

Myers and his firm played a lead role in planning the Arena District for Nationwide, the insurance giant based in Columbus. The district is anchored by Nationwide Arena, home of the city’s only big-four professional sports team – the Columbus Blue Jackets of the National Hockey League.

The District features a grid pattern, throwback brick buildings and: 1.5 million square feet of office, retail and entertainment use where more than 3,600 people work and nearly 1,000 will live.

“The residential uses in the Arena District have been much more successful than we had ever dreamed, said Myers, a landscape architecture graduate of the Ohio State University. “The original master plan was for 350 units and we will likely double that or more. The rental units are getting the highest rates in the market and the for sale product went very quickly. “Over $650 million of private investment has off set the meager $43 million of public investment. The City of Columbus made the best business deal in America.”

The city’s land investment and Myers’ master plan turned the grounds of a huge abandoned penitentiary and adjacent largely vacant former industrial zone into a highly popular mixed use destination.

In a downtown that used to die after 5 p.m., the Arena District comes alive year round with a restaurant row, indoor-outdoor live performance venue, the NHL arena, a compact urban multiplex theater and a waterfront park featuring a Daniel Burnham-designed arch salvaged from a nearby building that was sadly razed during Columbus’ less enlightened era.


TOMORROW: New Urbanism

Wright has written for a living for 25 years, with nearly 5,000 published articles. He lives in historic Little Havana and is very active in Miami’s urban issues. He and his wife of 20 years also are involved in making new and old towns more accessible for people with disabilities.

KEITH MYERS -- URBAN PLANNER PROFILE

KEITH MYERS

By Steve Wright

Keith A. Myers grew up in exurban Cleveland during the late sixties/early seventies area of urban renewal with and middle class exodus from big cities.

His dad worked in downtown Cleveland, but his family lived in the next county over – far from the “Mistake of the Lake,” the sooty Great Lakes city where the polluted river burned, the baseball team was a joke, the school system was broken and a once-thriving industrial hub went bankrupt.

The prevailing wisdom at the time was that cities were dark and dangerous places -- all of which was exemplified in the great cult classic movie Escape from New York,” said the principal of Columbus, Ohio-based MSI Design. “The movie captured the feeling about cities at that time. In spite of that, I used to love to go downtown to my dad's office…I never really felt threatened by the city, Cleveland, in spite of its appearance and reputation. In some ways, that made it more of an adventure.”

The award winning urban planner spent his early professional years in the Mariemont, the fabled 1920s master-planned community on the outskirts of Cincinnati on the Ohio River.

Mariemont was a sharp contrast to suburban Cleveland with its village setting, wealth of parks, red brick Norman, Georgian and Tudor buildings, bell tower, concourse, village square – and one of the few elected town criers in America.

“I moved to Mariemont in 1980 and couldn't understand why we were not building villages, towns and cities on the same principles that seemed to work so well in the past,” he said.

TOMORROW: The Arena District in Columbus OH

Wright has written for a living for 25 years, with nearly 5,000 published articles. He lives in historic Little Havana and is very active in Miami’s urban issues. He and his wife of 20 years also are involved in making new and old towns more accessible for people with disabilities.