urbanMSP

That last picture confused me for a second, since the angle makes it line up almost perfectly with the building behind it. I could not figure out why they'd put the facade on the upper floors before even putting walls on the first.

4Marq... isn't that bad. Maybe we bottomed out on terrible apartment building names and are now on our way back up?

But why the alpha-numeric combinations? Why not just "Four Marq" or "Four Marquette"?

We'll get there. Baby steps.

4Marq... isn't that bad. Maybe we bottomed out on terrible apartment building names and are now on our way back up?

^This. I can't really think of many "entertainment uses" that would need that much space above street level, except the movie theater that was kicked out. (Which I'm still unhappy about. I love St. Anthony main, but having a big multiplex theatre downtown was a good thing.) The bottom floo...

I agree with that guess, given that this thread could very well hit 100 posts today. This is 88. Also, didn't LPM, at least, require some kind of rezoning from the city before they could start? I believe that's one of the pluses of this project, that the lot is already zoned for what they want to do...

This is a freight track. I don't live in this area, but I don't know that I've ever seen a train go through here, so I don't think there's more than a couple trains a day. I agree with you above, this a really good use of an underused space.

RIght. The housing around the University's all on a September-September cycle. My guess is we won't see prices start to drop until summer, when landlords realize that they really won't fill their units at their current prices. Or, maybe there really is enough demand for all these buildings, and we w...

Since I was at 414 Nicollet today, I looked at the way the building's laid out, and I actually believe that the intra-Xcel skyway will be on the level of the third floor, since a second-floor skyway would connect oddly to the mezzanine level of 414 Nicollet. This also means that it'll presumably be ...

Agreed. I just got back from a few days in Chicago, and on Tuesday, when I was wandering around downtown in the 15 degrees and the 40 mph winds, I would have killed for a skyway system. Disjointed or otherwise.

The Star Tribune had an article on this today. Not much new info, but it appears that my earlier guess that this might be a bit cheaper than other new buildings was wrong - a studio will still go for ~$940/mo. Also, I can assure you that the student they interviewed said a lot of really interesting,...

There's an article on this this month in Xcel's internal newsmagazine. Great news: they've decided to go for it with the skyway connections! The new building will connect to the "Nic on Fifth" building now under construction, and 414 Nicollet and future development across 4th Street. I sai...

The article I could read wasn't clear, is this going to replace the old spaghetti factory building, or just go into the parking lot behind it?

Apparently someone at one point floated the idea of a building on this site that would have a skyway connection over Walnut to the Station, which was rejected because it didn't leave room for Sally's. I'm normally all about skyways, both downtown and on campus, but this one seems like a remarkably s...

The Daily has a feature on this today. The sale only goes through if Sally's gets a place in the new building, and it sounds like they're doing their best to get Gold Country and Steady Tattoo to make the jump too. This should help quiet all the Dinkytown 'residents' that act like its impossible fo...

Awesome! Hopefully this building will also make an allowance for a skyway connection across 4th to whatever that parking lot becomes, since its unlikely that Xcel will let it go through their building.

So I guess this was a huge disaster. http://kotaku.com/simcity-disaster_watch/ Did anyone buy the game? I was going to, but I never got around to preordering it, and now, in hindsight, that looks like a great decision. I just bought SC4 from Steam and found all the old mods I used to use instead.

It surprised me that MSP is third in the Midwest. I would have thought we were behind St. Louis as well. However, I also would have expected San Diego to be larger than MSP, so maybe I'm just a bad judge of size.

Awesome. Glad to see the "Sally's" sign on the rendering wasn't just a placeholder. Now if we can get the tattoo parlor to take the third retail slot instead of Toppers, I'll be really happy.

That's too bad. I had already had doubts about the long-term viability of the U of M Market that moved into the old Village Pizza space, but.. I don't really have doubts anymore. Given that I've never seen more than one person in there at any given time, I can't see how they'll survive adjacent to a...

And, as of today, at least, the construction trailer is on site, along with at least four excavators. I'm guessing the building will come down this week.