Park East Freeway spur land is becoming 780-stall parking garage
Park East Freeway spur land is becoming 780-stall parking garage Back to the full article.
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Not exactly breathtaking construction, but I’m okay with it.
This is one of the few (if not the only) developments that is being done right. I can’t wait until it’s done.
Really? Yet another parking garage downtown that will kill four blocks of streetlife. Not to mention a soccer field that can barely fit spectators. Yeah, this is certainly the highest and best use of a large downtown building site.
@Frank Done right? Yikes. Even supposing the use was needed this fails again on design.
Well, at least the pictures of MSOE’s gym look good. Just what we needed. More parking downtown. Maybe someone should note that no one comes downtown to park, they come downtown for work/shopping/events etc. Parking is part of the picture, not the whole d@mn thing.
@gleiss I know people just don’t get it. I just came back from Bulgaria and visited multiple cities. All of them had the common thread of very little parking, and very real vibrancy, active streets, busy retail and so on. Too bad we just don’t get it.
@ Mr. Reid – There is nothing wrong with the design. Space is very limited in that area. Killing two birds with one stone was the option for MSOE. I like it and will enjoy looking at it every time I drive by.
@ Chris – Four blocks of STREET LIFE? LOL. More like four blocks of seagull droppings. FYI – There are adjacent empty parcels of land ready for purchase that one can benefit from being located next to this structure.
@Frank – I understand your perspective, but the autocentric perspective is only one of the multiple views that needs to be taken into account. Yeah, I get that right now, the site is surrounded by empty ground, but as D-town continues to grow/evolve, this space will become shops, residences, office space, bars, etc. creating life and vibrancy. For comparisons sake, think of the amount of people walking around during the day at Water and Wisconsin or Water and Mason and then contrast that with the dead space littered with sparse, failed places just south at Water and Michigan or Water and Clybourn. Each intersection has heavy automobile traffic, but Michigan and Clybourn solely prioritize the car driver with a parking structure and abundant surface parking while Mason and Wisconsin put peds/bikes/cars on equal footing while still including parking spaces.
All I’m saying is that you can create a successful place that includes parking, but that success can’t be created with only parking.
As a current MSOE student, this project is a failure from the start. MSOE is more or less landlocked, but the school owns a large number of surface lots that offer opportunity for expansion. This parking structure is only big enough to keep up with demand, not eliminate the need for surface parking lots that take up roughly half of campus.
Since MSOE has convinced itself that it needs parking (I disagree, there are really probably enough spots in undevelopable lots and below the Kern and Campus Centers for the school to function), really for this parking garage to be considered a “success”, it needs to be big enough to allow the school to expand on all of the underused real estate it currently owns.