Imagine a mid-sized city free of slums, with eight swimming pools, a citywide system of walking trails and a thriving air-conditioned shopping mall downtown. In the middle is a gleaming river lake, flanked by museums, high-rise apartments, marinas, upscale shops and swimming beaches.

Welcome to Waco, as envisioned by city planners in decades past.

Four times in the last 42 years, the city has assembled citizens and planners to chart Waco’s course. The first was the landmark 1958 Comprehensive Plan , followed by plans in 1967 , 1983 and one that is now under way.

From the lofty vantage point of the year 2000, it’s easy to dismiss some of the plans of yesteryear as far-fetched. Some are unthinkable today, such as the 1958 proposal for a riverside highway slashing through Cameron Park.

On the other hand, many of those plans formed the basis of public improvements we value today: A convention center-hotel complex, important roads and streets, parks and the low-water dam that created Lake Brazos.

The plans were clear-eyed about the challenges that confronted the city then and now, if overly optimistic about their resolution.

“Waco is faced with several serious problems, problems that were present when the previous city plan was prepared and for which there has been no resolution,” the 1967 Comprehensive Plan states. Those problems were a downtown on the skids, declining infrastructure, blighted housing, low income and tax base levels, limited land in the city for growth and political fragmentation due to suburban governments, according to the plan ‘s authors.

But this was an era of confidence, of the space race and the Great Society. The first two plans , drafted by the renowned Harland Bartholomew firm of St. Louis, offered big solutions to the big problems, and they formed the basis for the most ambitious public works programs in Waco’s history.

The 1958 plan laid the groundwork for federal Urban Renewal, which involved a huge slum clearance program along both sides of the Brazos River. Waco received nearly $80 million worth of public improvements from the federal government in the 1960s and early ‘70s.

The 1967 plan was the springboard for more federal programs and a city bond election that built the convention center, Uni- versity-Parks Drive, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and the low-water dam on Lake Brazos.

Downtown was center stage. The first two plans insisted that the central business district should be the main retail center of greater Waco, despite competition from new suburban strip centers.

The 1958 plan recommended clearing the heavy industries along the river to allow for large apartments, hotels, museums and a sleek convention center. City Hall would become a police station and the old buildings on the square around it would be razed. Austin Avenue would be turned into a pedestrian mall.

This vision was mostly unfulfilled by 1967 . The plan that year stated that downtown Waco was in a “desperate” condition, “unattractive at best,” giving an “impression of complete mediocrity.”

“The only certainty about downtown Waco is that inaction is calamitous, and unfortunately, inaction has been the story to date,” the planners said. “A major change in total environment is obviously essential.”

Pedestrian mall

Based on the 1967 plan , the city tore down the buildings around City Hall, many of them tornado-damaged, and built the pedestrian mall, which the plan called a “perfectly sound proposal.” However, plans to air-condition the mall and create second-story arcades and pedestrian overpasses were abandoned.

Even with significant improvements, Austin Avenue and downtown continued to decline through the 1980s. The 1983 plan conceded that downtown had lost the battle to be a retail hub.

City planning director Bill Falco said the mall lacked adequate parking and vibrant new businesses, and it was awkward to try to impose a mall structure on a turn-of-the-century main street.

The mall, which was reopened to traffic in the late 1980s, has come to be regarded as a mistake.

“A lot of people think it was,” Falco said. “I guess I now think it was. I don’t think it killed downtown, because downtown was already on the way toward deterioration. It was a losing battle.”

Mayor Mike Morrison said cities across America tried to pump up their downtowns in those days, but few succeeded in an era when old things were scorned and people replaced antiques with Formica furniture.

“What was happening was the suburbanization and the malling of America,” he said. “It didn’t matter how attractive your downtown was. I think downtowns were victims of the times. But I think downtowns represent a more enduring value, and we’re coming back to that.”

LaNelle McNamara, who worked on city plans in the ‘70s and served on the Waco City Council in the ‘80s, said the city and federal governments went too far in clearing land in downtown Waco, especially the town square.

“It was cleared without any realistic hopes for redevelopment, and it stayed empty too long,” she said. “We weren’t San Antonio having Hemisfair in the late ‘60s. The ultimate goal was delayed so long that it became a negative instead of a positive.”

McNamara said the main flaw of the early plans is that they relied on sudden, drastic changes instead of small, incremental improvements.

Growth in surprises

While the downtown declined, the outlying areas grew, but not in the way the early planners had expected. The first two plans anticipated that the Speegleville and Steinbeck Bend areas would be the growth areas of Waco through the 1980s. Instead, Hewitt, Woodway and the Highway 84 corridor have been the growth centers.

The 1967 plan projected that McLennan County would have a population of 215,000 by 1985, with 72 percent living in the city of Waco. Today, McLennan County’s population is estimated at 206,000, with only 53 percent in Waco.

Durwood Ringo, who was a city planner from the mid-60s to 1991, said the integration of schools caused the population to shift westward, and the expense of providing sewer to Steinbeck Bend and Speegleville hampered growth there.

Morrison said the city in the 1970s spent millions of dollars on roads and other services to areas north of town that failed to grow as expected. The money would have been better spent on fixing aging streets and sewers in the city, he said.

“It was a classic example of us building and them not coming,” Morrison said. “Everyone was busy convincing themselves that this is where growth was going to happen.”

In recent years, he said, the city has worked with developers and builders when developing annexation and service plans . Likewise, the city has tried to work more with the private sector to accomplish goals such as affordable housing and downtown revitalization, Morrison said.

Falco said the old plans , despite their shortcomings, were valuable and laid the groundwork for much-needed improvements.

“They were fairly realistic,” he said. “You want to dream a little when you’re doing a plan , though you don’t want to go so far out that people question your credibility. I think planners today are more conservative in their projections. Maybe that’s good, maybe not.”

J.B. Smith can be reached at jbsmith@wacotrib.com or at 757-5752.