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The building that used to be at the corner was a decent 2-story brick affair that looked to be from the 1920s. I wouldn't call it anything spectacular, and with a little love it could probably have been made to shine, but my guess is that it had some odd spaces inside. With a bunch of garage doors on one side and what looks like offices above, I guess it was only conducive to certain kinds of retail/industrial use, with pretty marginal office space above. It's a loss, but probably worth the trade. http://goo.gl/maps/dfRDL Even if you don't like the design/style of the new building, it is pretty well executed. The proportions are good, the materials are at least OK, and it doesn't have a bunch of unresolved details from what I've seen. What's more impressive though is that the urbanism is quite good, if not excellent. There's little to no setback from the sidewalk, and where there is, it's on the residential side leaving just enough room for a little stoop. The scale of the building is just right for 3-story townhouses. Many newer developments such as University Station by Xavier, the building that replaced Schiel School on Short Vine, and University Park on Calhoun have inappropriately tall first floors that make the buildings look like they're on stilts. There's also no blank walls that I'm aware of, and the both the retail and residential sides facing the streets have plenty of windows and doors. The only disappointment is that the courtyard is a parking lot instead of an actual courtyard, but even that is a pretty well-defined space and it's not too gaping a hole in the built fabric. It's a good example of building dense mixed use without having to resort to expensive construction types and parking garages that require a very overscaled development to amortize those additional costs.

Whether you like that design or not, it's being so over-used right now that it will soon be remembered as the fad of the early 2010s along with Dunnhumby and Mercer Commons.

Damn they're not messing around, that's some serious business! I'm glad they're going as minimal as possible with the new traffic signal mast arms. So often they're vastly over-scaled and usually pretty chintzy too.

^ I'm not sure when he did it, but it could very well have been in the 60s, though I'd guess more like the 70s or 80s.

This is one of my least favorite buildings in Mt Adams, as well. There's a beautiful 1890-1900 era house in there somewhere, just waiting for someone to dismantle the hideous "renovation" that was performed decades ago. That's a project of David Niland. It has some nice spaces inside near the back where the site drops off and the first floor ends up a whole story above grade. Being a Niland project it's white white white and more white, which gets tiring after a while. He said that leaving the old cornice on the front was "tongue-in-cheek gesture" to the original house. To me it's a fuck-you to the original house and to the street. Either embrace the original and work with it, or get rid of it altogether. In this case it just doesn't work. The overall materiality and detailing on the exterior is also not good, which is typical of his work. Because of that Niland's houses need constant repainting, and they still end up streaky and grungy after a short time. What's disappointing is that the overall design (ignoring the cornice) almost works with the appropriate verticality of the building and site. You can see it on the side, in the original 2nd story window, and even in that chimney-like whoop-de-do on the far right, but the proportions of that boxout addition in the front are all wrong and ruin it.

True many people do have bikes, but most people aren't likely to have access to their bike from anywhere but their home. For someone who lives even just a little bit outside the central city, having bikeshare means they can go exploring in a neighborhood on a mode of travel they're familiar with but without having to deal with putting a bike rack on their car and lugging it around to wherever, then having to worry about it being stolen or getting chain grease all over the interior upholstery.

Why are bricks and double-hung windows automatically not modern though? It's like the argument that streetcars are old technology while automobiles are modern, but there you're comparing 120 year old technology with 110 year old technology. Big whoop. Even so, brick and more ancient materials like stone are still hallmarks of modernist designs. Just because they can be made cheaper on an assembly line into thin veneers or other complex shapes doesn't make them inherently better or more true to some aesthetic ideal. Glass and metal (whether steel, aluminum, or titanium) have been around for nearly a century now too. If you want to really be cutting edge then you should probably be looking at carbon fiber construction, or maybe some sort of 3D printed structure. Otherwise you're really just setting arbitrary boundaries for what's "modern enough to be ok" versus not. If your goal is to always be on the cutting edge and to constantly reinvent the wheel, then you can never learn from and adapt what works best for the conditions at hand, and that just makes buildings more expensive and less durable. I guess the point is that architecture is not 100% pure art, it's a practical art that has to be grounded in a number of hard rules. So for the most part just about everything that can be done has been done already somewhere else. Ergo, every design is going to be derivative of something that came before it. So if a contemporary glass and steel box is derivative of a 1950s glass and steel box, is that really any more legitimate than a contemporary brick row house derivative of an 1880s brick row house? I would say no, not inherently. The trick is in the execution. Because the rules of historical architecture are much better known (if implicitly rather than explicitly), poor execution of modern examples are much easier to spot. Since there basically are no rules for modern design styles, it's much easier to just say "oh that's how it's supposed to be!"

The step-through design has nothing to do with fitness, it's nominally about modesty (though not many women wearing skirts or dresses are going to be riding a bike anyway), but mostly so the rider doesn't rip their pants. Since they're also deployed in busy urban areas, it also minimizes the chances of kicking some wayward pedestrian in the face when mounting or dismounting the bike.

In this day and age I guess you'd need to make it a cafe/bar/library/dry cleaners/whatever first, which just happens to also have some public laundry facilities, as opposed to the other way around. Even with in-unit or common machines in apartment buildings, it's still handy to have some larger commercial machines available for big blankets, comforters, or curtains that won't fit in conventional washers and dryers.

It's been a while since I've seen any drawings or descriptions, but I believe they were adding a whole extra lane in each direction plus the shared use path on the south side (not sure if there's also a sidewalk on the north side as well). It's still an abomination either way at something like 9 or 10 lanes wide.

^That's all? The last drawings I saw showed them adding at least 30' to the width of the bridge.

Don't you like drinking turpentine? Mmmm, smooth as gravel!

Oh my, that Kroger in McConnelsville is sad. It looks a lot like the old Pleasant Ridge Kroger, though smaller still. http://goo.gl/maps/uZ3ky

^ I wonder if they try to parse that data through the Kroger Plus cards. I imagine they would, seeing that someone usually shops at a particular store but occasionally goes to another to buy certain products is the kind of data that's otherwise very hard to gather, but it shows that the close-by store isn't serving a need. Of course they may just think that the status quo is ok because those people are still getting the things they need regardless of where they get them. That'd be a risky conclusion to make though because they can't track people who shop elsewhere or who simply don't buy things that they can't get at their local store, etc.

Captive audience in the small town maybe? In the big downtown there may not be competing grocery stores, but there's Walgreen's, CVS, maybe some dry goods and hardware stores, and farmer's markets, all of which nibble away at the grocery store's margins. This is on top of downtown residents usually being wealthy/mobile enough to go out of the neighborhood to shop. It's the trap that the Walnut Hills and to a lesser extent Corryville and even OTR Krogers face that I've mentioned in the past, the "choice" customers just drive to Hyde Park or Newport.

Glad to see that school building getting some love. It's so gorgeous, and looks from the outside to be rock solid. It even has its original slate roof!

Bike lanes and bike share aren't supposed to make the city "a more interesting place to ride a bike." They're to give people safer places to ride, and to give residents and visitors alike a chance to ride bikes without having to worry about buying one and storing it somewhere. As far as bike lanes versus cycle tracks versus side paths, etc., the fact of the matter is that vehicular cycling (ride in the middle of the traffic lane) simply does not work for anyone but the fearless, and the fearless make up only low single-digit percentages of the population. Bike lanes help a little bit, but because of the way they dump into the traffic lanes at intersections and the careless ways they end they still cater to the mostly fearless crowd. To appreciably increase mode share, a little paint simply won't cut it. Think about it like this, would you ask your 8 year old daughter or 80 year old grandfather to ride down Vine street (which I agree along with most downtown and OTR streets are pretty easily ridable, but then I'm one of the fearless types), Central Parkway, or Liberty? If not, then the cycling facilities on those streets are inadequate, and only a few people will bother.

They also have to, you know, finish the design and do working drawings too. While that can sort of be done in tandem with construction, it still requires a certain amount of front-end work to get far enough ahead of the game.

Or put a bike lane next to the curb. It's not quite wide enough to be three lanes of traffic, nor is it striped off that way anyhow, so why not (besides Cranley)?

Oh my god, that's SO SAD. It's a well-executed mural, but still.

If that was the Norelco headquarters I'd totally buy the design, especially if they also made lipstick.

^ The more available through streets there are, the less pressure there is on any one to become a cut-through of sorts. As soon as streets start being closed to through traffic, the problem multiplies and begins to cascade out of control, so it's best to nip that in the bud. I doubt there's going to be a significant number of people coming here via anything other than the Norwood Lateral anyway though. This site has much more direct highway access than the Paycor and SHP crap further to the east, though I expect this will be just as car-dominated.

^ Agreed. It's not stitching back together the urban fabric when you just leave empty space. Boston's Big Dig is a major fail in that regard, but we've been over this all before.

33% affordable housing?!?! That's an enormous number that sounds like an attempt to deflate the market and stall redevelopment. Besides, new construction and rehabs simply are not the place to be implementing affordable housing. New construction is just too expensive, so making units affordable requires very cheap and crappy construction. Maybe the city could be allowing or encouraging smaller units or SRO's through some sort of incentives or density bonuses, but to say that much of the housing should be affordable means the developers will need to further inflate the prices of the market-rate units to compensate.