Ram23

This was posted in the random developments thread not too long ago, which when paired with this news is a very good sign that this is more serious than other grocery store speculation we've heard. Geotechnical exploration is usually a good sign: Seen recently in this parking lot:

Maybe it can become a trend. We already have a Park and Vine on 12th and Main, why not a Vine and Main on Park and Walnut? Some of the more avant-garde boutiques could even use paper streets in their names for an added layer of obscurity.

^ There's a Kroger 4 blocks away. I assumed they would close that one and make this store a Kroger, but if they make it a different (higher end) brand, they'd likely keep the OTR Kroger open. It has done a fine job serving mostly low income residents for decades. This store would then fill a gap that exists right now - the OTR Kroger doesn't carry as many mid range and higher priced items as other Krogers around town.

Given that Saturday was much busier than Sunday, I imagine the Bengals game raucous over the streetcar was just the fact that 60,000 people were entering/leaving the stadium at once and hundreds tried to get to the streetcar at the exact same time. Rather than constantly running more cars all day, should Metro try to line up 2 or 3 cars at the southernmost stops as the game ends? A similar setup occurs with the 7 train in NYC after Mets games.

Given that the additional funding for increased service during Oktoberfest was not needed in the end because the amount of fares collected was so high, chances are running additional streetcars during big events would cost the city next to nothing. It should be a no-brainer.

There's no reason to have fares based on the honor system if you have platforms that can be secured via turnstiles. That wouldn't work with streetcars, but it works for subways/elevated rail like Chicago and NYC have. There's also the reality that on a very crowded train, it's next to impossible for a fare collector to move around and check everyone's tickets. I can't imagine someone trying to move through a 6 train in NYC and check tickets at rush hour - it might be physically impossible. On a somewhat related note, Taipei has an interesting setup with paid turnstiles to both enter and exit. You scan a card or token on your way in, and then again on your way out. This allows them to easily charge more for longer trips because your card or token indicates where your origin was.

^ The streetcar tickets are not unlike paying for a parking meter - a lot of the time you can get away with not paying, but if you get caught you'll wish you would have just paid the $2. It's a $100 fine if you are caught riding without a pass.

I am in the same boat as you. I also might head down to watch Band of Horses - I watched some shows Friday night from the parking garage on Sycamore (the one with a Subway in the bottom) and had a good time. From the sound of it, the view from the garage was better than the view the paid audience gets. The crowd for Future Islands (which I viewed from above) looked tiny, and that was their biggest headliner. I think the organizers thought they were going to fill that entire parking lot up, given their layout. If so, they were at about 1/10 of what they expected. There were bigger crowds at Washington Park last year, and those shows had anywhere from 5-10 simultaneous shows going on. Future Islands was the only show at the time Friday. If they are so dedicated to this format that they try it again next year, I don't think we'll see many more iterations of MPMF.

I'd be curious to know if they did lose a lot of subscriptions over that. I bet they lost at least a handful, and they can't really have all that many left anyway.

I bet that will sound great. I might try to catch a show or two from the parking garage across Sycamore (the one with the subway in it). I was a little upset about the parking lot venue this year so I didn't buy tickets for the first time in close to a decade.

Well, their food isn't really any better than Applebee's. Please. I always wonder if people feel superior when they say things like this. Do you feel a sense of superiority over us lowly people who like The Eagle? Or do you TRULY believe it's no better than microwaved food that came frozen from a large warehouse supplier and was only heated up when ordered? You wonder about some weird things. I don't think the Eagle's chicken is anything to write home about, and for my money I'd rather get a spicy 3 piece meal from Richie's and save $8. Chicken, when factory farmed, is extremely cheap. The only time chicken starts to get pricey is when it's free range (I've seen it cost 3+ times as much per pound), despite the fact that it has no effect on taste (and if anything has a negative impact on weight). There are some subtle differences between breeds of chicken and types of feed, but when you're smothering it in batter and dropping it in a vat of cooking oil it all becomes negligible, with the exception of maybe the breasts. A lot of people are willing to pay the premium for chickens who lived nice, comfortable lives but as someone who spent a good deal of his life in the presence of chickens I think they're a$$holes and don't care enough to do so.

^ Once you park your car in the lot, it is a very walkable place.

^ I have parked on Liberty or other free street spots in OTR a few times and taken the streetcar to my destination. I don't know if that was one of the intended uses or not but I've been doing it. It worked well for Oktoberfest. I haven't noticed parking getting any harder to find over the last few weeks so I don't think a lot of people are using the streetcar that way.

Well, their food isn't really any better than Applebee's. I'll take Richie's Chicken over the Eagle any day. I think to some extent every similarly sized city is slowing turning into the same thing, in this sense. I was in Jackson, Mississippi 2 or 3 years ago and stopped by the trendy part of town and they had what seemed like a copy-paste version of Bakersfield. There are certain styles of food and a very particularly atmosphere that is trendy and has been replicated everywhere. That's fine, buy I wouldn't want to go to Columbus and eat at Bakersfield, I'd want to go to Columbus and eat at their version of a Bakersfield, even though the food would probably be about the same, it would probably look about the same, the waitresses would have the same haircuts, etc.

3CDC set out dedicated to making sure OTR didn't fill up with chains, and now all of the original restaurants located there are becoming chains. They really backed into that one on accident. When's the first Applebees going to open?

It would be okay without the random square windows strewn about the left upper level. The proportions bother me a bit but that might be a site constraint.

I think the festivals should ultimately move to Mehring Way and Smale. They can stretch it out and have all the booths face the park from the north side of Mehring, and allow people to utilize to park to eat/drink/sit/etc. You could get creative and incorporate stretches of Vine and Freedom, as well. The caps, if built, should definitely add more density to the core rather than even more green space - Smale and Sawyer Point provide enough of that already, IMO.

^ I eat celery, baby carrots, and cucumber all day long. Baby carrots are the easiest/quickest because you don't have to rinse or chop or peel. I also like seaweed crisps/crackers/sheets/whatever that you find at Asian food stores.

Two words: Richie's Chicken. If your profile is right that you're at UC, there's one about 5 minutes away on the corner of Vine and Woolper. I try to limit myself to once a month, at most, but it's tough. It blows the chains out of the water (especially the spicy version, which actually has a bit of a kick to it compared to Popeyes, which doesn't even register on the spicy scale for me). It's all my family ever wants to eat when they come to visit me.

^ You could mimic the results of an express train by having a streetcar flip the switch at 12th and Race and just do half a loop, if the clustering got really bad. If there are two cars right behind one another, and only two cars running, it would make perfect sense to cut one of their routs in half. It would inconvenience the people on the car at the time, but improve service for every future rider.

It absolutely needs this. I imagine it would speed up headways by a couple of minutes as the streetcar, in theory, would only ever need to stop at stops, in lieu of stopping at stops and the majority of stoplights. Given how many stops and stoplights there are on the route, though, this might be very tough to pull off.

^ My guess would be something related to HVAC. There has been a temporary cooling unit near that spot for awhile, and the semi trailer in that photo looks like it is carrying curbs that roof top HVAC units sit on.

16 feet wide is a very common width for a lot of the houses on 25 foot wide lots throughout the city. 13 feet would be a bit narrower obviously but not impossible to work with, given that you could find a way to use the full width of the lot for the building.

I'm at that Stop & Go a few times a month to buy a six pack, and I have seen cops walk in and go through the doors to back of house several times. I assume they have an office of some sort back there but I don't think it is always staffed, or even staffed very often at all.

When I lived in NYC it was fairly common knowledge that to pass the emissions test with a car that didn't deserve to pass it, you just went to one of the Indian owned places down by the Queensboro bridge and paid in cash. I don't know if Ohio ever had any places seedy enough to pull something like that off.