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I just found this info in the Feburary agenda of the VV Comission. Looks like Pizzuti is the applicant, which is a different company then originally announced.
THE FOLLOWING APPLICATIONS WILL NOT BE HEARD BEFORE 8:15PM
9. 08-2-17
632 North Park Street (UCT Building)
Pizzuti (Applicant)/ Order of the United Commercial Travelers of America (Owner)
An application, aerial photos, and massing studies have been submitted.
Conceptual Review
• Proposed mixed-use re-development of “UCT Block”.
• 10-Story boutique hotel fronting High Street (160 rooms and 7000-sqft of retail).
• Parking garage (400-500 spaces).
• Office/residential building totaling 40,000-50,000 square feet; including 5,000-sqft of retail.
• Cultural Center located in Park Street portion of existing structure.
• Conversion of Russell Street to one-way (west).
• Improvements to Millay Alley for pedestrian friendly access between High and Park streets.
I wonder what kind of “Cultural Center” and where they are going to put 40-50K square feet of office/Residential space? A 10 Story hotel with 160 rooms will have 17-18 per floor on that small lot! I would be interested to see this.
Wow! Wonder where those businesses will move. Maybe they’ll fill up all the spaces for lease elsewhere. Pretty big deal of a project.
That sounds like certain demolition. At very least a “facadomy.”
Great! That parking garage is really going to help get a street car.
No the developer nor the city ‘gets it’. It is just more urban space turned into the national automobile slum.
No the developer nor the city ‘gets it’. It is just more urban space turned into the national automobile slum.
10 stories of hotel guests and major mixed uses such as more full-time residential will definately help the streetcar debate. Cross fingers that there is not a density uproar in the middle of what should be a denser neighborhood. The developer absolutely gets it.
- Cultural Center located in Park Street portion of existing structure.
It seems like this is the existing structure United Commercial Travelers of America, and it seems like it will remain in tact. The garage out back will probably get leveled, but I am having a hard time seeing from this slim description what else, if anything, is being removed?
While this will obviously affect the tenants of the the UCT property, which is largely office space, the rest of this is currently a random garage, a flat surface lot next to the Burgundy Room, and a couple of alley crossings, so no commerical/retail/restaurant tenants will be uprooted if I am reading the description correctly.
so the current surface lots do advance the cause? nobody bikes in from Chicago or Detroit to their hotel, so a hotel would need some parking. But the density of this project would increase a call for public transit much more than a couple of surface lots and an alley currently do.
My one initial concern, it seems that this will obscure the Bellows mural on the side of the Burgundy Room.
^ +1
Also, if this is going where I think it’s going, it’s actually surprisingly visually tucked away for such a location. I actually don’t think very much of this would be visible from High St. The United Commercial Travelers Bldg., for example, is actually surprisingly easy to miss even on foot.
Oh. Maybe I misunderstood. When somebody posted a different version of this months ago I understood the project to include the properties behind UCT, directly on High Street.
No, you weren’t mistaken– the development starts on High and extends to Park Street!
<a href=”http://maps.google.com/maps?
From what I can gather, the hotel will front high where the current surface lot is. The cultural center will go inside the current UCT building, which is the T shaped structure facing Park. The rest will fill in the surface lots and lawn along Russell, the surface lot on Millay, and I presume we can see the end of this stretch of Wall Street. The only building I think would go would be the small garage on Russell.
So Kyle, do you understand this project to take over the Wood Cos properties at 641 N High that currently house Lemongrass, Burgundy Room, Loot, Urban Office, etc…?
I thought it was supposed to fill in the holes as you described.
What I meant to say is that the developer sees the garage as an “anchor” and reason for the development. Automobile storage comes first. It is a priority ofver any mmixed-use building or denisty. Automobile density is of the greatest importance accoring to the article from last year describing this potential development.
On top of that, the city is willing to chip in to build a public garage. Well, if this happens that makes three new city built garages including those two downtown. How much of that monety could have went to building a streetcar.
Maybe I just jump to conclusions, but in my opinion, more parking only means more easy motoring and less potetnial for anything else to take root. Maybe I am too polarizing.
What do you think?
This is unrelated to this thread, but it is about downtown development so I thought maybe sometime here would know. Does anyone know what the construction is for at 4th Street and Main Street between Main and Fulton? There is a fairly large structure being built there? Thanks in advance if anyone has any information.
Parking is impossible there now in the evening and on weekends, a parking garage could only help the situation. I don’t think the parking garage be a trade off for streetcars or obviate the need for the streetcar. How else will the Longaberger ladies get to the convention center? There will be throngs of them with baskets clogging traffic on High Street.
This one is complex because it will contain a parking garage, cultural center, hotel, office, condos, and High Street retail. Apparently the hotel will be high enough to overlook Goodale Park over the UCT building, while the office, condos, and retail will be on the High Street side,
I don’t understand why there needs to be individual garages for the condos on Russel if the project will contain a central parking garage.
This is a Columbus Public Schools vocational education center.
Thanks Whopper.
Do any architects/engineers on the board have an opinion on whether it would be prohibitively expensive to do this ten-story project without including the Lemongrass space? Seems like restricting the footprint of the tower to the oddly-shaped empty parking lots would be tricky.
This post made me wonder about progress of Jackson and Ibiza, not far from the proposed Pizzuti development. I had assumed everything was on hold until the market settles, but actually the Ibiza site now includes floorplans and prices, suggesting that it’s on track:
http://ibizaonhigh.com/floorplans/floorintro.php
I don’t understand why there needs to be individual garages for the condos on Russel if the project will contain a central parking garage.
I don’t think the condos on Russell are part of this new version. The graphics are from the old proposal by Pat Grabill. This new project by Pizzuti doesn’t seem to call for them. It will be interesting to see if they make new graphics public at the VV meeting.
it does seem like a lot of stuff to cram in this space. after looking at the aerial, I started to wonder if they were planning to level the hindside of the UCT building. I’ll have to walk down there at some point and see if the hindside is a later add-on that does not contribute to the historic nature of the front facade. But I also just don’t see Wood Cos selling 641 High where Lemongrass, etc… is located. It seems like that sale would have made some waves already.
I think you enjoy being one CUs resident polarizers. That aside, I think the original Grabill plan was really amped up about the garage factor. If the garage had fronted High, it would have been a dumb plan in my opinion. It seems the new plan has the garage internalized, and as a hotel, it needs a garage of some sort. And I don’t mind garages that sit off of High and are incorporated into larger residential/retail structure (why I personally have no issue with the Ibiza garage). I also think more density will call for mass transit, and this plan looks very dense.
do we really need more development? shouldn’t we get more people in the condos built already? am i wrong?
Yes. Density is good for the ‘hood.
Yes, vacancies are bad for the ‘hood.