We all know the story of Decatur’s CVS plaza and the city’s hard-won campaign to convince the developer to place the drugstore along the sidewalks of Ponce and Commerce.  Unarguably, a huge win for our city.  If the CVS building was tucked back into a corner of that massive lot, that Decatur intersection would still be an unpleasant place for pedestrians.

But, while the fight was won to move the building, it’s obvious that CVS wasn’t willing to compromise more than that.  And that story can be told by observing its street-facing windows.

You can almost hear the CVS corporate interior designers saying, “OK, they can move the building forward, but hell if we’re going to change the interior layout!”  (Apparently, I imagine that corporate designers swear a lot.) So while we get a nice row of windows fronting our sidewalks, they are covered with funky red panels, because…well, it’s a building living in the city that grew up in the ‘burbs.  Drivers care little about the placement of a building’s window.  Behind these particular windows, you won’t find window displays, but the back’s of the cashiers’ heads as they ring up an endless line of customers or the rear-side of an extra display that couldn’t find wall space.

This layout is so familiar that it’s no surprise to most these days, but it is still regrettable.  How much more enjoyable would that strip of concrete be today with a hugely ornate Halloween display instead of panels of red raindrops?  (Maybe these panels were Peter Gabriel’s inspiration?)

But of course this is Decatur.  For every shortsighted, corporate “this is the way we’ve always done it” decision, there’s local innovation and reinvention.  We take the lemons grown out of the 1960s and turn them into sweet, downtown PLACES, which hold near-universal appeal to bipeds.  So it wasn’t hard for me to locate some windows of found opportunity.  Case in point…

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