Originally Posted by
hoyasooner
I don't mind the box. The parking garages will be ugly though.
It would be fairly easy to make this project into a total home run.
1) Eliminate the angle of the building so that you can keep the Hotel Black.
2) Take out the back half of the Motor Hotel and incorporate it into the new building. Sort of like the Braniff building. Kinda. Convert the original half to luxury housing with ground level retail.
3) On Main Street, recreate the original storefronts for your retail space. They're going to have to tear down those buildings to put in their parking garage, but there's no reason they can't make the corner of Main and Hudson look like the Carpenter Square Theater again. Much better than the sides of the Devon garage that currently lines Hudson.
4) Build the garages study enough so that in the future a few levels of housing can be placed on top. People don't want to drive up 9 levels to park, but that doesn't mean you can't put 4 or 5 levels of nice expensive apartments with a view of the Myriad Gardens on top. Don't even have to do it now. Just build it so you can do it later.
5) Incorporate some of your west parking garage into the base of your tower. This raises the tower up another 5 levels or so, so most of the offices will still have a great view of the park. That takes care of any lost parking spaces as a result of keeping the Hotel Black and the front of the Motor Hotel. The building will also be like 50 feet taller so that soondoc will shut the hell up.
6) Make the ground floor design of the garage on Sheridan look similar to the old bus station.
7) Make a space on Sheridan for the Lunch Box to come back.
If they did half of those things, it would go a long way towards making people happy. If they did all of them, people would be ecstatic. And some of them should actually be really easy and not that expensive.
Edit: These changes would also be something that would be worth allocating TIF funding to get.