urbanMSP

Doesn't the Penfield have the same siding?

The Villager has a somewhat contradictory pair of articles on the development in this week's edition. The first talks about things going along smoothly, with approvals for zoning changes and conditional use permits granted, with minimal public comment. The second has a headline that implies a brewin...

So after looking at the map, there is less open developable space in the central core of St Paul than I thought - I forget the CCLRT is cutting across a block. Other surface parking lots, like the one next to Metro Square, are somewhat on the edge of the core, not in the middle of it. So maybe a dev...

The arrival of Burlington Coat Factory tends to signify that a dying mall has "jumped the shark". I am in constant awe of slow-witted Dave Thune: City council Member Dave Thune has taken a dim view of the idea of a new office tower or apartments. In a June 7 email to Bedor, Thune asked th...

^^^ Agree completely.

Also, pedestrianizing the mall would create the opportunity for really exceptional street/skyway connections, instead of tiny staircases shoehorned into the sidewalk.

If that's the 'wide' side of the tower, it's still going to look pretty slender when its done. Can't wait.

The window assemblies on the at the corner have sliding door components, so I would guess a restaurant would be the target tenant. I walked by this morning and it truly does look far, far better. This corner really has great potential.

There's a lot of vacant street level retail space on this block. Hopefully it gets filled with something worthwhile. Hopefully it gets filled with something.

Downtown needs more visually appealing skyscrapers. It's no wonder that Saint Paul has such a poor, vacant CBD in comparison to Minneapolis. I recently spent the day in the Wells Fargo Center in Minneapolis, and what struck me is that just having a view of other attractive buildings is a status sym...

I can't wait to see the ridership numbers once the line opens -- if nothing else, it will give us a real-world baseline to evaluate the engineer's projections. A lot of those numbers seem pretty low, to me. But I'm only going by gut instinct.

It’s been mentioned on this thread already, but a roughly U-shaped Rice-Payne or Rice-East 7th line really makes the most sense to me. It serves transit-dependent populations and hits areas of the city that could really use new development. It would also complement the Green Line quite nicely, for i...

According to the Metro Transit schedule, there are 65 runs, each way, on a weekday. 130 runs, total.

6.13 riders/run.

Are there capacity issues at MSP? This is the first I've heard of that, if so.

I've heard rumors that Whole Foods will be the grocery tenant, which makes sense to me. The current store is tiny and crowded, and the parking lot is almost always full and probably only has 50-60 spaces.

The sultan's jumbo jet is parked by the Delta hangar at 494 and 24th. I was driving by earlier and couldn't think of a reason such a plane would be in town....thanks, Internet!

University looks far, far better now than it did in 2006, when I moved here. The LRT is a huge factor, but so is the street reconstruction and sidewalk improvements that accompanied it. Even the much-maligned (by some people) walls between the tracks and the driving lanes make the street look more u...

Regarding the potential for shadows on the field - The Indianapolis and Houston stadiums have issues because the field isn't lit evenly - there are patches of very bright sun and very dark shadow that are very close to one another. TV cameras can't adjust to it, therefore its difficult to watch. I'm...

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/05/car-sharing-services This seems like a good advancement on the car-sharing idea. With the reliability and flexibility of a system like this, I could imagine individuals ditching a private car entirely, or families going from two to one car. That would ...

I went to Seattle for the first time this January. They have terrific density and very active street life, but I don't think any given piece of architecture is noticeably better than what is being built here. I also think they way they relate to the Puget Sound shoreline is not nearly up to the leve...

Ayd Mill Road would seem the logical candidate. It seems to have a lot of spare capacity but is difficult to get to from I94.