Big_Ben wrote I myself don't think the size/bulkiness of the building is much of a problem. It is just a short fat building which, to me, is better than the massively tall skinny ones.
The problem is that when you have a 3-story mall, it's just a mall. When you have a much taller building, you can have ground-level commercial units with either residential or offices towering above. It makes the area much denser and adds PEOPLE to the mix. You need PEOPLE downtown if you want those stores to survive.
And I don't think it needs to be completely gutted to turn it around but it does need to be renovated.
If you look at the trends, big box malls are not the same as they were 40 years ago. The average mall shopper has changed a lot during that time and they only want to go to the newest mall with the newest stores. If the City Center is renovated in a minor fashion and kept to be pretty much the same style of mall, all it will do is draw a short term crowd and it would be back into the same shape it is right now within 10 years. If all we're going to do is "bring it up to par" with Polaris or Tuttle, then it's not going to give anyone any reason to travel downtown to shop there. Why would the suburbanites come downtown to the City Center if it's just the same type of mall you can find out there much closer to home?
Something that I think would be a nice improvement would be to convert the third floor into apartments/condos. I think it would be cool to have a balcony that overlooks the bottom two floors of the mall.
I'm thinking along the same lines, but on a much larger scale. Open it up so you're looking down OUTSIDE on greenspace and storefronts. An indoor mall balcony would be a TERRIBLE view at night when the mall is closed. :P And why just have the 3rd floor as apartments? Why not tack 20-30 floors of apartments above. This is downtown we're talking about! Make it dense! If you want to see more people hanging out downtown we're going to need a lot more units than just 1 floor of apartments.
Something that I would like to see downtown that could be built in the open space on the city center lot would be a large apartment building with moderately priced apartments.
There was supposed to be residental units going into the lot between the garage and high between rich & main, but I guess it fell through. Not sure when that's ever going to get finished.
I haven't seen any new apartments coming downtown, they are all condos. That is nice for the 30-50 crowd but if they want to bring people back into downtown they will need some 20 somethings down there as well, and they usually aren't ready to buy a condo yet.
There are some apartments (sixty spring for has both) but I agree that there aren't enough. They'll start trickling in over the next few years though as developers start to gear their projects towards lower price brackets as that becomes more profitable for them. I'm thinking the area just east of the core of downtown would be a nice place to start for that sort of thing. There are a TON of flat lots along spring & long between high and CSCC that are just begging for affordable apartments. When you consider how large of a student population there is in that area between CSCC, CCAD, Franklin, and Capital, and the fact that there is practically NO student housing, there's a giant hole to be filled there and I think a nice vibrant young neighborhood could emerge right there and spread through the rest of downtown.
There is a need for clubs and restaurants that are open past 5 o'clock.
There's quite a few restaurants downtown open for dinner. And as for clubs and bars, they're all open past 5. Most of them aren't open BEFORE 5. Granted, downtown isn't as saturated with entertainment options as the Short North or Arena District, but that's going to take time to change as more and more people move downtown.
The PEOPLE have to come before the BUSINESSES. Businesses can't function without customers, but people can live just fine in their homes without a bar next door. :wink:
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