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^It's up to around 4 floors of steel framing. As with Rush, this one will be quite massive when alls said and done
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Kmart has downsized its city holdings in the past, selling off 2 north side stores in recent years, so perhaps this store too, will disapear soon. Its a big opportunity site. The key is to gather support for the eventual replacement development in hopes that we won't make the same mistake in the future because of NIMBY concerns over parking, density and so forth. |
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That Kmart probably opened around 1990 on a site that was previously industrial. The neighborhood was still smarting from the loss of industrial jobs, and new residential in that location was still a pretty iffy proposition. There was certainly no market for highrise or even high-density residential. Kmart will create jobs and commercial-rate property taxes and sales taxes for the city. Seventy new houses might eventually sell, but would only produce residential-rate property taxes, no jobs, no sales taxes, and might present more children to the local school, already overcrowded by the change of the neighborhood to Hispanic. Thanks to a time machine, you enter the room and argue . . . what, exactly? That if they instead choose residential, in 20 years an additional 40 people each day will walk into the CTA station? |
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Economically the K-mart et al are fine. But they're a site-planning disaster. |
^But the Kmart was built 22 years before the CVS and Home Depot. The only land the Kmart developer had to work with was an irregular parcel stretched east-west along Addison, deeper at the east end than at the west. Had they put the parking lot on the east side it would have made the store configuration very awkward, with the "front end" along a short side. As it is, they had to put the loading docks in an inefficient (and ugly) place along the north side to save the width of an access road around the south side.
Site planners have to work with the site they have, not the site they wish they had. |
Demo at Diversey & Orchard
I don't know if this had been mentioned, but I walked by a demo of 3 story building near Diversey and Orchard last night. This is next to a surface parking lot that is also now closed. I think it was rumored that this location was going to be a Trader Joe's previously. Anyone heard anything?
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The site in question will likely stay commercial, becaue the industrial area to the south is a Planned Manufacturing District, and the city requires PMDs to have buffer zones between them and residnetial areas, to minimize resident complaints about trucks, noise and the other "I can't help it" aspects of industrial uses. |
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Parking in rear sounds fine in theory, but just won't work for big-box retail. Any kind of retail, actually. First, well over 90 percent of the customers arrive by auto, many of them in a minivan with kids. To keep them happy, you need to minimize the walk from car to entrance and from checkout to car. You can't ask them to walk an extra 200 feet, through a tunnel where a scary guy might be lurking, to get to the front entrance. If you turn the store around, you have the loading docks and blank rear wall lining the sidewalk on Addison. Second, only a couple of types of retailers (notably fast food, where payment is separated from access) can afford to keep two entrances open. So you end up with signs on the sidewalk entrances saying "enter from parking." About the best compromise you can hope for is the one used by pre-1970 supermarkets, having the store hug the sidewalk with parking to the side and a corner entrance serving both. But once the store grows beyond 80,000 sq ft, the parking lot becomes a lengthy void to walk past. In fact, that's exactly the site plan of this Kmart, which so infuriated TUP. Other examples include the Jewel on Chicago Avenue in Evanston, or the recently closed Southport store. Parking on the roof is great, but that extra cost just isn't in Kmart's business model—and certainly wasn't for an in-city store in 1984. I, too, am sometimes tempted by the idea of a California-style specific plan, that would try to imagine how a neighborhood would build out and set up the urban design guidelines for how it would all fit together. The problem is the one Yogi Berra aptly described: "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." In 1984, the CVS/Home Depot site was still industrial and everyone hoped it would remain so. More to the point, would we be happy today with 1984 thinking about urban design guidelines and how the city should look and function? |
^ Parking in rear is a joke.
It is a failed New Urbanist scheme in every sense of the word. You have no argument from me there. The best Chicago can hope for in order to not suburbanize the city's commercial corridors any further is to have more booms like the one from 2000-2009, in which developers build multilevel housing with ground-level commercial space fronting the street. Because in so far as I have seen, we're doing a miserable job (with a few exceptions) building stand-alone retail in the city that doesn't look God-awful, or doesn't face the sidewalks with signs that say "enter through parking lot", as if that's much better than a standard strip mall. |
The Clybourn Red Line station house has been unveiled - or at least the western facade. It looks underwhelmingly bland, like a 2005 outlot bank branch, but it certainly improves on the decades of decay (original quality notwithstanding) that was there before. Here's to higher hopes for Apple quality inside or downstairs.
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how do you quantify "work"
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this definition is based on an assumption that big box, car oriented development "works". Which is an opinion, (not one that I'm accusing you of holding, Mr. D) one that doesn't take into account a lot of factors, and is reliant on some big assumptions (low fuel costs to name one) The problem of this development is the culture in which it was realized. One we must move past it, and that is that. Criticizing the idiocy of transportation and development decisions from the 80s could fill many threads, better to address the base problems, then to criticize the execution. I'll just try and do better in the future, to foster a society that doesn't demand such backwards justification for place creation, because it's our environment. Not the cars'. |
Is this a new rendering of Chinatown's Eastern Tower project? I don't recall seeing this one before.
http://wibiti.com/images/hpmain/178/270178.jpg yochicago: http://wibiti.com/images/hpmain/178/270178.jpg |
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