Quote:
Originally Posted by DruidCity
Excellent find ! That is one of the best-looking proposed projects I've ever seen in Tuscaloosa. Any idea of the timetable ?
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I am not really sure. Here is a post from an Alabama football board that talks about it:
Now that the cat is out of the bag, I'll shine some light here. The Phi House is fine, so no worries.
I made a post months back hinting at what was to come, but didn't follow up because things grew stagnant for a while and our marketing plan was delayed.
This project is going to be AWESOME. I work for an agency who was hired to do the early concepting and marketing for it's advertising campaign, so we met with Dr. Witt, the City Council, and EVERYONE is on board. We had some kick-ass football related marketing that I just couldn't WAIT to show you guys, but not really sure if we've retained the advertising business past the early stages, because things quieted down so much in the off-season.
The only things going away are Stadium apartments, the Alabama Book Store (no new news here), and the Haleil (sp?) Foundation. Basically it runs from Univ. to the block Rama Jama's, which will remained untouched.
Gallette's is untouched. Dr. Witt stated that he understands Gallette's is a gameday tradition and it will forever remain untouched. Which is good, because I would have probably pulled an Ike Turner on him. (g)
The bottom-level retail is meant to attract sellers like Barnes and Noble and nice chain restaurants. The housing is meant to be not elite but very nice and have a hotel feel to it. There will also be 12th-floor penthouse-quality rooms available for purchase, which should be very, very nice.
It will be big for Tuscaloosa and big for UA.
This thing has the potential to be the finest football-related real estate project ever built. It will be 12 stories (the city hight limitations were lifted), and will be the first of it's kind, with imitations possibly to follow in places like South Bend and all over the country. It is RIGHT NEXT to BDS, so the location is absolutely unbeatable. And it's part of Dr. Witt's plan to move our campus forward and make it more attractive to prospective students.
I don't want to get into any more specifics, but the name we generated is perfect for the project and the advertising kick-off campaign we did was F'in great. You guys would've loved it. But Real Estate clients are real iffy in this business, so after Phase 1 of the campaign, it seems the developers (Spectrum Capital, an affiliate of Yates) have moved on because we haven't heard from them since the end of the '07 season. So don't know if they'll use what we came up with or not.