Every successful downtown needs a personality. I've lived and worked in some that did (New York City, Milwaukee) and others that didn't (Hartford and New London, Conn.). Here's what I wish for downtown Fresno:

• A gourmet restaurant. We've got subway sandwiches, chicken pita and a pittance more.
• A five-star hotel. I'm sure glad that the Holiday Inn has gotten gussied up and reopened (looking forward to the reopening of the rooftop lounge with the cocktail view of the jail). But put together a top-flight place to rest your head, and another where you can meet and eat, and -- zounds! -- you can pull in happy visitors with six-figure salaries. Good chow and high-thread-count sheets as recruiting tools? Call it a start.
• More cops on bikes.
• Cohesion within government and industry, beyond the Monday lunch at Fresno Rotary or Sunday "church" at the 18th green at Sunnyside Country Club.
• A couple of overpasses that ease the time-devouring blight of railroad crossings.
• A printable (and regularly updated) online map of what's where and what's there in downtown.
• A brief, printable online history of downtown -- what was (is) Chinatown? Armenia town?  Can anybody say much about the old destroyed courthouse or just where all the downtown lakes were (are) supposed to go?
• A biographical guide to names of notable Fresnans -- Seaver, Saroyan, Kerkorian, Peckinpah, Cher, Audra McDonald. (Even if they're not all technically Fresnans -- other than maybe an uncle and a 30,000-foot flyover -- they help give a place a face.)
• Understand what "Level 1" means. Some docs will tell you the way to remember your bad cholesterol -- the LDL -- is to think "L" stands for "lethal." The Level 1 trauma center at Community Regional Medical Center means if you're banged up in a car wreck, this is the No. 1 place to get your life saved.

Let me know what else you think downtown Fresno needs.