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Business Development News

Phase two of The Banks set to begin construction in early 2013

[This story was originally published in the October 5, 2012 print edition of the Cincinnati Business Courier. You can read that story online for additional comments and discussion about the forthcoming phase of work at The Banks – Randy.]

Developers of The Banks hope to break ground in early 2013 on the next major phase of construction work at the $600 million development.

Following the success of the $91 million Phase 1, newly revealed designs for the riverfront development call for an additional 300 apartment units, more than 60,000 square feet of street-level retail and more than 400 parking spaces at the block southeast of Race and Second streets, said Libby Korosec, spokeswoman for The Banks development team. The structure is one building, but appears to be two, sitting on a three-story foundation.


The next major phase of construction at The Banks is planned to get started in early 2013. Rendering provided.

The Banks development team has until now been quiet about the design for the second major phase. According to principals at the Preston Design Partnership, an Atlanta firm selected by Carter for Phase 2 design work, the designs have received approval from Cincinnati’s Urban Design Review Board after two “productive” meetings over the course of the summer.

“The review board liked the concept, but they thought we had watered down the idea across all of the elevations in terms of its 3D massing,” said Edsel Arnold, senior design principal with Preston Design. “They also wanted us to look at how the structure appeared within the city skyline view, and were worried that some of the original color on the building would look too cold in front of the city skyline.”

Taking the board’s comments into consideration, Arnold said that the team went back to the drawing board to better match color schemes with the surrounding cityscape and build upon their design concept.

Building reflects city’s grid, riverfront
The end results include more gray and light blue colors to match existing buildings in the Central Business District. With a strong emphasis placed by the UDRB on integrating the designs of Phase 2 with the city skyline in mind, the colors were considered a critical element.

Arnold said the three-story base of the building will include brick to match that of other nearby structures and also offer some variation in the building’s use of materials. The two structures that will rise from the base will largely be made up of grayish-blue glass and vertical white columns.

Preston’s concept was influenced by the unique convergence of Cincinnati’s orthogonal grid street system with the organic curves of the central waterfront, Arnold said. It was this design concept that led to an eye-catching curved glass façade on the north side of the 10-story structure.

“Being from Atlanta, we were struck by the way that the city comes out of the plain and comes out to the water’s edge,” Arnold explained. “We decided it would be fun to play a strong curve along one of the walls, and let the other three sides play up more of the grid system of the city.”

To that end, the remaining three walls will be flat, as is true with most buildings in downtown Cincinnati. And a popular design element carried over from Phase One, balconies, will be incorporated onto the building’s western and southern façades to take advantage of city and river views.

From here, the design team will return to the design review board for final approval later this fall.

“We don’t have a schedule set for Phase 2 yet, but we are pleased with the progress being made on the development overall,” Korosec said.

Developer still seeking hotel, office deals
Project officials also say that they continue to work on negotiations for a potential operator for a hotel tower and tenants for an office tower planned to be built within the footprint of Phase 1 work. Townhouses planned to front along the Schmidlapp Event Lawn are also pending financing.

Once complete, the $2.5 billion public-private development partnership will transform Cincinnati’s central riverfront with 3,000 new residents, 1 million square feet of commercial space and 300,000 square feet of hotel space. The first major phase of construction work was completed in 2011 and has been considered a major success by city officials and the development team, with 100 percent of its apartments leased and about 92 percent of its 96,000 square feet of retail space occupied.

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Categories
Development News Transportation

Cincinnati officials are looking for design ideas as they work to cap urban highway

Billions of dollars of public and private investment has transformed Cincinnati’s central riverfront over the past decade. What was once a flood-prone industrial center turned unusable waterfront property, is now home to a new park, neighborhood, museums, and professional sports venues.

The investments made to date have been so successful, in fact, that they are creating spinoff investment in the Central Business District. A remaining hurdle, however, is the crossing of Third Street, Fort Washington Way (FWW), and Second Street.

The nearly 300-foot span of roadways was significantly reduced in width when Fort Washington Way was reconstructed in 2001, but the span remains a visual barrier for many of those in the Central Business District or at The Banks.

Cincinnati officials are looking to build off of recent success by capping Fort Washington Way. Photograph by Randy A. Simes for UrbanCincy.

The problem was expected by city officials, in the 1990s, during original planning efforts for the central riverfront’s transformation. As a result, city leaders worked to raise $10 million to construct pile foundations that could one day support a cap over the interstate highway running beneath street level on FWW.

The pile foundations are capable of extending 600 feet over the highway roughly between Elm Street and Main Street. According to engineers who worked on FWW’s reconstruction, the caps could support the weight required for a park, or built structures depending on height and building materials.

No specific development plan for the caps has been developed however, and now the city is launching a design competition called Connect the Blocks to establish a vision for space.

“The Banks is well underway, downtown is growing, and now we must begin thinking about what we as a community want to see over Fort Washington Way to connect downtown and the riverfront,” City Manager Milton Dohoney stated in a prepared release. “We must first have a common vision of what we want, then we can establish the roadmap to get there.”

The national competition is calling on architectural, engineering and design professionals to create and submit concepts and cost estimates for the caps that are to be built over FWW. According to city officials, three to five finalists will be selected and awarded stipends to further refine their designs.

St. Louis has dealt with similar issues as it has tried to bridge the divide created by I-70 between downtown and the Gateway Arch grounds. While I-70 will not be capped entirely, a one block portion is envisioned to connect Jefferson National Expansion Memorial with Kiener Plaza in the CityArchRiver 2015 plan.

In Ohio, the only similar example of such a project exists in Columbus where a $7.8 million cap was constructed over I-670 along N. High Street. It includes approximately 25,000 square feet of street-level retail and connects Columbus’ downtown with its Short North district.

The City of Cincinnati held the first of two public meetings, on the design competition, last Wednesday in Madisonville. The second meeting is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, October 9 at 6pm at the Main Public Library (map). The public is also invited to weigh in on the process by participating in an online survey going on now, and officials also say that the public will be invited back to view the finalists’ designs once they are selected.

Full details about how to participate in the eight-month design competition can be found on the project’s website. The implementation of any winning design, officials say, will be dependent upon the availability of funding.

Categories
Business News Politics

Cincinnati aims to revise plumbing code to allow for rainwater harvesting by November

In early 2011, Cincinnati City Council signed a motion to develop a task force that would oversee the creation of new building code standards to allow for rainwater harvesting throughout the city. The work of the Rainwater Harvesting Task Force, however, may now be jeopardy due to a lack of clarity about who is responsible for maintaining such systems.

The initial goal of Cincinnati’s Rainwater Harvesting Task Force was to develop a code to allow for the reuse of rainwater for non-potable uses such as flushing toilets. One of the concerns with such a system is the potential for backflow of non-potable water into potable water sources.

To that end, one of the biggest advances over the past year was the release of a new national standard in March 2012. And according to the Task Force, it is that national standard that is being used as a template for Cincinnati.


Dater Montessori 2009 renovation achieved LEED Gold standards, and also boasts the city’s first, and only, rainwater harvesting system. Photograph by Glaserworks.

“There is no community in Ohio that has a procedure in place to allow this [rainwater harvesting] to happen,” Bob Knight, Green Partnership for Greater Cincinnati and the Rainwater Harvesting Task Force, explained to Cincinnati’s Livable Communities Committee on September 25. “Significant hurdles have been resolved in Cincinnati, and we are working on eleven additional items now.”

Some of the eleven additional items that still need to be resolved include the finalization of water quality requirements, inspection processes, certified maintenance protocols, metering, and development of tailored language from the new national code that will work for Cincinnati. Knight, however, is optimistic that the task force will meet the goals of city council and have an amended plumbing code in place by late November.

To date, the only rainwater harvesting system in place in Cincinnati was installed in 2009 at Dater Montessori School on the city’s west side. The Dater system, however, has not yet been used due to lack of agreements between various agencies and institutions. Specifically, Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) is concerned about being responsible for maintaining the system once it is operational.

“I’m afraid the direction the Task Force is taking is not taking us in the direction we want to be,” Terry Elfers, Chief Operating Officer of CPS, exclaimed. “CPS does not want to be responsible for treating water.”

CPS is not alone in their hesitation to move forward, as Greater Cincinnati Water Works has also expressed concern about where responsibility will lie in these systems that are envisioned to help reduce water consumption while also helping Cincinnati reduce water runoff as is required by a federal consent decree.

“The heart of the problem is allowing the agencies that are responsible for this decision, to be able to point to a standard that they can defend,” Knight explained. “With this model code, the agencies can now point to it and can say that they will follow this direction.”

The Rainwater Harvesting Task Force hopes to have the language in place for Cincinnati’s plumbing code within 60 days so that they can meet their deadline. Absent that direction and approval from City Council, the activation of Dater’s rainwater harvesting system may have to continue to wait, along with other potential systems around the city.

“It would be wonderful for the City and CPS if we could resolve this so that we could support moving forward with this project,” Eflers stated as he reminded the committee that CPS has served as a leader in the community when it comes to environmental sustainability issues over the past decade.

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Up To Speed

Chicago’s Cabrini-Green redevelopment taking cues from Cincinnati’s City West

Chicago’s Cabrini-Green redevelopment taking cues from Cincinnati’s City West.

Chicago is moving on from its infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects with a plan to create a mixed-income neighborhood. The plan, however, is facing early criticisms that have also troubled Cincinnati’s similarly built City West development. More from Salon:

“They still be gangbangin’ out here at night,” says Andrea of the neighborhood. Still, it’s nothing like it once was. There’s now a supermarket, a Starbucks, bicyclists riding by, and these immaculate apartment buildings. Andrea says it’s the nicest space she’s ever lived in. A 150,000-square-foot Target is in the works, and an urban farm sprung up nearby in 2007.

But though Andrea likes the new buildings and the neighborhood, she recognizes that this sort of carefully engineered milieu is an environment that doesn’t exactly feel natural, even to the people who live here. “We have meetings where people talk to each other,” she says, referring to activities organized by the management. But aside from that, she says there’s not much interaction between the low- and high-income residents. “You can’t barbecue on the property,” says Andrea. “People aren’t really hanging out together.”

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Arts & Entertainment News Transportation

Prize to be awarded for best idea at improving urban mobility at September’s URBANexchange

Due to the Reds home schedule, we had to adjust our regularly planned meeting time for this month’s URBANexchange at the Moerlein Lager House. Instead of being held on the first Tuesday of the month, we will be holding it on Thursday, September 13 from 5pm to 7:30pm.

This month we will be getting together just as we have been, but to jumpstart the conversation we thought we would give it a transit theme. We hope you come to discuss ideas that could help improve urban mobility.


Attendees enjoy the Moerlein Lager House and conversation at the August 2012 URBANexchange. Photograph by John Yung for UrbanCincy.

All of the ideas submitted will be reviewed by the UrbanCincy team. The person with the winning submission will then have their idea profiled in an UrbanCincy.com feature story. Will we also do a drawing, from the submitted entries, for a free Metro monthly bus pass courtesy of the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority (SORTA).

The themed transit discussion corresponds with the Metropolis & Mobility Seminar taking place at the University of Cincinnati, and we have confirmed that Paul Grether, Metro’s Manager of Rail Services, will be among those in attendance.

Other notable transportation experts are also expected to be confirmed within the coming days, so stay tuned for those announcements as we get closer to the event date.

Those interested in attending are encouraged to stop by the biergarten at the Moerlein Lager House (map) anytime between 5pm and 7:30pm. There is no entry fee, but we do strongly encourage you to support our host establishment by purchasing food or drink while you are there.

Due to scheduled events at the Moerlein Lager House, it is expected to be a bit more crowded than usual. As a result, we recommend that you arrive early so that we can reserve additional space as is necessary.