[the urban politician]

Originally Posted by Mr Downtown
The main parking and delivery entrances are from Wells, which gets treated rather badly, with blank parking garage walls. Developer says they can do no better because they don't know what Cacciatore will do across the street.

Originally Posted by honte

This is the kind of crap that makes me really mad. It is unacceptable, garbage planning that one might expect from Omaha or Des Moines or some smaller city with little or no experience handling major developments. NOT Chicago. As I said a few pages back, this area is screaming out for a modern and exciting, comprehensive master plan. We are not going to have it.

^ Uhh, that's the kind of planning you'll get in Manhattan as well. Walking around Midtown, you'll see plenty of streets treated as garage/delivery access alleys for the major avenues. Nothing new there, and it's definitely not just a Des Moines thing.

Anyway, with an elevated Roosevelt, a walled-off Dearborn Park, and a river, this chunk of land is obviously very challenging to develop. THe more and more I learn about it, the more I realize that extending the streetgrid into this area is scarcely possible, if at all. That said, from the looks of Roosevelt Collection I am not encouraged; it's one thing to have limitations on layout, but I see no reason why the architecture itself has to be so crappy.