3 minutes ago, Cincy513 said:

Wonder where these 2,470 surface parking spaces the county is going to provide for tailgating will be. 

Apparently they will be at the Hilltop concrete site to the southwest of the stadium.  People already park there for games.  I guess the county might kick out Hilltop/make them downsize and just make that area a surface lot?  

2,470 surface spots is completely disproportionate to what the Bengals are qoute unquote “giving up” by allowing the music venue. Sounds like the county got had again. 

 

Will that quota prevent development on the rest of the Banks project? Did they even think to ask to lift remaining height restrictions on development? 

 

County commissioners reach agreement with Bengals on music venue at The Banks; could pave way for new indoor practice facility

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/money/2018/11/14/team-and-commissioners-have-signed-memorandum-understanding-which-bengals-have-agreed-allow-proposed/2000534002/

Edited November 14, 20186 yr by thebillshark

My question will be OK, you will buy Mr. Steele's Hilltop plant, but what about the asphalt plant down there that isn't his? Valley Asphalt owns a very busy plant in between 75/71 and Clay Wade Bailey Bridge. If you buy the concrete plant but not the asphalt plant that seems short sighted. Annoyed it will become surface lots and maybe indoor practice facility, I would assume built up out of the flood plain, but I guess its better than concrete dust all over my car...

I'm also not thrilled about the idea of the Bengals taking MORE prime real estate along the riverfront. I assume Hilltop Concrete pays quite a bit in property taxes (their property is split across several parcels, so it's tricky to figure out exactly how much they pay). I wish the Bengals would put the indoor facility on the existing practice fields, which currently sit unused the vast majority of the year. And if they do ever build an indoor facility, it'd be great if they make it available for community events and other sports leagues year-round whenever the Bengals aren't using it. 

I also wish the Bengals would just build an indoor facility replacing the current practice field, but this still sounds like a good deal. Perhaps Hilltop Concrete could move to Queensgate or some other location that's still within city limits. Tailgaiting gets pushed out of The Banks and into this new lot. My bigger concern is about the future of The Banks. This new music venue is fine, but what happens next? Do they still intend to fill the remaining blocks with residential, office, and retail, or is The Banks going to be built out with nothing but entertainment venues and game day restaurants?

The banks needs more office space and another hotel.  They've been waiting for years for one big tenant to come in and take all of the office that's available on Walnut.  News flash, that isn't going to happen.  Just build the building and lease out the space like any other space.  Downtown needs more hotels as well and adding one to the banks would put more people down there 24/7.  I'm sure they'll build more apartments as well but I don't think the existing ones are thriving.  Maybe they could try some condos instead of apartments? 

50 minutes ago, taestell said:

I also wish the Bengals would just build an indoor facility replacing the current practice field, but this still sounds like a good deal. Perhaps Hilltop Concrete could move to Queensgate or some other location that's still within city limits. Tailgaiting gets pushed out of The Banks and into this new lot. My bigger concern is about the future of The Banks. This new music venue is fine, but what happens next? Do they still intend to fill the remaining blocks with residential, office, and retail, or is The Banks going to be built out with nothing but entertainment venues and game day restaurants?

 

Not positive but i think they still use barges to get material delivered so any new location site may be limited.

 

10 minutes ago, Cincy513 said:

The banks needs more office space and another hotel.  They've been waiting for years for one big tenant to come in and take all of the office that's available on Walnut.  News flash, that isn't going to happen.  Just build the building and lease out the space like any other space.  Downtown needs more hotels as well and adding one to the banks would put more people down there 24/7.  I'm sure they'll build more apartments as well but I don't think the existing ones are thriving.  Maybe they could try some condos instead of apartments? 

 

I agree another hotel seems like a no-brainer the AC seems very popular. But Condos and a speculative office building is a non-starter to get financing outside of tier-1 markets. 

I think the development team and the city/county need to do some thinking about why the residential aspect hasn't been very successful. The Banks is a great location- central riverfront, steps away from both stadiums, museums, fantastic parks, river views- but obviously the location in and of itself isn't enough to overcome the other challenges. I think the biggest impediment to success at the Banks is the uncovered highway trench separating it from downtown. The noise from FWW would be enough to keep me away, but also think of the air pollution those people are exposed to living there. The caps need to be a priority, and if we can only do one riverfront project at a time, I'd rather see the caps than the next phase of The Banks south of the Taste of Belgium building. The Banks needs a more seamless relationship with the rest of downtown, and the freeways are a huge mental and physical barrier.

 

10 minutes ago, wjh2 said:

 

I agree another hotel seems like a no-brainer the AC seems very popular. But Condos and a speculative office building is a non-starter to get financing outside of tier-1 markets. 

 

I have always thought that the Banks should have at least 2 hotels, and have wondered why the development team has been so hesitant to build another hotel when it became obvious the office pad wasn't going to get built any time soon. I'm inclined to take your word for it that a speculative office building would be a non-starter to get financing, but we have seen speculative office buildings built at Rookwood Exchange and the Kenwood Collection (and I'm sure there are others I'm not thinking of). Do those sub-markets have drastically lower class A office vacancy rates than Downtown or something?

Below is the High Street caps in Columbus and Walnut Street over FWW in Cincinnati at very, very close to the same scale. It seems like caps like this, even if they didn't full cover the trench, would help. Covering the trench for a park seems like you'll just have empty dead space given the Riverfront park right there. 

I would support capping FWW if the caps are designed to be built on (not just greenspace), but as long as 2nd and 3rd streets continue to feel like highways with five lanes of one-way traffic, with signals timed to encourage fast thru-traffic, and many blocks with no onstreet parking, it's going to inhospitable to pedestrians and not feel like a place where you want to linger --> not a place you want to live. That intersection of High St in Columbus is also five lanes, but it is two-way and has onstreet parking, effectively bringing down to 1 lane in each direction with a center turn lane. The restaurants on that block of High St have outdoor seating, and it is a much more pleasant environment because traffic will be naturally much slower there than along Cincinnati's 2nd and 3rd streets. 

The pilings that were driven in the FWW median in 1999 intentionally left 20+ foot gaps at either end of each overpass so as to provide natural ventilation to the trench and prevent it from being categorized as a "tunnel" by the FHA.  So Columbus-style caps wouldn't be able to make use of those pilings unless they extend pretty far from the overpasses.  And then most of the pilings wouldn't be used at all. 

 

 

I think it's most important to cap the trenches to mitigate noise and visual impacts. I guess ideally you would have construction on top of them, but there is some pretty damning research that links construction above freeways to cancer. I believe the study I'm thinking of looked at these "bridge apartments" in New York: http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3682

 

I know we have the riverfront parks right in that neck of the woods, but I think something interesting could be done to differentiate the cap parks from the riverfront one. Hell, even a large reflecting pool which could be used as a splashground or something in the summer could be pretty cool. I completely agree that 3rd and 2nd are too wide, too. Simply adding some street parking would help a bit. Sidewalks could also be widened.

^I believe that a ventilation system could clean and redirect the exhaust fumes in a way that doesn't happen with the notorious "bridge" apartments. 

 

Also, the unfinished Third St. to I-75N ramp remains an ongoing problem.  Its construction has been delayed 18 years at this point and is waiting for a final design for the Brent Spence Bridge  replacement  augmentation.

 

Right now traffic leaving the Riverfront area has to cross Third St. up to Fourth to reach its 75N entrance ramp.  This single situation is the cause of the majority of the congestion down there after Bengals games and other large events.     

Building the Third Street to I-75 ramp would do so much to relieve traffic on Fourth Street and possibly even allow it to be converted to two-way. Unfortunately, IIRC, the most recent plans for the BSB call for keeping the Fourth Street ramp.

I have a contrarian opinion on the caps. I don’t think they’re necessary or at least not a high priority (blog post coming soon.)

 

I think the reason the Banks has struggled to build out the initial plan is scale. It requires a big developer to spend big money and take a big risk and plan a big project to fill in an entire big block above a big parking garage. Add in the fact that the site is county-government-owned and you have a recipe for inaction. In a slower growth market it just hasn’t happened. Compare this to the situation in OTR where 3cdc has had great success. Their projects were smaller and spread out, and due to the smaller scale of the neighborhood many other companies and individuals had the means and opportunity to build on that success with buildings and businesses of their own, something the little guy or even the medium sized guy can’t do at the Banks. The CBD to some extent has the same problem of scale as the Banks but not as bad because not every site requires working with the county to build on top of a parking garage.

 

As far as caps providing connectivity to the CBD, I don’t see the CBD as an active node right now with pedestrians waiting to spill over into the Banks if it only weren’t for the highway. Both the Banks and the CBD need to work on building their existing population and street level activity, something that can be accomplished at far less cost and risk than building out the caps. 

The Banks is a major planned development, so of course it was always going to be done at a larger scale than anything we've seen in OTR to this point. I don't really think they are comparable areas at all. I would have liked to see more granularity in the design of the different Banks blocks, but given the expense required to lift the development out of the flood plain, it was almost certainly going to be a job handled by a major development company, and executed at a large, 'super block' scale. When you look at other similar types of development across the country, many have been much more successful than the Banks, even while built at the same or larger scale. 

 

Off the top of my head, I can think of LA Live, Columbus' Arena District, and Kansas City's Power and Light District. All are master planned developments built around at least one sports venue, and all are built at pretty large scales. Downtown Columbus, Kansas City, and yes, even LA are or were not exactly bustling places filled with pedestrians, but I think each of these cities have better integrated their new downtown entertainment developments better than Cincinnati has, and I think that has made a huge difference. The Banks will always rely a bit on game day/event traffic, and people who drive in, park on site, and spend their whole night at the Banks establishments, but it could still greatly benefit from enhanced integration with the rest of the downtown area. It's kind of the concept that led to the streetcar- if people have easy movement throughout the basin, the whole area will be healthier. I think the freeway caps can be thought of as another tool to encourage movement, just at the pedestrian level rather than transit. 

 

I agree with you that the caps won't be a panacea for the riverfront and downtown, though. Third Street really has next to nothing for pedestrians. Very few dining or retail establishments, and not even much in the way of pedestrian entrances, either. Then you have the hill up to 4th street, so a pedestrian at the Banks has to cross 2 very wide streets (2nd and 3rd), a freeway trench, and go up a hill just to get to the next node of activity. Few people will enjoy that journey. The caps would make it significantly better, in my opinion, but wouldn't solve the connectivity issue by themselves. 

Look inside Galla Park, the Banks' newest restaurant and entertainment venue: PHOTOS

By Andy Brownfield  – Reporter, Cincinnati Business Courier

Nov 21, 2018, 12:00pm EST 

 

Galla Park is the newest restaurant and entertainment venue at the Banks, and it just held its grand opening on Nov. 16.

In the former Crave space at 175 Joe Nuxhall Way, Galla Park is a massive 8,371-square-foot venue operated by Peerless Culinary & Nightlife Management Group. The restaurant becomes a night club with a dance floor and DJs on weekend evenings. Flip through the photos for a look inside.

 

More

The Banks' giant Ferris wheel extends its stay 

 

The massive 150-foot-tall Ferris wheel on Cincinnati's riverfront set up to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Banks development has announced it will extend its stay in Cincinnati just a day after it was set to close.

 

The SkyStar observation wheel will stay on the Banks until June 16, 2019. The wheel was originally scheduled to close on Dec. 2. That means the wheel will stick around for the Taste of Cincinnati and the Asian Food Fest.

 

“In its short stay, SkyStar has already become a Greater Cincinnati tradition and a beautiful addition to Cincinnati’s skyline," Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber event director Cynthia Oxley said in a news release.

 

More below:

https://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2018/12/03/the-banks-giant-ferris-wheel-extends-its-stay.html

 

They're trolling Newport. 

16 hours ago, jmecklenborg said:

They're trolling Newport. 

Maybe the city should buy it and make it a permanent fixture. 

Edited December 4, 20186 yr by Ucgrad2015

if you are gonna troll or buy the damn thing, why not make a statement: 400 ft tall, right on the river. In fact, make it a figure 8. maybe a first. You can wave to your relatives twice on one ride..

Banks concert venue: The county and Bengals came to a deal. But the county and city haven't.

Scott Wartman, Cincinnati Enquirer Published 10:21 p.m. ET Dec. 4, 2018

 

Before you see your favorite band rocking on the riverfront in a new music venue, politicians will have to settle a spat over parking. 

The month started out promising for the long-awaited music venue at The Banks when Hamilton County and the Bengals put aside their differences to agree on a location.

 

more

^Cranley suggesting music venue go onto Lot 24 (the big one that can support other development) after the county already moved heaven and earth to make a deal with the Bengals to put it in Lot 27

Well Cranley should not have thrown emergency cash towards his buddies in Oakley for the upgrades pedestrian bridges the way he did. Its not the full amount needed for the cities portion of the garage construction, but he definitely creates major issues that dont need to exist. 

"The 550-space garage underneath the music venue will cost $29 million and sit underneath the music venue and a future lawn next to Paul Brown Stadium"

 

$52,727 per spot parking garage

But it also lifts the development out of the floodplain, right? Still expensive, but the alternative is put it in the floodplain or fill it with dirt (which would still cost millions and give the county nothing).

1 hour ago, ryanlammi said:

But it also lifts the development out of the floodplain, right? Still expensive, but the alternative is put it in the floodplain or fill it with dirt (which would still cost millions and give the county nothing).

Filling in with dirt would be much more expensive actually. It's the whole impetus of building the Riverfront Transit Center. Structure is expensive, but volume isn't. With fill, you're doing every cubic inch of that volume.

It takes eleventy billion dump trucks full of dirt just to have a Supercross or monster trucks in a stadium.

The Freedom Center and the lawn immediately south of it, home to "Sing the Queen City" and our hillbilly London Eye are built on the dirt that used to form Fort Washington Way's levee.  In 1998~ they simply bulldozed all of it a few hundred feet south into something resembling the fruit cake room from Pee-Wee's Christmas Special. 

LOL at hillbilly London Eye ?

53 minutes ago, jmicha said:

Filling in with dirt would be much more expensive actually. It's the whole impetus of building the Riverfront Transit Center. Structure is expensive, but volume isn't. With fill, you're doing every cubic inch of that volume.

 

Fill dirt can be brought onto site and graded and compacted for about $12 to $17 a cubic yard. Gas is cheap and there are quite a few large projects in Cincinnati digging big holes. The Banks looks like it needs about 15 feet or so of fill, on average, to get above the base flood elevation. I don't know how many acres Lot 27 is, but you're looking at around $300,000 to $400,000 max per acre to just use dirt. The parking garage is likely several times more expensive.

 

Anecdotally, The Banks garage doesn't seem to be all that crowded most of the time - it seems a lot of people are willing to walk a bit further to the cheaper lots to the west. At some point you do have to wonder if there's more than enough parking.

Banks parking should come with streetcar passes. Or even Metro Day Passes.

1 hour ago, Ram23 said:

 

Fill dirt can be brought onto site and graded and compacted for about $12 to $17 a cubic yard. Gas is cheap and there are quite a few large projects in Cincinnati digging big holes. The Banks looks like it needs about 15 feet or so of fill, on average, to get above the base flood elevation. I don't know how many acres Lot 27 is, but you're looking at around $300,000 to $400,000 max per acre to just use dirt. The parking garage is likely several times more expensive.

 

Anecdotally, The Banks garage doesn't seem to be all that crowded most of the time - it seems a lot of people are willing to walk a bit further to the cheaper lots to the west. At some point you do have to wonder if there's more than enough parking.

I don't really deal much with large amounts of fill in my projects, so my knowledge of numbers is admittedly limited. Am I crazy or did they not determine that filling under 2nd Street would have cost more than building the Riverfront Transit Center?

 

Regardless, you'd still need to build retaining walls, implement drainage, use fill capable of holding up the venue, etc. That's going to be more expensive than just filling in with general backfill.

Edited December 5, 20186 yr by jmicha

10 minutes ago, jmicha said:

It's more than 15'

I guess it also depends on what you plan to put on top of it. My thought was something that can actually be used for more than grass, but you're probably right that just general landscaping fill would be significantly cheaper.

 

But creating new earth that can have anything useful on top of it is expensive. But in this scenario that doesn't really seem like it would be what's necessary.

 

I don't really deal much with large amounts of fill in my projects, so my knowledge of numbers is admittedly limited. Am I crazy or did they not determine that filling under 2nd Street would have cost more than building the Riverfront Transit Center?

 

I believe that the transit center was only incrementally more expensive to construct than to fill, especially since they got either a state or federal grant to build it. 

 

If you read the audit of the California High Speed Rail program that was just released in November, you see repeated mentions of the second $900 million federal grant that California received from the stimulus funding after its initial $2+ billion grant.  That was Wisconsin and Ohio's money. 

 

If Ohio hadn't given back the money, we would have gotten some of Wisconsin's money, perhaps $100 million or more.  That would have been enough to extend the 3C's rail from the contemplated Bond Hill station to the Transit Center.  We'd have trains running in the thing right now if now for Kasich.  And the sales tax would be 1/4 cent lower. 

 

 

 Above ground level parking structures today cost $20,000-$30,000 per space.  Subterranean garages cost $30,000 to $90,000 per space.

 

https://cityliftparking.com/build-not-build-parking-automated-parking-lifts-changed-rules

^Also, the block-sized garage upon which GE and Radius now sits was built with Federal stimulus funds.  The Tea Party/COAST/Kasich didn't seem to mind. 

2 hours ago, Ram23 said:

Anecdotally, The Banks garage doesn't seem to be all that crowded most of the time - it seems a lot of people are willing to walk a bit further to the cheaper lots to the west. At some point you do have to wonder if there's more than enough parking.

 

Yeah I wonder if the garage is ever fully occupied and if further expansion of the garage is really necessary. Alternatively, let's keep expanding the underground garage, but let Banks residents park there so that we don't have to keep building above-ground garages on top of the underground garage.

 

AC Hotel at the Banks’ rooftop igloos debut: PHOTOS

By Tom Demeropolis  – Senior Staff Reporter, Cincinnati Business Courier

Dec 6, 2018, 8:06am EST Updated 2 hours ago

 

What do you do with a rooftop bar when it’s really cold? Build igloos.

That’s the solution AC Hotel Downtown Cincinnati at the Banks came up with for its Upper Deck rooftop bar. Instead of closing the space completely for the winter, the hotel has added four “igloos” so people can have rooftop drinks even in the snow.

 

more

17 hours ago, taestell said:

 

Yeah I wonder if the garage is ever fully occupied and if further expansion of the garage is really necessary. Alternatively, let's keep expanding the underground garage, but let Banks residents park there so that we don't have to keep building above-ground garages on top of the underground garage.

Maybe for a Reds or Bengals game?  Outside of that though it's definitely never full.  For those events though they make everyone clear out of the garage so it would be very annoying if you had a monthly spot and still had to do it.  The norther portion of current has it's own above ground garage but the southern building does not.  They park in the garage underneath their building but have their spots fenced off from the general public parking.  Not sure why they couldn't do that for radius.  Or just have people who live at the banks get special mirror hanging passes that signify they can park in the garage 24/7.  But of course the Reds and Bengals have to make their money so obviously we clear it all out.  

37 minutes ago, The_Cincinnati_Kid said:

 

What do you do with a rooftop bar when it’s really cold? Build igloos.

That’s the solution AC Hotel Downtown Cincinnati at the Banks came up with for its Upper Deck rooftop bar. Instead of closing the space completely for the winter, the hotel has added four “igloos” so people can have rooftop drinks even in the snow.

 

 

From the article: "The igloos are available from 5 p.m. to midnight nightly and can be reserved starting at $250 for two hours..."

 

I would like to know who actually pays $250 for 8 people to spend an hour inside a tent (they're not actual igloos) for two hours. 

I'm visiting Baltimore right now, spending time in the area called Harbor East (streetview)... and I can't help but think this is what The Banks could have become if it had been better designed/managed. Its roughly 6 blocks so somewhat comparable to The Banks in terms of size and scale, but here there are several 20+ story towers with mixed use. It has a Four Seasons (built 2011) hotel/residences. The Legg Mason Tower (built 2009) also houses the Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business. I think of Baltimore as being just a bit wealthier/larger than Cincinnati, but maybe that's wrong and Baltimore is in a different league. This development certainly feels like a whole different league compared to anything in Cincinnati. 

 

At one point, UC Law looked at moving to The Banks, and it would have been neat for the Law School and a local business to go in together on constructing a tower like Legg Mason and Carey did. A lot of the street level retail here in Harbor East is typical high end (Anthropologie, Brooks Brothers, J Crew, Madewell, etc.), but there are also few local offerings like the Under Armour "Brand House".  And there's a full-sized Whole Foods. Overall, the area just feels nicely designed and well executed with beautiful architecture.

 

Which reminds me... has a replacement to Carter been selected? In summer 2017, it was announced that Carter would not be the master developer for remaining phases... but I don't recall if a replacement has been selected. 

Metro Baltimore might be nominally wealthier than Cincinanti by virtue of being in the Washington metroplex, but the city itself is probably on equal footing with Cincinnati, if not actually a bit shabbier. West Baltimore is... rough, to say the least, and even most of downtown is a bit grubby. But that's more of an East Coast thing than specifically a Baltimore thing. It's really a lot like St. Louis, where you have some really solid neighborhoods (Fells, Mt Vernon, Charles Village) that butt up directly to some not-so-friendly places. 

The reason why there is a heavy build up in Baltimore, is all the folks that work in DC and commute from Baltimore. I have two friends that live in Baltimore and commute into DC. Housing/Rent prices are alot lower than DC. So there is a pent up demand in the area now, and younger population with DC paychecks spending in Baltimore. 

A large monument/ride/artpiece/touristdraw will help to get people off the interstates and into the city. Consider the Octolith,  a 30 story tower of steel and glass, plus a figure eight ferris style ride. Don't like Octolith, then consider Awful Tower.

Reminds me of this thing in Osaka:

 

i like osaka better.

Latest blog post: https://cincinnatiideas.com/gondola-at-the-banks/

Skystar Ferris Wheel owner says that, "We love Cincinnati. We might never leave."

 

I'm curious how there business model works? I know they set up shop around various cities with this ferris wheel, but I wonder if this skystar has had there biggest return on investment due to the premier location of the water front at the banks. 

 

I'm curious if they are trying to sell the skystar to the city in exchange for maybe some type of royalty deal? X amount of percent for every ticket sold? 

 

Curious to see how this develops though. Definitely wouldn't mind this becoming a permanent fixture at the banks.