Another chance for downtown

The announcement that the Mervyns store in Napa is soon to close is sad in several respects. Dozens of locals will be out of jobs when the department store shuts down in just a few months. Locals have lost a viable shopping option — good old McCaulou’s remains the other — in a downtown sector that increasingly caters to tourists.

But the end of Mervyns may be the biggest boost yet to those who would like to see the undoing of downtown Napa’s 1970s redevelopment.

No, it is not likely we will see the old Victorians and other structures return 30-plus years after they were wiped out. Yet Mervyns is about to abandon a spot that creates great opportunity for Napa.

On one side of Mervyns is the city’s outdoor bus terminal — but not for long, as the city already has plans to move the transit center across the river, near the Depot.

On another side are city-owned parking lots just waiting for better, and perhaps more beautiful, uses.

On a third side is what was once and could again be Coombs Street, punching through from Napa Abajo and Old Town to its terminus at Napa Creek.

To the west, across what is now Coombs Plaza, is the Napa Town Center, the pedestrian mall that has never reached its potential and has been for sale for years.

On the south side is First Street, changing in fits and starts but saddled by the empty storefronts of the Gordon and Merrills buildings and the bland, institutional wall of the Carithers building.

(The Carithers building, too, might be in for major change, as the county offices that now occupy it may someday be moved to a new site, and the county has agreed to give the city first dibs on buying, and hopefully transforming, it.)

Smart money might bet that tourist uses would crowd the ground floor of what’s to come at Mervyns, and that condos would go above.

But citizens who want something different — an accessible creekside park, an effort to locate local-serving shopping here or nearby, or a dramatic rethinking of the area from Mervyns or even the Town Center to the soon-to-depart Cinedome Movieplex — have a chance to weigh in.

The city of Napa is launching a Downtown Specific Plan, a boring phrase but a vital topic.

What it translates to is this: We have a chance to rebuild much of downtown, and we want to do better than we did in the 1970s.

The demise of Mervyns, sad as it is for some, could be the beginning of something grand.

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