Secrets of the City

neat looking building, but i am glad they didn’t go for it. now if only the downtown folks can start saying no to these developers…

More at Minneapolis Observer.

i’m not entirely opposed to this, if only because uptown is OVER. and i like the sound of “he sought no public funding.” frankly i think the traffic issue, at that intersection especially, is more important than a “character of neighborhood” intangible.

I’m all for urban infill development, but I’m glad this development went down.

It’s a suburban office tower plopped into the middle of the city. It’s simply too tall for the area. I don’t want a suburban tower to be the icon of Uptown.

The design is another go-around of tired modernist mistakes. It wastes the street frontage on Freemont with a parking garage instead of turning it over to pedestrian-friendly shops and restraunts.

Because the designers “need” to offer “free” parking to their office clients, the only way they could think to do that was to subsudize it with 12 stories of luxury condos.

I think much better can be done with the site that would make it a vital urban street space. The developers just can’t or won’t think outside the box.

Who the hell cares how tall a building is? It amazes me that the same left-wing urbanites who fought this project are the ones who demonize people that move to the suburbs and are always advocating smart, transit-centric growth. Well, I got news for them: The best way to reduce urban sprawl is to give people legitimate housing options in the city and this development would have done just that. Shows the true color of these urban hypocrites. Oh, and did I mention this is right next to the major transit hub in Uptown? So much for transit!

KW, I think that’s BS.

I am a strong proponent of infill development. There are a number of areas in Uptown, Downtown, and Northeast that desperately need infill development. But it has to be done RIGHT. I did not like this project because it was yet another modernist piece of crap. It didn’t provide an urban feel, just the same as a 20 story building in an Eden Prairie parking lot isn’t urban. To contribute to the urban environment, a building needs to come up to the sidewalk, be permable to the street, and prohibit parking lots in front of it. Well, one out of three ain’t bad, but it’s not good enough for me.

After approving a 10 story version of this projects, the developers went back to the drawing board and made something I’m much happier with. I haven’t see photos of the new design, but it sounds much better. It’s multiple buildings instead of a monolithic tower, and they are adding storefronts on Lagoon and townhouses on Freemont, instead of a parking garage.

The thing that is holding back infill development more than anything in Minneapolis is the lack of public transportation, meaning trains. People don’t ride buses unless they don’t have a choice. We tore up our street car system 50 years ago…now we have to build it again. When we do that, residents in popular neighborhoods like Uptown will finally have some relief from the traffic gridlock that plagues them.