Postby ztr421 » April 26th, 2013, 10:28 am
So here's my beef with placing the Byerly's right on the corner in an effort to make the area appear more pedestrian friendly and not a sea of parking lots. Unless you actually put an entrance along the street, the result ends up looking like a giant impenetrable facade. They did it with the Centennial Lakes development (West Elm, Five Guys, etc.), the LA Fitness development in Richfield, the Chipotle/Potbelly corner in Richfield at 77th and Lyndale, the new CVS on York by the Galleria. They all end up with these fake (or insignificant) "entrances" that face the street, but the real entry is around back where you can park your car. I find it very uninviting, and I blame planning commissions for wanting new developments to have the appearance of an old Main Street (but not actually forcing the developers to create it), and not making the larger transportation changes that would be required to actually make that happen - and in reality, those changes are probably never going to happen because the buisinesses know that most of their customers (especially along France) are always going to arrive via car, so they're certainly not going to agree to build something without a giant parking lot. I equate it to the fake vintage look they tried to pull off with Block E (we'll build this one big building to look like a bunch of smaller buildings) - if you try to make something look like something else, it's usually going to fail.
The 50th and France area is a good example of the Main Street look, but they have giant parking ramps, and a bigger nearby urban population of people more likely to walk. The new stuff on Excelsior is the same (except for the faux-old look) - entrances actually oriented to the street, but with those ramps that you need to actually accommodate your customers.
