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Originally Posted by eschaton
The awful thing is it was done by an architect. A coworker of my wife lives across the street, and asked her why they were doing it and she literally said "It's not in the historic district, so we can."
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Yikes
Quote:
Originally Posted by eschaton
My wife works for Rothschild Doyno (though she hasn't been on this project in particular) so I knew this was in the works.
If it gets built, I think it might be worth sacrificing the Market Street buildings. But that's a big if. They openly note in the article that without an anchor tenant for the commercial section of the tower it will probably not be built. So the Troiani family are basically offering a speculative project as a reason to be allowed to demolish historic buildings. It could be an empty lot for a decade plus if they never get the tenant. It's possible this is all a bad-faith effort to look like they're serious about a big project in order to get the planning commission to okay knocking the buildings down - potentially allowing a more modest project or even expansion of their parking in the future.
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Yeah, I think it's a really big if. The majority of these types of real estate "developers" can't get projects like this done. This is a parking lot family. Easy money. I give them credit for thinking big, but where is the capital coming from? And unfortunately, the pragmatist in me just looks at the reality of the situation... and the facts are that small, family-owned operations like this don't succeed in building skyscrapers as their first major project. And the cynic in me realizes that the Froggy's building and other small buildings on this tract are liabilities for Troiani, while parking lots would be assets.