[gmsalpha]

I sure hope this thing goes forward. It looks really nice, imo. I love this tall, slender type of building a lot and it looks fantastic. After having read the article, I sure hope the financing in fact gets secured, and hopefully having an operator for the hotel is the last hurdle.

I attended the Austin comic convention in November '11 and stayed at the Radisson only a couple of blocks away. The room was nice, I had a great view of downtown and the capitol, and I liked that they had a Starbucks and a TGI Fridays, but the architecture of the hotel itself was really generic and ugly, quite frankly. I'm happy to see this new Fairmont if it happens, and the JW Marriott. Both look like they'll make an extremely positive impact on the convention center business and the downtown skyline.

In fact, having looked at the original Marriott design, I wanted to slap whoever approved that monstrosity. Like a lot of people, I'd rather nothing be built than something that looked like that! Then they redid the design and it looked a lot better, but still left a lot to be desired.

I'm still ecstatic over White Lodging deciding to go with the JW brand. The way the design looks now isn't perfect, but it's still pretty darn cool and Austin dodged a huge bullet.

If both of these go up, it'll be a fantastic step for the city.