thebillshark

I like the idea of having the concert lawn open to the public while there is no event going on, (the alternative being a large fenced off area), but I would like the stage and facilities to be more permanent as well.

I think the Millennium would be a really neat conversion into residential but they would really need to fix how those buildings meet the street and sidewalk. And tear down the weird portion north of 6th Street.

^if he was trying to make a statement about an empty streetcar, he didn’t notice all the new construction visible outside the windows

^they should remove access points and put sections underground.

^it maybe an “unconventional” set-up but I am wondering if the Fort Washington Way caps could be built out and used as auxiliary convention space? I’m thinking it doesn’t make financial sense to put ordinary development on the caps when we have so much other space for infill downtown. If they were some kind of flex/open hall space we could use them to really expand Oktoberfest as well.

Stopping and waiting (“dwell time”) before arriving at the Banks stop sounds utterly implausible. Hate to call out a new forum user but these posts seem suspect to me.

taestell[/member] got any drone shots of the block in question?

My views have evolved over the last few years and now I would be against the demolition of 1415 Walnut (the purple building) as part of any larger project here. My views on the keys to “good urbanism” have distilled to two main points 1. Building entrances that engage the sidewalk 2. Granularity - specifically fine granularity- is key. (1 and 2 are related but that’s for another post.) Historic buildings and districts, besides being pretty, have the hidden effect of maintaining fine granularity in an era where developers would rather consolidate whole blocks at a time. It’s the reason more pedestrians are drawn to OTR over the CBD, and there is more opportunity for small business, small developers, and entrepreneurs in OTR vs. the CBD- simply because the building spaces and real estate are of a scale they can take on. Keeping the building at 1415 maintains granularity at the site. When development happens at the site I hope it is split into several new buildings instead of one big structure.

If you look around Cleveland, you will find that two-story wooden structures are just as vulnerable. Economic shifts sink all boats, so to speak. Your economic worry is a genuine concern; the style of the architecture is an independent variable. True, but someone on a middle class salary with pluck and gumption can bring a two story structure back from the dead. Not so with a skyscraper. It’s more so about scale than style. A two-story structure. That's just one parcel of land. Equivalent to a single condo in a skyscraper. Even if a skyscraper totally deteriorates to the point it must come down, that is one parcel of land. As opposed to the two-story equivalent of space, which is a whole block or more of decay. I think there are a couple things which skyscrapers excel at, which you can't replicate with a height-restricted city. One is somewhat theoretical: keeping housing affordable. This is hard to prove, because 1) it's impossible to say what the rent would be in, say, Midtown Manhattan, without the high-rise residential buildings, and 2) there just aren't many or any examples of cities where there's an abundance of low-to-mid-end apartments in skyscrapers. Maybe in Asia there are, but North America has had super weird urban migration and construction patterns which has lead to alternating gluts and dearths of neighborhood housing supplies. And South America has such income disparity that talking of lower-middle or middle income classes (and hence housing for them) doesn't compute in the same way or at all. The second thing is just limiting the footprint of a city, which has major environmental benefits. It also has economic benefits, since less infrastructure needs to be bought and maintained per capita. Basically, a skyscraper city is more efficient. You make good points that I've been thinking about too, and have come up with some counterarguments- 1. Affordability- It's worth asking if without skyscrapers, would the real estate prices in Midtown Manhattan really just increase according to a simple supply and demand model, with nearly infinite demand driving prices to near infinity? I don't think so. I think what might happen instead is that we'd have much economically healthier second and third-tier cities meeting the demand, spread across the landscape in a recursive fractal pattern. Through this lens the skyscraper could be viewed as an enabler of the winner-take-all economy we find ourselves in, allowing vast amounts of wealth to cluster into just a few city blocks. Isn't it somewhat absurd to watch mega projects like Hudson Yards go up in NYC, not to mention other skyscraper construction booms around NYC like Downtown Brooklyn or LIC, while Cincinnati struggles to renovate the Ingalls Building, McHahn's building, or the Terrace Plaza hotel, let alone build on parking lots mere blocks from Fountain Square? Things seem dauntingly skewed. I also think especially for developing nations to create stable societies, it would be much better if they had strong, healthy second and third tier cities instead of huge capital city urban agglomerations. 2. Environmental- I think it's important to draw a distinction between urban and suburban sprawl. I maybe arguing for a theoretical here, but dense, mid rise urban sprawl wouldn't really pose that big of a threat to the total land area of the countryside or wilderness. Low density, automobile oriented suburban sprawl eats it up however.

Is anyone thinking about what effect a full changeover to electric cars will have on real estate? Everything adjacent to a highway will become much more valuable. People are already willing to build office buildings and apartment complexes right up to the highway when they are sources of ear splitting noise and lung searing air pollution. Can you imagine the effect, particularly on urban areas, when these negative stressors are removed and only the connectivity provided by the highway remains? Also it seems the press has been unable (perhaps intentionally on the part of automakers) to de-couple the effects of a fully electric vehicle fleet from the self driving car discussion. A full changeover to electric vehicles in my opinion is something much more likely to happen sooner and will have profound effects (and almost all positive, compared to the great unknown of self-driving cars) in and of itself.

^^ The problem with the "Cincinnati Special" retail+garage+upper stories combo is that they require complicated government involved deals so it ends up that you can only do one at a time and they seem to have a 2-4 year cycle. I wonder if the Fourth & Race project could use a re-design where they have one to two floors of underground parking but then split the project into 3, 4, or even 5 mid rise buildings. I think that would be a better compliment to the historic buildings across the street that will otherwise be eye-level with the garage facade. I wonder if that would help get something built more quickly or if the current project really is just around the corner as they are saying.

Where are the 1,554 condo units under construction mentioned in this article? Number seems flat out wrong to me. Doesn’t seem to be that many total units including apartments under construction either. Maybe that many total units in planning stages (ie, including projects that may or may not get built?) Downtown population ebbs, but may be set to surge with condo influx https://cin.ci/2r2aDXz

I think those would look a lot better if the front steps were perpendicular to the sidewalk and you could see the entire front door from the street. Also they need some vertical definition where one home ends and the next begins, it is all one solid undifferentiated horizontal mass.

Fencing is up around the red brick industrial building on Reading road south of Kinsey. Guessing for demolition. Would’ve been a cool adaptive reuse for some kind of light industrial or fabrication shop/studio, but too late now I suppose.

This is incorrect. The ask was to run additional streetcar service on game days, not to buy more streetcars. We have 5 streetcars of which 2 or 3 are in service at any one time. They should run 4 or 5 to meet demand on game days. They are only building 1,750 parking spots for a 21,000 seat stadium, so they will need the streetcar to contribute getting people to the stadium. Current streetcar service levels simply aren’t going to cut it. They’ll find out the hard way I guess. That should take care of itself. When demand on Gameday spikes and they can justify the cost, it will be easy to add the streetcar It's not even just about adding another car. A simple thing like having two cars waiting for when a game gets out would be such an easy thing to but apparently no one thinks/wants to do that. The problem is the 3 way bureaucracy and contract structure (city, Sorta, Transdev) surrounding the streetcar makes them blind/ties their hands to reacting to what’s going on around them. I don’t think they ran all 5 streetcars even for the Blink festival. Without external partnerships being established (with FC Cincinnati, or the Reds, or Taste of Cincinnati or Oktoberfest or Blink) to accomplish specific service goals I have little hope this situation will change.

This is incorrect. The ask was to run additional streetcar service on game days, not to buy more streetcars. We have 5 streetcars of which 2 or 3 are in service at any one time. They should run 4 or 5 to meet demand on game days. They are only building 1,750 parking spots for a 21,000 seat stadium, so they will need the streetcar to contribute getting people to the stadium. Current streetcar service levels simply aren’t going to cut it. They’ll find out the hard way I guess.

If you look around Cleveland, you will find that two-story wooden structures are just as vulnerable. Economic shifts sink all boats, so to speak. Your economic worry is a genuine concern; the style of the architecture is an independent variable. True, but someone on a middle class salary with pluck and gumption can bring a two story structure back from the dead. Not so with a skyscraper. It’s more so about scale than style.

It may sound strange to question (and be unpopular in this forum,) and indeed they are a powerful symbol of modernity and optimism, but are skyscrapers a positive development for the urban form? 1. The oldest ones today are only about a hundred years old. How will they handle aging through 200, 300 years? 2. They’re hugely expensive to build and maintain and require lots of concentrated capital to do so. That means they’re vulnerable to the sources of that capital drying up. It’s hard to imagine that happening everywhere all at once, but easy to imagine economic shifts, technology, or geopolitics taking away the sources of wealth of at least some cities currently experiencing skyscraper booms. 3. A related point to #2 above is they are large scale, course grained structures by nature. Fine grained urbanism is better at allowing a greater variety of building owners charging rent at different price points, which is more conducive to the organic growth of diverse small businesses. 4. If a skyscraper has some negative effect in its surroundings, that mistake is locked in. It’s rarely heard of for a skyscraper being methodically dismantled and replaced with another structure. 5. In Midwest cities that sprawl outward, a skyscraper can suck up what urban demand that exists. Meanwhile abandoned/empty buildings, vacant lots and parking oceans abound elsewhere downtown. 6. People love cities with height limits like Paris, Washington DC, or Barcelona (which is mostly mid rise with some skyscrapers.) Those cities have celebrated urbanism/strong urban fabric. Thoughts? Tell me what I’m getting wrong or counterpoints! (This is more of a thought experiment for me than anything else.) In particular what effect would a height limit on new construction, from this day forward, have on cities in the Midwest? Would it change how we grow? Would it improve our urban fabric and make it more cohesive? Would we construct better mass transit systems or have different parking needs? Or would it be completely harmful and drive away growth?

How many people could the line support, considering they would probably all be wanting to board around the same time? The only way the streetcar would be up to the task is if they ran all 5 of them and they created transit only lanes for game day

In a city, things work better when they have multiple uses/support multiple functions. So instead of having a big 750 space, strictly stadium oriented parking garage, it may be better to have multiple garages within walking distances. For example a garage here of perhaps 250 spaces could be 1 block away from the stadium, a short direct walk via Wade Street: https://cincinnatiideas.com/liberty-and-race-underground-garage/ It would be a longer walk, but not really a long walk, but perhaps you could even put a garage up by Findlay Market as part of this deal. Build a garage above the streetcar maintenance and operation yard. Of course the problem with branching out like this is if the team is expecting a certain number of spots to be guaranteed available on game day or expecting game day revenue. And another problem with “Cincinnati-style” single file line development: if the stadium and reconstruction of the CET block (presumably for a garage) gets moved to the front of the line, where does that leave Fourth and Race, Fountain Place, the Banks, etc.? (We could make reforms to make it easier for “market forces” to develop things on their own but that’s just crazy talk)

What would the advantage be? What are you hoping to accomplish? Seems extremely expensive and I don’t see any practical benefit. The Fountain Place structure is solid and can serve as the base for a taller building. Doesn’t seem like you’d gain much by tearing it down. And moving the fountain a block doesn’t make sense. The current layout of Fountain Square is quite nice, where the Square only has streets on 2 sides. The buildings to the north and east provide a sense of enclosure that makes the Square a pleasant place to hang out. Even the Via Vite structure helps be enclosing the shady grove of trees, making a nice place to sit at a table. I agree with all the points you make here (I actually thought the idea was over the top- thus the reference to the galaxy brain meme.) I think it’s an interesting thought experiment for the following: 1) if you were working with a half block (south half of the block between Race and Vine) larger space from scratch, could you design a space that functions better than the current Fountain Square and 2) the effects on the surrounding blocks of moving the center of town to the west a block. Issues with the current square that I’ve read: 1) overshadowed by surrounding buildings 2) stage placement creates barrier against Vine Street. I’ll add 3) the square does not seem naturally active weeknights when there is no programming going on. (I’ll admit that I don’t get to see it at lunchtime and the summertime programming schedule is very full.) I don’t know if being one block west would solve #1 (would still get Carew tower shadows) and #3 probably can’t be solved by the space itself- probably would require a more active higher population downtown in general. A larger space too would be a double edged sword- it could accommodate larger crowds but be tougher to activate when nothing is happening. Main drawbacks to the moving idea include 1) Fountain Place building solid as you mention with quality materials- walked past it yesterday and noticed this too 2) If the Square was moved, I don’t know I you could build a structure over the top of the existing Fountain Square garage and 3) wouldn’t be good for the current businesses facing the square. I think any gains would be marginal compared to the costs.

Galaxy brain idea: Tear down the Fountain Place building and move Fountain Square itself west across Vine Street. Bad idea, or good idea but just too expensive?

^ timing of this library project is so strange. They just went though all this drama trying to sell the north building and will ask for a levy increase this fall. But looks like they’re remodeling anyway to something that would require more maintenance (carpet)?

This project on Broadway downtown completely slipped past my radar when it was first announced but it appears it is under construction and now known as the “Crane Factory”: https://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2016/10/19/exclusive-developer-plans-to-convert-downtown.html

If an FC Cincinnati stadium was built in Newport, would it help “spur development” at this site? It’s obviously within walking distance of the proposed Newport stadium and the target demographics of FC Cincinnati (millennials) overlap with those of Skyhouse. Could be an interesting test of the claims people throw around.