urbanMSP

Great news. I hope the Fed will take the comments of the city planning commissioners to heart, and come back with a proposal that better fits the city's goals and honors the riverfront site. Break this big site up into multiple buildings. Make room for people to live and work, not just space for car...

The scale is excellent and the location will patch a gaping hole in the urban fabric. Great looking design, positive (quasi)public space, extremely inventive site plan, mix of uses is fantastic and will bring a lot to the area. The restaurant on the amenity level will have absolutely killer views of...

It's better with the retail. The crane room portion could look fascinating from the street. I'm bothered by the lack of any interest in the southeastern portion of the site. The two story building at 508 Washington is a pretty ordinary structure, is it worth preserving? The surface parking lot at th...

These repeated cuts are extremely frustrating and dispiriting.

I think what a lot of pipe-dreamers on here fail to recognize...

The almost exactly one-to-one model for this Minneapolis pipe dream is Denver's Union Station and the SOM-designed train shed.

Somebody somewhere alluded to repurposing the I-394 trench and I think it's brilliant. Cut-and-cover N 3rd Ave from the Fed to Washington; demolish the C Ramp (and the B Ramp?); build shiny new *European-style* terminal building from Washington to 5th. (stage II includes converting 5th St. into a b...

Detours from states and counties are reliably dumb, because they are required to use state or county roads and work for both cars and trucks. At a certain level, they're not really even intended for locals.

Pretty sure the Fed’s economists aren’t just sitting around thinking deep economic thoughts about the north loop’s parking situation. At least I would hope they’d delegate that to an administrator. It's completely within their wheelhouse to investigate. No reason why studies about the North Loop wo...

I was struck by a couple things: 1. The Federal Reserve's presentation took forever and contained very little of substance. Mr. Carter gave an entire presentation about the function and work of the Fed, as if he were addressing a visiting group from a middle school, it was extremely odd. At one poin...

The building's first floor would have a 14,000-square-foot day-care facility and outdoor play area and 5,000 square feet of retail space, which Sherman is looking to fill with fitness users and a coffee shop Is there another day-care facility nearby? This retail mix seems excellent for the neighbor...

New owner will rename, renovate troubled 180 E. Fifth building in St. Paul

This is a donut shaped building, I imagine the floorplates might be tricky for modern office tenants. Why not convert to apartments?

I'm disappointed they couldn't get the original watercolor too.

Most of the recent residential growth in downtown St. Paul has been driven by Class B/C conversions. As far as I know, that hasn't happened at all in downtown Minneapolis in the past decade. How much vacant, older, narrow floorplate office is out there? Has there been any recent inventory?

Far more likely that plans will be mothballed at 90% engineering and the Met Council will wait around until BNSF changes their mind, or the national political situation changes in a way that gives urban transit more leverage. Just insane that the region's transit efforts were tied up for a decade on...

I wish there was more setback along Nicollet, it looks like it will be boxing in Cancer Survivors "Park", when it really should be opening up to it and a future path to the river. Hard disagree on this. Cancer Survivors Park and the surrounding gateway area suffers as an urban place becau...

This submission is really catnip for the CoW, because this proposal has a lot of areas where a little bit of improvement would go a long way. The massing of the building is off, there needs to be a better delineation between the Nicollet "tower" portion and the Marquette/3rd "slab&quo...

I expect that ridership is down, especially on local buses, which would only follow trends. But a 7% drop is extreme, and the drops on light rail and the A Line are a huge break from recent trends. To me, that suggests the primary cause of this ridership fall was the remarkably cold and snowy winter...

Define "immediate area." The 1,473 spaces in the C Ramp are less than a quarter mile away from the Foundry building. We assume that people will walk a half mile to transit all the time, maybe we should think about what it would mean if we occasionally asked drivers to walk a quarter mile f...

From my own experience, parking in this neighborhood between 9:30am and 3pm during the week means circling the block/s for 30 minutes waiting for a spot to open or parking between T3 and the Twins stadium. There is a high demand that will only increase once "TMBR" construction starts. I m...

It would be great if someone would come up with an appropriate way to dress the two exposed ends of the parking ramp.

Tearing it down completely and building buildings at both ends would do the trick.