Quote:
Originally Posted by Shawn
Rochester, Minnesota always struck me as impressive, but I'm not sure how much of that is the Mayo Clinic. Never actually been there.
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Rochester kinda sucks. Remember that Mayo is still a US medical center, so it's got huge monolithic buildings, blank ground floors, and lots of parking garages and underutilized spaces.
Now, take a huge medical center from, say, Houston or LA and drop it into a small Midwestern town
with the bones of a small Midwestern town. The traditional urbanism is very patchwork and not cohesive at all, and occupied by the usual mix of sleepy Main Street businesses - insurance salesmen, thrift shops, cutesy coffee shops, etc. Then the new buildings are all connected by skyway, so any life that exists in town is squirreled away from street level.
However, the original Mayo Clinic tower from 1955 is very cool in a Mad Men kind of way...
https://www.google.com/maps/@44.0222...7i13312!8i6656
And the Plummer Building is a beautiful Spanish Gothic tower that would not look out of place on Central Park West:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plummer_Building
But yeah, that's two buildings surrounding by dreck...