Jenna Petok moved to Westport in January 2022. Nine months later, she was appointed to the Downtown Plan Implementation Committee.
Her professional background is in marketing and placemaking for real estate and business improvement districts. Her full-time job is global head of CX at Host — CBRE’s experiential and digital tenant engagement platform. Jenna writes:
As a place-maker in real estate and community development, I aim to help Westporters understand the significance of the vision, and urgency to enhance the safety and resilience of our downtown and its rare and wonderful riverfront attribute.
Through enhancing placemaking (the participatory process of connecting culture and events with physical surroundings and real estate), wayfinding (readable directional signage for where to park, shop, dine and visit), and the activation of more open spaces, together we can create a sustainable and multi-modal downtown that we all need for the future.
Downtown is many things, to many people. (Photo/JC Martin)
Great downtowns create opportunities for primary destinations like shopping and dining, and secondary reasons to stay, linger, explore, stumble upon events and experiences, and shop and dine some more.
Currently, downtown is primarily accessible to people with cars, and leaves out to some extent pedestrians entering town by foot (lack of safe crosswalks), bikers (lack of bike lanes and bike parking), people who need accessible parking, and families with young children trying to keep them safe in parking lots and crossing unsafe crosswalks.
Cars are king downtown.
Since becoming a Westport resident, I participated in the DPIC charrettes and surveys, and heard mainly positive feedback on the plans. Beginning last June, I was shocked to find this visionary strategy and plan for our downtown suddenly reduced to the number of parking spaces available in a dangerous lot that is currently a deterrent.
Of course the lack of parking is a concern, and we need places for people to park. But if they are coming (as some merchants mentioned) to pick up their order, that is because they are coming for a single purpose and leaving. If we can work together to look holistically at the infrastructure and planning needed to give people multiple ways to get downtown and access safe parking, we will create a more economically viable downtown and surrounding area.
Cold Fusion
One reason to hang out downtown. (Photo/Lynn Untermeyer Miller)
I’ve also heard the argument that people don’t want to hang out in town and that green space is not needed. Perhaps this is because there is currently almost nowhere desirable to do so.
Take the other side of the river, for example, where there is a patch of green space with seating. I have spent countless times with friends and family there, where my kids can run around safely, thankful to have a place to enjoy the riverfront before or after shopping and dining.
West side of the Saugatuck River. (Photo/Jonathan Alloy)
Community development is about collaboration and compromise. After 40 years of debate, we need to move forward urgently to begin the first part of this multiphase plan.
This will continue to be a step-by-step process with community feedback, the first of which is creating the additional parking spaces in the upper Jesup Green lot.
The newly planned lot will not only benefit merchants, but also our amazing programming at the Westport Library and Levitt Pavilion.
Let’s get started, and balance our parking needs with activating the riverfront to give future generations of Westporters and visitors the gift of a sustainable and vibrant town.
The Saugatuck River runs through downtown. (Photo/Andrew Fishman)
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