jjakucyk

Elsinore could easily lose a lane each way and it would affect nothing, same with removing the two right turn slip lanes from Gilbert and onto I-71 north. Reading is another story. The side that actually has buildings fronting it has a total crap sidewalk with encroaching utility poles, overhead sign gantry foundations, and fire hydrants. The east side on the other hand has a wide planting strip and tree line. I can totally see the administration pulling an Eggleston and paving over that whole east side to make a crap shared use path and then getting all indignant when anyone points out that it doesn't fix the problem.

I've heard a fair bit of chatter from people who are interested in stopping by to pick up things on their way home. Not sure about doing their whole week's worth of shopping, and taking a car over there kind of defeats the benefits, but I can see someone walking a couple blocks or possibly driving over to pick up a ClickList order. I'm glad to see it right in the middle of the streetcar route, making it convenient to a lot of people who live downtown and in OTR without requiring a car trip.

It's an awfully large and elaborate structure that really only eliminates one intersection, and then only for Gilbert itself. If it was demolished, Gilbert would intersect Eggleston at Reedy where there's already a light, so it wouldn't really affect Eggleston much. What's left of Reedy and Culvert would need to be reconfigured or just dead-ended, but that looks pretty trivial. Of course get the traffic engineers involved and it would require triple left turn lanes and double right turns and crazy signal phasing and slip turns and who knows what else. I will say this for the current overpass, it allows the bus lines that use Gilbert, which is a lot of them, to fly in and out of downtown. They can go nearly a mile without stopping, giving them a leg up on travel times. Of course this just illustrates how there's "no there there" along that stretch of road.

Wheely McWheelface

I actually think what hurt it the worst was the I-471 connection since it runs right next to Eggleston. That's a very wide boulevard which used to be flanked by sizable multi-story warehouses, resulting in a street wall not unlike Central Parkway. With the highway on one side it's not possible to create that boulevard feel again. If we could, then Eggleston itself would be the spine/anchor encouraging redevelopment of the blocks in between.

I agree with what you're saying, but at the same time you have to look at it from the point of view of someone making rational decisions based on the situation at hand. If the choice is between a 20 minute drive with an employer-provided parking space or a 40 minute bus ride (with another 10-20 minutes walking on either end) and no flexibility then it's pretty difficult to take the high road. Moving closer in is tough with housing prices being so inflated right now.

Wish I knew, there's been occasional work over the past couple years, but that might just have been stabilization. Those look like mid 19th century industrial buildings (the closer one looks like it got some newer brick veneer at some point to dress it up, but I'm not positive about that). Sycamore and Broadway were a very industrial part of downtown historically, kind of like River North in Chicago, but it's easy to miss.

The cabinetry and woodwork looks pretty bad. End panels are not well integrated, and I see unpainted edges of baseboards and toe kicks. At best they'll get slapped with paint, but unlikely to be sanded flush or properly sealed. Hopefully that'll be caught in the punch-list, and since I still see some painter's tape around that's certainly not done yet. The cabinets themselves are bog standard commercial full-overlay cheapness though, which is disappointing.

Apparently the 12th & Sycamore lot is only doing full-day rates now, so that would explain why it doesn't get used by the courthouse people. That "narrow window in the morning" just happens to be when most people arrive though, that's why it's called rush hour after all. Thousands of open spots at all times is a gross exaggeration.

Do you mean 12th? That's a very recent change. I think they kicked out all the monthly people but I'm not sure exactly what's going on there. I see A&D every morning (used to park there myself), and it's closed to daily parkers every weekday morning. Nobody's saying there isn't parking, but it gets swamped in that critical 8:00-10:00am timeframe before the cops and potential jurors get let out. It doesn't matter if the lots are half empty at 4:00pm to someone arriving at 9:15am. If you want to utilize alternative transportation means, but still need to drive from time to time (say for client or consultant meetings, site visits, bad weather, etc.) then you still may need to get a monthly pass somewhere to make sure you're not lugging stuff for four blocks on the client's dime or circling the streets in the snow. Even getting a monthly pass isn't easy. I hung on to my A&D pass and am "renting" it out to someone else until they can get their own spot with them, and it's been six months so far.

You would think, but it may also be partly taken up by construction workers too. Lockport doesn't exist anymore, the city re-signed it as Eggleston. Anyway, there used to be a gas station at that spot, so they're digging out the old tanks.

But where exactly? Like I said, the courthouse area fills up completely (garages and lots are closed for much of the morning except to monthly pass holders). Same with the Gateway garage. It could be totally different at East 4th Street or near City Hall.

Everything near the courthouse is swamped until just before lunchtime, then it starts to thin out. Of course it's all nearly empty by 6 PM.

There used to be a nearly continuous business district stretching from the 5-points intersection all the way into Norwood. Unfortunately Jewish Cemetery and St. Mark's kind of sucked the life out of those blocks in between (streets with building frontage on one side don't do well for businesses), and the construction of I-71 leveled a solid block and a half of the northern business district, with plenty of collateral damage as well. I-71 also marooned that north end of the neighborhood and business district, so it feels more like part of Norwood. No Evanston wasn't as nodal as Hyde Park, Mt. Lookout, Pleasant Ridge, or Clifton, it was more linear like Glenway/Warsaw, Reading Road in Avondale, or Vine Street through Carthage and Elmwood Place. Evanston and those other neighborhoods actually have more common streetcar suburb layouts than the nodal neighborhoods. People would walk from the side streets to the main street to catch a streetcar, and with stops every block or two it encouraged a more continuous strip of denser development along that main street. It takes more density than these neighborhoods ever achieved for it to be a continuous strip of commercial development, so there's apartments and random older houses scattered along there as well. Even McMillan never achieved 100% commercial despite being the major crosstown route. So I don't think Evanston is weird, it's just unfortunate that its somewhat skewed business strip was made even more so by cemeteries smack in the middle of it, and then worsened by I-71.

It certainly simplifies maintenance when service techs don't need to enter the unit.

I've noticed a trend where people, even in the profession, overestimate the renovatability of a building. Sure anything's possible, with enough money, but there's never enough money. The old Donato's building at 8th and Main is a case in point. The floor-to-floor heights were so low that at best you couldn't even get an 8 foot ceiling height in most of it (I think it was closer to 7'-6" in fact). Even with 8 foot ceilings, there's nowhere left to run HVAC or plumbing without eating into that head height. So what do you do? Well you could remove every other floor to make each space double-height. Clever, but very expensive and risky, especially for a 150+ year old unreinforced masonry building. And for all the trouble you're taking a six story building down to only three or at best four stories. If you wanted to get just three or four multi-million dollar condos out of the deal, then that might be feasible, but I think the tradeoff for a much larger 12(?) story apartment building with no parking was well worth it. The Dennison Hotel, that's a whole other story. I bring that up because if the Millennium has rooms that are too small, ceilings that are too low, cramped hallways, and mechanical chases that are inadequate, that's a monumentally huge task to try to remedy. Say everything is only 80% the size it needs to be. Widen the halls and now you have less room for the rooms. No problem, just double up the rooms. But now they're too big, and you cut your occupancy in half. Ok, instead take three rooms and make them into two. Now your vertical chases don't line up anymore, even if they had a chance after widening the halls. Oh, but there's columns buried in those hallway walls, so you can't move them anyway, and there's already too many holes in the floor slabs so you can't cut in new vertical chases. So now the only option is to double up those rooms again, but the rate of return doesn't work if the room count is cut in half. There's no remedy to the ceiling height situation, no matter what else is doable. Hotels are so compartmentalized and regimented that making changes which aren't integer multiples gets very difficult. Cramming hotel rooms into the Ingalls Building is a lesson in compromise and non-compliant prototype design, but it's an historic building with character that makes it worthwhile. An outdated high rise hotel is a different ballgame because it's so hemmed in by its physical structure (both literally and figuratively). The best analogy I can come up with is an egg carton. You have one made to fit medium eggs perfectly, but now you want XL because that's what the demand is for. You can't just stuff them in the old carton without modification, it won't work. But to make the cells bigger you pretty much have to destroy the whole thing. I know it's not great, but my brain is done for tonight.

So I saw today that they did just that. Kudos.

I prefer the term "tacky trolley" to "decorated bus". I hate them so much.

Along with the build-to lines and glazing requirements, restricting the number of allowable curb cuts is another way to de facto ban or at least limit drive-thrus. Also keep in mind that a drive-thru takes up a decent amount of space that could otherwise be used for parking. The queue is basically a parallel parking lane that just moves slowly. So I don't think eliminating a drive-thru would require adding more pavement, just reallocating it. Also something that hasn't been mentioned but which makes a drive-thru less compatible with an urban environment is noise. I'm not one of those people who think that we should concede all urban neighborhoods to being noisy and that residents should "just deal with it." Yeah if you live over a bar you shouldn't expect it to be quiet, but a lot of commercial streets back up to residential, and the ordering station for a drive-thru is usually also in the back. So you have people shouting back and forth at a crappy speaker at all hours of the day. Car washes are also noise problems, not so much for the washing but the drying. There's no reason for them to be in prime walkable areas anyway since unless you're one of the few attendants who works there, you have a car if you're going to such a place. I guess it's all just a manifestation of how cars degrade the urban environment more so than in suburban or rural environments. When people complain about the city being crowded, noisy, dirty, smelly, dangerous, busy, or stressful, it's nearly always because of cars, whether being in proximity to them or trying to use them. The city will never be as good as farther out places in accommodating cars, so it shouldn't try, and instead should attempt to mitigate their impacts as much as possible.

The whole Hopple Street corridor, including White Castle, is CC-A (Commercial Corridor - Automobile) so there's no restrictions on drive-thrus. The real crime is that pretty much all of Central Parkway on the west side of OTR is as well.

Cincinnati's zoning code has banned drive-thrus in any of the pedestrian-oriented commercial districts, and there's restrictions in mixed commercial districts. That's been on the books for a while.

No way that isn't going to be fought tooth and nail. The building would literally be in the back yards of several houses and small apartments on Besuden, and they plan to tear down a couple more houses (that are mostly small businesses) on Madison to create a big surface parking lot that would surround Lemon Grass. And seven stories? I tend to be pretty pro-development, but damn this is a bridge too far.

Dean is that you?

Is there a Chipelto?