Quote:
Originally Posted by Sigaven
Agreed! Or at least densify the site somehow. I love the 1950s office building. Everything else can be demo'd and replaced though.
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The DPS offices shouldn’t move. That’s a major driver of ridership in the light rail corridor. You can’t just have housing (origins) in a major transit corridor. You also have to have destinations. What should happen:
• redesign the complex in an urban fashion
• build a parking garage to service the governmental/bureaucratic public facing needs on site
• relocate those services into a new single building facility on site adjacent to the parking garage (however tall and however many square feet necessary)
• move the maintenance facilities to the periphery of the city
• raze everything else
• plat the remainder of the land into blocks and sell it off to developers for:
1. mixed-use, mixed-income housing
2. ground level retail facing Lamar, perhaps Koenig as well, and maybe a coffee shop and neighborhood focused boutiques at Skyland and Guadalupe
3. a park at Guadalupe and Denson across from Reilly Elementary School
The corridor does have other big developments ongoing and potential future sites as well:
The other state bureaucracy campuses (DSHS Central and the HHS Campus) are midway through refurbishment and addition master plans, so those eggs have been laid. They'll generate some inbound transit traffic, which is good for the health of the rail system. Same for the State Hospital Campus. The real action in the corridor will be the small parcels and assemblages taking advantage of height increases near stations. This will have the effect of extending our skyline through Heritage (that neighborhood will end up looking a lot like a non-student West Campus throughout) into Hyde Park (many of the older apartment complexes on Avenues A and B will be torn down and replaced with towers without parking) over the next 30 years. I sincerely hope that the historic commercial structures lining Guadalupe between 40th and 43rd remain*** and are refurbished into a hip commercial strip. We've already lost an Austin icon to a standard-issue Walgreens.
***specifically:
4301 Guadalupe
4227 Guadalupe*** must save -- has architectural merit as a mid-century streamline moderne gas station and garage and is wasted on an interior design company. I'd love to see a coffee shop and bistro in that location with the entire outdoors redesigned as a cafe seating area in a garden.
Hyde Park Theatre Bldg
All of the 4100 block, particularly the Hyde Parket Marketplace Bldg
4023 & 4029 Guadalupe