thebillshark

Didn't we have two dueling piano bars a few years ago that have both since closed?

^Best quote from the Aaron Renn article:

What an idiotic comment by Charlie Luken. Why is 1 Lytle Place bad? Because it provides housing for 100 taxpaying households of the City of Cincinnati? Much like this development will provide housing for hundreds more people? Does he realize he was mayor of a city that was losing population since 1951? Yeah we've already spent a lot of money building out the park, so we shouldn't build the city up along the park border? It's somehow nicer to have a buffer zone of asphalt surface parking lots sitting there baking in the sun? This kind of stuff is why I start to believe the talk that the Luken/Cranley team wants to keep Cincinnati as provincial as possible so they can run it as their own private fiefdom. http://www.governing.com/columns/eco-engines/gov-do-we-really-want-development.html

Re: displaying streetcar in opening day, I think you might have as many people saying "why the hell isn't it ready yet" as you would have people thinking it was cool. Maybe better to have it testing on a weekend with nice weather with lots of people out so people can at least see it moving.

Lots of people asking for rail on the OKI 2040 survey results http://2040.oki.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/full_document.pdf

The plan has these openings for an interior courtyard cut out on what was pretty much the blank wall on the south side of the building, it's a neat idea, but my concern would be if that means the parking lot to the south will forever be a parking lot and never see infill development because of that.

IMO the only thing we can do is keep building in our core according to "Walkable City" principles, and incrementally build the kind of ecosystem where people (and businesses) want to be. Add a few thousand people in the basin and some Uptown and suddenly the Mt. Auburn tunnel seems possible. Build that and experience a true boomtown. Add light rail to Northside to connect even more neighborhoods.

I like the "River and Crown" logo on the older police cars, but I think that's only for the police department.

Yeah all in all pretty awesome, it's a huge downtown development no one was really expecting. I hope I get to swim in that pool someday!

Yeah that parking garage is really low and taking up a big footprint. Would have been neater if they went taller with the garage and left room for a second tower in some way or built something around/on top of the garage as jwulsin[/member] suggested.

It may work to the Dennison's favor. If the Historic Conservation Board wants to be known as moderate or pragmatic, they could approve Donato's building demo and protect the Dennison.

Is it even one of the largest events in the park? Lumenocity, City Flea, MPMF, July 4th, Taste of OTR all huge. Don't see why Health Expo needs special streetcar shut down for loading/unloading.

No, people online are getting this confused with the Dennison, for which there is no redevelopment plan. Renderings of the project at the Donato's site were included in the historic conservation board packet on the city's website.

^in regards to taller heights in OTR you could get into a "Tragedy of the commons" situation there though, especially at 10-14 stories. That's were a shared resource (in this case, the view) is depleted by everyone trying to harvest it, acting rationally in their own self-interest (in this case by building tall buildings which will block the view of others.) That being said I could see a little bit taller buildings in certain locations such as along Central Parkway (east-west and north-south portions) or at the base of the hills.

I still think you are getting more than you are giving up wth the current plan but... What if you did this? If floor to ceiling heights in the Donatos building are the issue, remove every other floor except for the support joists. Then do open floorplan office. You'd lose square footage but that might make your renovation costs lower as well. Looks like you could get about three floors in maybe?

It is? I mean, there's no request for demolition, but I'm not seeing it in any of the renderings in the packet - the north tower has that space in the renderings. It's on page 133 of 312 of the updated packet labeled "3/21/2016 staff reports and attachments" http://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/buildings/historic-conservation/historic-conservation-board/march-21-2016-staff-reports-and-attachment-s/

I see what you're saying but I somewhat disagree. First of all saying we're going to have a "Race Street Retail Corridor" was somewhat random to begin with, and only occurred because Sak's and one entrance to Macy's was there on Race Street. But the truth is the urban fabric has some major holes over there, and it's not near the streetcar line. Second of all 3cdc acts more like the manager of a shopping mall in OTR and has special rights to those retail spaces in the buildings they redevelop. No such relationships exists for the buildings in the CBD. In fact the only strategy we've had in the CBD was for the city to directly subsidize department stores, which is an awful way to try to "pick winners" because sooner or later you're going to lose. So I can understand trying to change that strategy.

Nice looking building! Two new nuggets of info from this latest packet: -south tower is 14 stories confirmed -811 Main St (Sophia's building) is staying!

Holy moly that's a lot of parking. Could some of that be used to support a condo tower above Macy's at Fountain Place, since you couldn't include any in a project there?

If he'd hadnt had came out for the streetcar early like he did there's be no way we could have built the momentum to change the minds of Mann and Flynn IMO. Also I think the notion that he flip flopped is somewhat incorrect. During that 2013 he didn't make any strong statements one way or the other. If you can fault him for anything it's for not being a strong pro streetcar voice throughout because he still would have been elected by a wide margin.

Since, for a statewide forum, a pretty absurd number of forumers here live in precinct 17-B (a few blocks around Washington Park), I'd like to remind everyone that Sean M. Lee is running for Democratic Party precinct executive, he is involved in Believe in Cincinnati and is a streetcar supporter. He is running against a Cranley PAC backed candidate.

Explain VTICA please

Let's not forget success will beget success here too. The more vibrant the core is, the more demand will increase from people and businesses wanting to move there.

My take on a few points: 1. Donato's building- It looks like it would make for a good rehab from the outside, but has all the structural issues with the low ceiling heights previously mentioned. It looks like the highest use of this building has always been a warehouse, and the upper stories haven’t even been used for that for 29 years. The location is definitely suited to higher uses now. One would wonder if the people who built the building in the 1800's boom time would be as sentimental about it being replaced as we are today. It's being replaced by badly needed residential construction, not a surface parking lot, with many more residential units than rehab of the Donato's building would have otherwise allowed. The proposed project as a whole is also an opportunity to "scale up" two corners of the Eighth and Main intersection with two buildings of similar heights. It cleans up some holes in our urban fabric by replacing two surface parking lots and a squat non-historic two story structure (the building south of Donato's.) It repairs the street wall along Main St. It seems like a good trade at the "gut level." My main qualm is that several of the arguments and math presented in the packet for the demolition of the Donato's building may be used to support the demolition of others. So even if this feels like a good trade at my gut level, I hope it doesn’t set a precedent for demolitions that wouldn't feel good at the gut level (the Dennison, the Davis, 313 W 5th Street.) 2. Sophia's building (811 Main St.)- It is not at all clear to me that this building will be demolished as part of this project. It's completely not mentioned in the packet text, and if it's in the historic district it would seem they would have to address it at a later date. The rendering (massing?) of the proposed project definitely doesn’t include it. But it is present in the site plan on page 181 of the PDF, and page 196 mentions an "811 Hideaway Lounge." 3. Parking- it looks like this has "evolved" over time. The documents in the packet dated last year seem to imply that no long term parking would be included and long term parking would be available at Olympic Garage. However the more recent documents in the packet mention the two levels of parking included. In any case the parking component doesn't seem to be that dominating a component for these structures as it has for other recent projects around downtown, which is a good thing.

The 7 minute time is via Eggleston, which is what I take. *I* agree that it is very doable, as is the walk to the southernmost streetcar stop. However, I have a hard time convincing coworkers right now to walk to Fountain Square. I hope I'm wrong, but I see this development as being more of an island unto itself. Funny how once the streetcar project got its final approval, the "Hop On Trolley" proposal disappeared. This would be a perfect route for a shuttle bus -- connect the streetcar stop at The Banks to the Purple People Bridge and perhaps some other points east. Yeah maybe they could do a high frequency "Cinculator" bus from Streetcar Stop #1 to Columbia Tusculum and Mt. Lookout Square. Alternatively a Newport streetcar could have a stop on the Ohio side of whichever bridge it crosses (probably Taylor Southgate) that would be that much closer to this development.