Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila
Unfortunately the stuff between the Blue Line station and this new development is towers-in-a-park crap. This would be great TOD if the walk was lined with sandwich shops, convenience stores, and apartments, but instead it's lined with fences and parking lots.
Also: it's hard to tell from the low-quality renderings on Curbed, but half of that nice plaza in the center is actually a parking lot. If the buildings all face inwards and present blank walls to the street, I don't see how this is much better than the last 50 years of development in the IMD. At least it looks like they're saving the triangular Higgie Building?
HQ renderings:
http://www.imdc.org/attachments/arti...rings_2014.pdf |
Well, call it ironic, but maybe the Medical Center Apartments parking lot being so large is actually a good thing; if the area improves enough maybe in a decade they'll build a proper mixed use development over it (and if we're really lucky they'll do the same to the ComEd bunker on the Ogden-Damen-Harrison triangle).
As for the stuff they're rendering now, my feelings are mixed. It's obviously encouraging from an economic perspective that they're investing there, and it's always good to see vacant lots that close in and near transit filled in. Also, it does reconnect the east-west streets (if only for pedestrians for Lexington on the south). And, while I may offend the stricter urbanists by saying this, I kind of like the diagonal parking on Flournoy (uses such as hospitals need parking, and a combination of plentiful metered street parking and shared multi-story garages provide that with fewer negative consequences than surface lots or smaller dedicated parking structures). However I don't like the 2nd row of diagonal parking adjacent to the courtyard, as it will shift the feel from that of a parking-rich-side-street to a mutli-lane-parking-lot, despite only adding ~14 spaces due to only having diagonal parking on one side. I also worry, as ardecila said, that the buildings may not provide much in the way of interest and entrances to the street, as the rendering isn't exactly detailed in that respect...