jjakucyk

At this point it's demo of newer tenant build-outs (drywall partitions, drop ceilings, etc.) to expose the historic fabric that's left for documentation.

Signage lofts really are the top-shelf brand. They pair well with a Chipelto Spanish Grill on the first floor. I think I probably mentioned this upthread, but the proportions of this thing are really weird. There's almost a full story of parapet, and the windows are very small for the amount of wall.

When Liberty was cut through to Reading, to make it as wide as it is, the result is hillsides that are very steep and pretty unstable. If you made the street half as wide and shifted it all to today's eastbound lanes, then yeah you could build something on the north side. You could probably do something with the Staples, the empty casino corner, and the check cashing place, but you're at one of the busiest intersections near downtown. It would take a lot of road-dieting and also an alternate route to I-471 to make that anything but a horrible place to be.

I don't see the slight relative difference in speed and acceleration between bikes and scooters to be much of an issue. At the most basic level in an urban setting, you can say sidewalks are for <10mph (ped, wheelchairs, rascals, runners), bike lanes for 10-20mph (bikes, scooters, segways), and the roadway for >20mph. Whatever the actual mode is actually kind of irrelevant. Now, when you get to roadways with higher speed limits, such as 40MPH and above, then you start getting questions about allowing mopeds in the bike lanes, but we're nowhere near that level yet.

Without a decent size kitchen, storage, and in-unit laundry then a condo is a tough sell, and these apartment conversions usually don't have that (they're lucky to get a stacked washer/dryer in a closet, but now you're down a closet). Those HOA fees aren't bad compared to what I've been seeing. Granted I'm looking more in the $125K range, but there's no shortage of buildings that have $400+ association fees. The big factor there is that those fees usually cover heat, water/hot water, and sewer since those were originally centralized and difficult to split apart. These old uninsulated buildings are fantastically expensive to heat, but when it's built into the HOA you have no control over what you pay for that, no matter how frugal and energy-efficient you might be.

Basements under sidewalks are super common around downtown, and the city hates them. Previously they might be supported with steel, iron, or stone vaults. Reinforced concrete became common around the turn of the 20th century. Now the city wants a structural slab below with a 5" non-structural topping slab to allow them to attach things like parking meters, sign posts, and other street furniture. Older sidewalks generally had a pretty thin topping slab of only 1"-2" like what we can see in your photo in front of the door.

^ The high vantage point of that shot makes the street look narrower than it is.

One of the logistical issues with dockless transport that I'm curious about is when someone takes a bike/scooter/whatever out of their normal range. I know Bird has "nests" where the scooters are deployed each/most mornings after they've been charged by their indy contractors/bounty hunters overnight. So on an aggregate level, they're redistributed around to where they're needed. But if you take one way out into the boonies, relatively speaking, unless you keep it checked out while at your destination, someone else could check it out or take it away for charging, then you're effectively stranded without a way to get back. Is this a common issue, or how is it dealt with?

The unfortunate thing about the Historic Aerials 1932 series (beyond their excessive watermarking) is that they're very poorly scanned. I believe it was some sort of UC/volunteer project a while back that didn't have the resources to scan them at a better resolution. Anyway, I got to see some of the actual prints at the Hamilton County Park District office in Winton Woods a number of years back, and there's a ton more detail than you can see online, at least as good as the 1955 series. The prints are also stereoscopic, so if you put a double image plate under some special viewing goggles (they're really just to hold your eyes and the photos at the right spot), you can see the terrain as well.

I would assume the downtown photo is also April 29, 1949 like the OTR/West End photo. While the Mt. Adams Incline was closed in 1948, they weren't necessarily in any hurry to demolish it. The incline house itself lasted until at least 1954.

Looking at Main Street I can see that. However I think the lane shift on Walnut south of 5th is specifically because of the double turns onto 4th and 3rd. Another reason for Main Street could be to ensure a wide enough turn radius from 2nd to Main (or else it would require moving the stop line for other traffic way back), while also shifting over to eventually make the turn onto 12th without cutting across traffic the way it does at 2nd. I think these are both poor tradeoffs, but I also don't think keeping it entirely on the left side of Main would've been a problem. Just pick one side and stick with it, don't cross over.

^ To enable the double right-turn lanes.

I've heard both arguments come out of the woodwork on this one. 1. The scooters will help legitimize non-automobile modes and encourage the construction of more separated facilities. 2. The scooters will be viewed by motorists just like bikes as "in the way" and they need to be extirpated from the streets. Frankly I can see both views depending on the person. I would hope for #1, because as it is, bikes, scooters, e-bikes, segways, and who knows what else might come next, are all in this sort of "missing middle" of transportation. They're too slow and vulnerable to be in the street mixed with motor vehicles, and they're too fast and dangerous to be on the sidewalk. Having a third "layer" of street facility between the sidewalk and roadway covers pretty much everything else.

^ They'd need to BUILD sidewalks. There wasn't one on 4th Street (a crime in and of itself) and the bits on Race and Elm were pretty thoroughly destroyed during the demolition. That would then have to be completely ripped out again for the new construction. Maybe a boardwalk would be a better way to do it. Go old school.

This just illustrates the importance of mixed uses. Downtown itself generally doesn't have much mix, it's only office for the most part, which supports very lackluster and generally only chain retail/restaurants that can survive on quick turnaround and fickle employees. Restaurants in particular generally have to survive on the lunch crowd only, and bars have trouble since nobody's around after dark. Neighborhoods that are primarily residential also have trouble because of the lack of daytime residents that don't support retail during normal hours. Plus restaurants are saddled with a lackluster lunch while having to cater to the much longer-lingering dinner crowd. Nightlife can be crushingly busy though because people are around late, but the bars and clubs have to get nearly all their revenue Friday and Saturday night since they can't get people there any other time of the day, so they have to stay small to minimize rent. So I'm in favor of more office space not just in OTR but other neighborhood business districts. What's lacking is decently sized floor plates. There's tons of office space in the sub-3,000sf range, but almost nothing bigger than that, even if it were on multiple floors. This limits these offices to generally less than 20 employees. It doesn't take much growth in your business to suddenly push you outside of the walkable neighborhoods or into downtown proper as your only choices. Plus as far as parking goes, with an equal mix of office and residential they rotate out the parking between the two in the morning and evening and get full utilization of the garage. One need only look at the A&D Parkhaus Garage behind Job and Family Services to see how poorly optimized it is. It's full starting about 8:30am, but by 6:00pm or so it's completely empty. They don't even offer overnight monthly permits, there's no hourly discounts in the evening, and the "night owl" discount rate requires you to be out by 4:00am. It's completely unusable for residents for fear that courthouse patrons might not get a spot in the coveted 8:00-10:00am window. Streitman is charging class-A rents (or at least trying to) so it's not filling up as quick as it could, but I don't doubt they'll still get there.

So is there just constant rebar from top to bottom?

Why would the brick need to be removed in full-height columns? On any high rise the brick is usually supported at every floor by a steel shelf angle.

My understanding is that it is technically possible to convert the base to parking (I think with a ramp addition to the south) but because of the column layout and narrowness of the building it would be a monstrously inefficient layout.

The preservation movement came about specifically because of the subjective nature of aesthetics. "It's old and ugly, let's tear it down" has no bearing on a building's importance, especially because what's deemed ugly changes with time. Victorian buildings were at their most hated some 70 years after their construction, when the preservation movement started in the 1960s. Buildings like Terrace Plaza are in that exact same position today. I think the difference is that buildings before the automobile era were generally not also failures at urbanism, regardless of opinions about their design aesthetic.

If opening up the base can't be avoided, fine, but the trendy early 2010s kajiggering of the windows is a bridge too far if you ask me. Maintain the original massing, it can just as easily be a monolithic glass curtain wall to play up its history as a monolithic brick wall, while showing off the internal structure of the building. That would be much more respectful of the history while still being overtly contemporary and "of its time." It's also possible to take cues from the old windows that used to be on the 2nd floor and give it something of a retro Bauhaus/Miesian feel. That could be a bit more confusing as it's a reinterpretation of the design that could present as original fabric, but it would also be more fitting. Regardless, is it really necessary to remove 100% of the brick anyway? This is such a clumsy move that it not only destroys any historic reading of the building, but it doesn't even make sense in isolation. The base itself tries to be the focal point of the design, rather than a literal platform for the (relatively speaking) bejeweled hotel above. Imagine Frank Gehry designing a new base for the Statue of Liberty that looks like the Bilbao Guggenheim. That's what this feels like to me. The rainbow parking garage across Vine Street would make a better base than this.

Because the context in which it was posted implies a conspiracy of "liberals are trying to pack everyone together like sardines and take away choice." As if there's so much urban residential over retail that it's choking out the fine, upstanding, salt of the earth, single-family homesteads. It's no different than discussing a reduction or elimination of subsidies to automobile use, there's inevitably cries about how "not everyone wants to take the bus to work" and the "war on cars."

Now if they'd just work on burying some of overhead instead of doing nothing. It wouldn't even have to be much, like 1% per year in municipal boundaries. Something. Anything!

There are people who've ridden the streetcar that don't even realize it's on rails (they think the rails are for something else, are abandoned, or don't even know what they are). I witnessed this first-hand. So don't underestimate the capability for people to be completely blind to what's in front of them, or under their feet. 45 minutes is a joke. Can passengers even get off in such a situation or are they trapped in the vehicle the whole time?

People move to those cities because people are moving to those cities. Growth begets growth, because so much of our economy is based on the construction industry. It's a self-reinforcing cycle, until it isn't.

I would say it's both micromanaging and a clumsy brute force situation. It's micromanaged in the sense that there's specific requirements for nearly every type of housing or business, which makes changing uses very difficult later on, even if it's just changing from a dentist's office to an accounting firm. On the other hand, the brute force nature of it is that parking is maximized to try to cover all worst-case scenarios, leading to huge redundancy and waste. So it's not dialed-in per se, it's just "throw as much parking in as possible."