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Pike Place Market 1987 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence - Gold Medal
Pike Place Market in Seattle renovated historic waterfront buildings to create a thriving farmers market with retail, low-income housing, and social services. Much more than a market, the project spans seven acres and includes 300 businesses and 750 subsidized housing units in an interdependent network of business owners, consumers, and neighbors.
The Market Foundation, created to support local residents, offers a wide a variety of social services including a health clinic, food bank, child care center, and senior center to strengthen and serve the community.
The farmers market was established in 1907 by local farmers in response to steep price increases in produce. The project preserves the founders’ commitment to creating and serving community by combining retail with residential units and social services. At the same time, the project preserves a section of the city’s waterfront, mixing new development with the adaptive reuse of several blocks of historic buildings. The market’s programming reflects its intention to attract a diverse population to the venue, where people can still “meet the producers” in the oldest continually run farmers market in the country.
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Casa Rita 1987 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence - Silver Medal
Casa Rita in Bronx, New York, converted a vacant school building into an empowering temporary shelter with services for homeless women and children. Conceived by the local Latina community and operated by Women in Need (WIN), it offers housing for 16 women and up to 39 children along with programs and services to help residents build the life and work skills they need to succeed on their own.
Case Rita provides a safe, compassionate, and stable environment that focuses on common space and a communal lifestyle. Living arrangements and programs emphasize responsibility and facilitate networking, self-help, sharing of tasks, cooperative child care, and group problem solving. This approach enables residents to achieve increased independence as they work toward permanent housing. WIN worked with the local community to secure support for the shelter, and it supports the local community by employing area women to help manage the programs.
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Quality Hill 1987 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence - Silver Medal
Quality Hill in Kansas City, Missouri, transformed a deteriorating downtown historic district into mixed-income housing and retail to revitalize the neighborhood. Completed in 1985, the development spans four and a half blocks and includes the renovation of 13 historic buildings and the addition ten new buildings that together provide 363 low- and moderate-income apartments and 52,400 square feet of office and commercial space. The largest adaptive reuse project in the city’s history, Quality Hill helped restore the vitality of the once-thriving district by providing the first downtown housing development in over half a century.
Quality Hill is the result of an innovative partnership between the city, a St. Louis-based private developer, and local businesses and foundations—and the first public-private partnership to succeed in the city’s history. The engagement of a wide variety of public and private participants brought the community together in a process that sparked reinvestment in the central business district while preserving the unique character of the Quality Hill neighborhood.
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Fairmount Health Center 1987 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence - Silver Medal
Fairmount Health Center in Philadelphia is a community clinic providing quality healthcare for area residents regardless of ability to pay. Established by Philadelphia Health Services in 1986 in a former auto parts warehouse, the clinic was created to serve the health needs of the surrounding North Philadelphia community, a struggling and densely populated low-income area where nearly a fifth of the residents were unemployed and without health insurance.
The center repurposed the dilapidated warehouse to create a welcoming, safe, 16,000-square-foot space. Intended to create “an oasis within a decaying cityscape,” the building includes areas for health and dental services as well as education and training. Public spaces are designed to serve as a “neighborhood living room,” and the light and airy lobby includes a play area for children. Local agencies and groups are encouraged to use the facilities for meetings, workshops, and recreational activities to strengthen the clinic’s connection to the community and reinforce its position as a neighborhood hub and place of community pride.
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St. Francis Square 1987 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence - Silver Medal
St. Francis Square in San Francisco emphasizes community building in an affordable, cooperatively owned, low-rise family housing complex in the inner city. Its award-winning design includes 299 units clustered in 12 three-story walk-up buildings arranged around three shared courtyards, a playground, and the local YMCA. In contrast to high rise developments geared toward the more affluent, St. Francis Square was designed to attract and retain low-income families and to encourage resident interaction.
Developed in 1963 by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and the Pacific Maritime Association, the complex was the first inter-racial housing cooperative on the West Coast. By closing off streets that used to run through the area, the project creates a strong sense of community and better provides for the needs of families with children. The cooperative form of tenancy makes residents stakeholders with a sense of political and financial power despite their modest means and invites tenant leadership and responsibility. St. Francis Square demonstrates that quality low-rise affordable housing, when well designed, can function in densely populated urban areas, facilitate community living, and provide a model for inner-city development.
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Pike Place Market case study
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Casa Rita case study
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Fairmount Health Center case study
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Quality Hill case study
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St. Francis Square case study
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Pike Place Market application
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Casa Rita application
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Quality Hill application
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Fairmount Health Center application
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St. Francis Square application
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Urban Excellence 1987 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence
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Sustaining Urban Excellence: Learning from the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence 1987-1993 The Rudy Bruner Award seeks to discover and celebrate outstanding urban places, while serving as a forum for debating urban issues and the nature of urban excellence. The projects presented in this book include the winners from he first award cycle in 1987 through 1993. While each of the winners represented innovation and success when they were recognized by the Rudy Bruner Award, time is the ultimate test of viability. As the Award proceeded it therefore became important to ask:
-How have these urban places withstood the test of time?
-How have they evolved in the face of changing circumstances?
-What do these places have to teach us when viewed as a whole?
In order to answer these questions, the Bruner Foundation, with assistance from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, undertook to revisit these finalists. This book documents the findings of those visits, and offers important observations about the challenge of sustaining urban excellence.
