Quote:
Originally Posted by SamInTheLoop
What’s going up there again?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by the urban politician
^ Seconded. I've been wondering that since he posted it
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Nothing too sexy, but a huge improvement for that corner, really filling in a huge missing tooth. Should provide a nice shot of density and vibrancy to that area as well. The final design is the top image, the original proposal is the bottom:
https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/2017...ment-deb-mell/
There was a huge NIMBY shit storm over this one and, frankly, I don't blame them since the original design was ass ugly and had all the parking traffic entering and exiting through the alley which is shared with a quiet residential side street full of SFH and two flats. The good news is that the Avondale Neighborhood Association was able to work with the neighbors and the developer to find a solution to the parking issue that I think is a win win for everyone. All the parking in this building is actually in a partial basement (shocking for something of this size) with 1.5 floor high retail bays on the street side and then a "1st floor" of apartments elevated .5 floors off the ground on top of the parking along the alley. Obviously adding a curb cut on Belmont is not ideal, but trading that for burying the parking and getting retail along almost the entire first floor was worth it. The curb cut was also pushed as far from the intersection as physically possible which is nice. Here's a diagram from the article showing what I'm talking about
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The other nice thing that ANA was able to get done here was to make the developer do some "place making" with a fairly nice architectural feature on the corner of Belmont and Elston. The little rotunda feature will not only hold the corner, but creates some interesting apartments and will also allow for a small triangular "plaza" type space on the corner that will hopefully become a patio for a cafe or restaurant eventually.
PS: my favorite feature of the parking is that the only parking that isn't buried is like 20 spaces in a surface lot along the alley. Those extra 20 spaces were at the request of the neighbors who were complaining about traffic through their alley and now they get to look at them forever. I tried hard to explain to them that agitating for more parking when you are concerned about the number of cars passing through your alley made no sense, but they wanted their damn parking so they got it and now have to live with it in perpetuity.