Tag: urban design

Categories
Development Opinion

Horseshoe Casino Cincinnati requesting 80-foot sign

On Wednesday, the City of Cincinnati’s Zoning Hearings Examiner will hear a request from the owners of the new Horseshoe Casino asking for the city to grant several variances to the city’s sign ordinance for signage at the casino site. Casino representatives are asking for more signage and larger signs than the current ordinance allows.

A variety of signs are included in the package including three signs that will display a real-time count of available parking spaces in the casino garage, and a monument sign that will located along Gilbert Avenue and rise 80 feet in height.

The sign, which is 943 square feet in size, exceeds the maximum allowed signage by 678 square feet in total area and 64 feet in height. According to the plans, the sign will be illuminated and visible along I-71 and up Gilbert Avenue into Walnut Hills, as well as parts of Mount Auburn and Mount Adams. For reference, the sign will be taller than the six-story building currently housing casino construction offices at Broadway Street and Eggleston Avenue, and will dominate the skyline view looking south from I-71 like a peculiar star above the Greyhound bus terminal.

In requesting for the sign variance, casino officials argued that they need the site to be visible to drivers along I-71. Once erected, the sign will tower above the casino complex and adjacent highway as a beacon of hope and good fortune to gamblers, and serve as a landmark to those traveling through downtown Cincinnati.

Residents living along Reading Road and in Mount Adams will also be able to bask in the comforting warm neon glow emanating from the sign at night. In fact, some may never need a night light again!

Some neighborhood leaders have raised concerns that the meeting is being held without enough notice for neighborhood councils; however, it seems to be in the city’s interest to get this sign up as soon as possible so suburbanites have plenty of lead time to know exactly where the casino is and how many parking spaces are free in its breathtakingly massive parking garage.

Already, out-of-towners are looking to flock to the casino but are unsure of its exact location.

“I was approached by a woman at the airport the other day and she asked me where the casino was being built,” disclosed UrbanCincy Chief Technologist Travis Estell. Thankfully, the woman will now know where the casino is with this gargantuan sign!

Springboro resident Chris Cousins also shared his enthusiasm for the proposed sign saying, “I’m really looking forward to dining at the casino’s buffet and this sign will point me in the right direction.”

The meeting will take place Wednesday, October 24 at 9am in the Permit Center located at 3300 Central Parkway (map). This facility is served by Metro’s #20 bus route.

Categories
Business Opinion

Downtown Cincinnati’s retail future probably not the shopping mall

[This is a guest editorial written by Eric Douglas in response to Episode #9 of The UrbanCincy Podcast which focused on urban retail planning – Randy.]

Do people visiting downtown do so to shop at a mall?

That’s the question I ask myself regarding Tower Place and downtown Cincinnati shopping. Across the region, the standard indoor shopping malls along I-275 that we have come to know, Tri-County Mall, Northgate Mall, Cincinnati Mall/Cincinnati Mills/Forest Fair Mall, and Anderson Towne Center/Beechmont Mall, all have had their struggles (if the rebrandings alone aren’t enough to prove that).

When architect Victor Gruen invented what we now know as the indoor mall in a 1952 and subsequently opened his first prototype in 1956 in Edina, Minnesota, it was not a totally original concept. Shopping galleries had existed in European cities, Cleveland’s Arcade, and Chicago’s Merchandise Mart well prior to the 1950’s.

Do urban shopping malls like Cincinnati’s Tower Place Mall still make sense?. Macy’s Fountain Place photograph by Randy A. Simes.

Though the region’s suburban shopping malls modeled after Gruen’s are different from the European Galleries and Tower Place in that they have two or three department stores anchoring the smaller stores and are within large seas of parking – something even Circle Centre Mall in Indianapolis and Water Tower Place in Chicago have. But what is also a commonality between Tower Place and other regional malls is that the post-1950’s indoor shopping mall experience is no longer desirable to consumers.

Now Kenwood Towne Center is thriving, and this does not include the decaying Kenwood Towne Place, the indoor shopping mall is not a complete and total failure in most markets, especially those more affluent like Kenwood, West Palm Beach, Troy, MI, etc., and most developers have acknowledged this by making malls outdoor “lifestyle centers”, but who’s to say that’s a viable alternative that will last half as long (30 years) as the indoor mall lived.

All this background sets the stage for the original question: do people visiting downtown want to shop at a mall?

Looking at the recent notable large-scale projects in and around downtown, all of them hearken back to traditional urban areas or city-led development: Fountain Square, obviously with its square or piazza, the Gateway Quarter’s shopping, and The Banks grid street layout. From these successful examples, the city should continue to not to try to reinvent or retrofit itself in order to compete in a form similar to the suburbs, it should in fact continue to try to be the exact opposite of the suburbs and their shopping experiences. It should strive to be what only cities and traditional neighborhoods can and have been for 200 years in America: true organic places that provide genuine experiences that shopping malls and strip malls cannot provide simply by their nature.

Strive to be New York’s Fifth Avenue or Chicago’s Michigan Avenue where shopping for Christmas presents is such an enjoyable experience, even in winter, it’s romanticized in movies and attracts people from other states just to shop. Don’t strive for another mall that any municipality with a highway interchange can attract. Be different.

If you have something on your mind, please send your thoughts to us at urbancincy@gmail.com. The UrbanCincy team will then review your submission and get back with you for further details about your guest editorial.

Categories
Up To Speed

Remaking a Columbus suburb for the creative class

Remaking a Columbus suburb for the creative class.

Dublin, Ohio, the affluent suburban city northwest of Columbus, has studied a radical remaking of its built environment aimed to attract young professionals and empty-nesters. Kaid Benfield examines plans for Dublin’s Bridge Street Corridor: mixed-use buildings, walkable streets, and light rail in place of typical suburban sprawl. What suburban neighborhoods in Cincinnati could, and should, be taking similar approaches? More from Switchboard:

From talking to residents, businesses and community leaders, Goody, Clancy found that Dublin is facing increased competition from downtown Columbus, other suburbs, and other parts of the country for the young talent needed to supply the diverse, skilled workforce sought by modern employers…and recognized that it will be important to build in a way that creates and strengthens neighborhoods, not just adds to them; that development should strengthen, not diminish, the town’s historic district and character; that transportation choices and more complete streets would be required; that the community’s greenway and open space network can grow.

The firm believes that the Bridge Street Corridor is an appropriate place to focus, with significant redevelopment opportunity due to the presence of several large parcels of land under single ownership (including commercial properties well past their prime), and several property owners seeking higher-value uses for their land. Focusing on the corridor would also present opportunities for increasing connectivity and transportation access, while avoiding impacts on the community’s single-family neighborhoods, which mostly lie outside the study area.

Categories
Up To Speed

Cincinnati a changed city since Reds’ last playoff run

Cincinnati a changed city since Reds’ last playoff run.

Those who haven’t been living under a rock for the past five years know that a lot has happened in Cincinnati’s center city during that time frame. On Sunday TBS’ announcers spoke highly of the transformation that has occurred in downtown Cincinnati since the Reds last playoff appearance in 2010, and with the eyes of the baseball world focused squarely on the city this evening, it seems as though the nation will get a front row seat to that progress. More from the Associated Press:

Less than two years ago, little more than a giant parking lot occupied the half-mile between the stadiums of the Cincinnati Reds and Bengals along the Ohio River.

After more than $600 million in new development between the two stadiums, there are now six distinct bars and restaurants, a popular riverfront park and high-end apartments that are touted as being “Cincinnati’s premier live-work-play destination” and charge rent in the thousands…A few blocks over is a new $322 million, 41-story office tower that’s the tallest building in the city, and a 20-minute walk away is the trendy Over-the-Rhine historic district that used to be best known as a haven for crime and the site of the city’s 2001 race riots. Now dozens of bedraggled buildings in the district have been renovated into popular bars and restaurants and a once crime-prone park has undergone a $48 million makeover to become one of the city’s best venues for concerts, outdoor movie viewings and flea markets.

Categories
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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