northsider

^^ well, John's words actually made me feel better about things. But if you're feeling all doom and gloom about it, why not just step away from news coverage of it for a week or two? It sounds like Qualls and other streetcar supporters need to regroup and rework things for abit anyway, so ath this point trying to stay on top of things is just people passing back and forth scary sounding rumors and the latest poop from the idiot nattering nabobs of negativity on WLW.

My understanding is that this is a rent/lease dispute - apparently they're contending that Tin Roof moving in violated their leasing agreement.

Seelbach's been a pleasant surprise in his willingness to publicly call out people for being lying sacks of crap, albeit in a politic way.

Really? I'm not seeing the kind of concentrated activity north of Liberty that I see south of it. Or am I not looking in the right places?

Don't worry guys, I'm sure you'll get to see the rendering no more than a few weeks after the dunnhumby Centre opens its doors~ more seriously, the rendering of the insides of the building is very dunnhumby, which means that they're really pushing the design firm to produce a building that fits the needs and aesthetics of their company. Which is great!

Fixed. I was just going to post that.

Morgens Hall looks gorgeous.

The level of butthurt is pretty astounding here. Folks, I can assure you that dunnhumby did not, in fact, run over your dog or cat.

Exactly, it feels like a demeaning of the importance of professional design. "Just get some DAAP kids to work on it or something" feels very dismissive. That being said, I could definitely see an interesting partnership between DAAP and the city working on various public design projects, but that's something that needs to be carefully setup so that all parties involved get real value out of it. A hastily thrown together project sounds unlikely to produce neither a worthy product nor good educational outcomes.

Thanks for saying this. Although I disagree with Nate's posts on the streetcar for the reasons you've listed, he's a friend of mine who is sweet, funny, and brilliant. He loves urban living and mass transit, doesn't own a car, and is basically the polar opposite of a COAST jerk. Feel free to slag his ideas all you want, but personally insulting him and calling him autistic is out of bounds. And yeah, The Banks to Findlay Market is a doable walk but most people aren't going to do that for grocery shopping.

This would be wonderful. A friend of mine lives in the American Can building and he's been highly satisfied with the way they treat their renters, and it was a quality conversion.

We had a date night last Wednesday - started off with a happy hour drink at Japp's, then dinner at Metropole, followed by seeing the Hobbit. The design of the Metropole is really, really great. The original floor being kept is key, and it's just an interestingly laid out place. Definitely somewhere to see and be seen. By the time we left at 7, it was pretty hopping - not bad for a weeknight just after the holiday season. Service is not stuffy but is extremely attentive. I had a Pig in the City, which was a cocktail made with rye, sweet vermouth, maple syrup, and bacon essence. Not bad, but the bacon was a little too overpowering - made it difficult to taste the rye and maple. I had a terrific salad with roasted pears and cooked chioggia beets. Just really lovely. My husband had the burger and fries which was done perfectly, and my entree was the milk-braised pork, which was simple but executed very very well, letting the excellent red wattle pork and local polenta shine. Portions were reasonable. We enjoyed ourselves quite a bit, but I'd recommend checking the menu before you go. There's only about 5-6 entrees, so make sure there's something you'd be excited about eating before you go. Menu's supposed to change every few months.

While that'd be nice, I wouldn't expect it. Folks in this thread have basically said that the Banks is like the My First Urban Experience for well-heeled suburbanites, and I pretty much agree. I expect everything that goes in at the Banks will be really safe choices and almost always national names. hopefully we'll see some retail in forthcoming phases - appropriate tenants might include Crate & Barrel, Apple, Anthropologie, etc.

Well, anything perishable with a limited shelf-life like milk is going to be the most difficult to get added, since it needs to be sold fairly quickly. I have heard success stories from multiple people of new products getting added to the OTR Kroger, so I know it can be done. But yes, a lot of Kroger's planning is now extremely centralized, and the models by which Kroger stores are re-evaluated are pretty slow. By no means am I saying it's a perfect urban grocer! But what I am saying is that we're unlikely to get another actual supermarket in the basin until a) Kroger's making money hand over fist in the OTR location and b) population in the basin grows considerably. to Jake's point, the grocery business is something that's extremely tough to make money in. Margins are very low - I think Kroger's bottom-line income is something like 1% of its total revenues. There will be no hipster grocery store in the offing - you just can't compete on price, and price and selection are how people generally evaluate their supermarkets. Where people can compete is on a smaller scale - look at the success of Picnic and Pantry in Northside, or the growth of Findlay Market. Frankly, if Findlay was willing to expand its hours again and if some enterprising soul opened a dry goods store that sold paper products, cleaning supplies, pet food, a few housewares, dry groceries, and maybe some cheaper dairy than Madison's carries, that would be a much more credible alternative to OTR Kroger.

That's not you being unable to get the thing you want. The product you wanted was 1% milk and they had it. This is you not being able to get the exact size you want. But any smaller grocery store - ie just about any urban grocer - does need to make some hard decisions as to what SKUs they do carry, and often they save on space by eliminating multiple sizes of the same product. If a grocery store had all possible sizes of all products everyone could possibly want, it would probably be too big, footprint-wise, for a true urban setting.

I'm curious as to why the currently existing OTR Kroger doesn't count as an urban grocery store. Or is "urban grocery store" here code for "grocery store in the city filled with affluent white people"? :-P if there's a particular thing you're looking for at the OTR Kroger and they don't carry it, talk to the manager. I've heard that the management at that store is very responsive and recognizes that the demographics of the neighborhood are changing - but you have to show up to make your voice heard.

TRUTH. 5 weeks vacation - gotta love European-based companies! dunnhumby (it's not capitalized because they're so hip) is offering services to retailers and consumer product groups that they can't get anywhere else. dunnhumby is a pretty big part of why Kroger's had over 36 consecutive quarters of identical store sales growth, which is insane. dh is going to continue to grow and flourish and attract really bright, creative, driven professionals, which is why it's so great that they are committed to staying in Cincinnati. Incidentally, dunnhumby's preferred hiring method is to hire really smart and flexible people, since they figure that you can train smart and flexible people on specific skills, but it's difficult to train people to be smart and flexible. So if you feel like you have an interesting resume, it wouldn't hurt to have a look-see at their open positions.

If there's no waterfall down the Vine Street steps I'll be pretty miffed.

Just now? No. They probably had this realization a few months ago and worked on the timing of the messaging with 3CDC. However, I am pretty sure that their rate of growth has indeed taken them by surprise, because I work for Kroger and for my job I work with dunnhumby fairly extensively. They are ahead of their business plans for expanding their operations. Basically, the more they do for clients like Kroger, other stores, and CPGs (consumer product groups), the more people recognize how valuable their services are, which expands further demands for their services, which ups the value of their services... they are in an extremely virtuous circle for their business right now. Again, I'm positing that your stance - a stance in which dunnhumby agrees to a residential component they don't actually want only to turn it down nine months later - doesn't actually make a lot of sense. dunnhumby is a rapidly growing company and a key component of Cincinnati continuing to build its rep as a hub for marketing, branding, and consumer products. 3CDC would have turned backflips to get them to create a new HQ downtown that would insure that those new jobs are downtown Cincy jobs without even needing to bring residential into the mix, and it's unlikely that 3CDC would have risked scotching the deal by doing a hard sell on an unwanted residential component.

And you know this... how? If dunnhumby didn't want to be involved with residential, then why did residential even come up in the first place when the initial discussions about the building came up? It seems to me like the "oh hey we're expanding faster than we thought and actually need to take up the whole site" explanation makes considerably more sense.

Crazy, I was just walking through Fountain Square today after checking out the 21c hotel (VERY nice), and i looked up at the Macy's jumbotron and thought, "When are they going to build on Fountain Place? It's gotta happen sometime in the next five years." All these announcements in the past few weeks have really made it feel like we've crossed some sort of invisible line with downtown housing, and that things will really accelerate from here. Here's hoping!

Do you have any dish on her? Friends of mine and I have been chuckling over her comments on Facebook today.

Fantastic. The news about this and the old SCPA have really helped take the sting out of residential being eliminated from the plans for the new dunnhumby building at 5th and Race. It's good to note that in that article there was a quote from the developer saying that supply and demand was way out of whack with downtown residential, with there being way too much demand and not enough supply. Hopefully more developers start to notice!

Oh no! They must have had a terrible model - ours was a hand-me-down for a friend that at this point is almost a decade old and we've never had problems with it. from Northside's Bits and Pieces newsletter, this place sounds very nice: " 



Spacious 850 s.f. first floor apartment in a four unit apartment building @ $725/mo. The apartment functions as a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment, both rooms are connected. The apartment has hardwood floors, high ceilings, large living and dining rooms, IKEA kitchen with refrigerator, DW, range and microwave, balcony and coin laundry in Basement. Water is included; all other utilities are paid for by tenant. Call 513-910-2202 to schedule a walk-through. Pets okay, though pet deposit is required.

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My Northside house (that we own) doesn't have a real dishwasher because the kitchen's currently too small, but we have a portable dishwasher instead that rolls over to the sink, and dubles as extra counterspace when it's not in use. You can get one for a few hundred bucks.