beergeek

Hopefully he learns someday... Since I'm on a roll posting off-topic links, look at this year's Pulitzer Prize for photography and try not to cry. Be sure to click on "next" to see the whole set.

Here's an article everybody on this board ought to read. Some more than others. . .

Absolutely. But what until then? And therein lies the crux of our problem...

Is it lonely up there on your pedestal? ;-) The original site was built in the late 1800s IIRC - parking wasn't an issue then. And if SH up and left like Metro, this forum would be on fire with "why ditch downtown" complaints. >14000 employees...all paying city taxes...you want to loose that? You can't have it both ways. And if you think SH should have just left it up to employees to fight with GRCC/GVSU/etc for parking in the area...well, we never would be having this discussion, because it never would have grown to the size it is now. People are the scarcest resource in healthcare right now...not CT scanners or PET machines. If you can't attract top-notch talent, you don't have a destination hospital, which in turn means you don't have a new cancer center/towers complex/children's hospital. I'm not saying I agree with it all, and I agree that the exterior c/should have been done better...but thinking that all those employees are just going to "find" a parking space is naive.

As I just said in another thread, most employees do NOT park on-site. Two questions for you: 1 - Why should SH employees not be "allowed" to park on-site whereas all the other businesses downtown have their own garage (or an agreement with a nearby garage)? What about St. Mary's? Bridgewater? The 5/3 building (whatever it's called)? Because it's a business that supports a large number of visitors, the employees have to find a way to get to work? 2 - It's a recruitment/retainment issue as well. Selfishly, SH would like to steal all the best nurses from Metro, St Mary's, etc. A lot of people are put off instantly by the off-site parking. Even if it's not in competition with the other GR hospitals, but say with Muskegon, or Holland. In a country already short 1mil nurses, it's a double-edged sword to do something good for the environment/city while also hurting your ability to acquire top-notch talent (or any talent with a license as the case may be).

I believe the majority of parking for the forthcoming Children's Hospital will be at LH/Towers complex. The parking at-site at the hospital will be for ED only (and some physician parking) AFAIK. I don't feel attacked, don't worry. And you can feel free to bash SH all you want (I've done my share). My continued grievance is that form needs to follow function, not the other way around. Could Spectrum have raised another half a mil to do a better job disguising the parking? Abso-friggin-lutely, no argument from me there. But to suggest that they could have done without the parking ramps on a hope and a prayer of some sort of transit system (as some have hinted) is ridiculous. As it stands right now, I'd guess 90%+ of the people walking around are visitors or employees trudging in from the satellite parking lots. It's a chicken and the egg thing....I can't see SH investing $$$ or real estate hoping that light rail comes to Pill Hill. And light rail isn't going to come up the hill unless people have places set aside for it. Who has to go out on a limb first? Changing subjects, do we know where the tunnel from Lemmen Holton is connecting to the main hospital? What building & at what level?

Yes, because those silly cancer patients, or families with children in the ICU, should welcome the opportunity to park 2 miles away and ride the bus in. I am constantly amazed at the "ground level transparency" mantra around here without any consideration for use of the buildings. High-rise condos don't serve the same purpose as Cancer centers. These buildings weren't created to beautify the skyline (or to give the UPers something to gripe about), they were built with a purpose in mind. You might be singing a different tune about accessable parking if your child was in a car accident and in the ICU and you needed to get to the hospital ASAP.

I am. I've donated and money comes out of my check every pay period as well. So I guess I get to beotch about design, eh? FWIW, rleuthueser, I agree with you. These boards here are a great source of information, but the constant complaining is starting to annoy me.

Thought I spied the tower crane today...but it was just pieces of the boom to another crane laying on the ground. There is a bunch of steel on-site today that wasn't there yesterday, though.

Nevermind, I'm an idiot. . .

You'll love this one...both exits from I-196 at College will be closed from April 2nd until fall As if traffic around the hospital wasn't bad enough...now everyone will have to get off at Fuller or Ottawa...oh, wait, can't do that either. Good thing it's not usually urgent to get to the hospital. Great planning.

Yep. "The westbound I-196 off-ramp to Ottawa Avenue is closed for approximately two weeks. The posted detour is westbound I-196 to Lane Avenue, exit at Lane Avenue, turn left on Lane Avenue, proceed to the eastbound I-196 on-ramp and exit at Ottawa Avenue."

If I was designing the new Cancer Center & Children's Hospital, I would have made them a big concrete box (a la GRCC) and saved a ton of $$$, and in turn provided more care to underserved populations. I think hospitals should get a pass on design if they're trying to save money (you don't need me to tell you how outrageous health care costs are nowdays). Personally, I don't think these designs are all that bad. Could they have been better? Absolutely. But they could have been a lot worse, or a lot more expensive. You can't have affordable medical care and iconic buildings with invisible parking garages, 100% street-level transparency, walkability, etc. Which is more important for the community? Can anybody out there guesstimate how much $$ would be saved if the HDVCH skipped the spire and the fancy exterior work and just built a concrete box? Are we talking $1-2M? $10M?!?

OUCH! Did you go to Butterworth? They're replacing the floors in the ED right now so half the ED is shut down (including the ED's CT scanner) - it's a mess right now. The trauma bay closes next week, so if anyone here was planning on getting in a car accident, I would wait 3 weeks.

The new Buddy's Pizza & Dogs on Fuller near Michigan (the old BK) opened today.

You mean like Taps downtown? Sports bar my a**.

There were some, umm, issues with the house in Wildflower Creek. Considering it's been on the market for 6+ months now, the builder was unwilling to negotiate on price...market's too soft to play that game. We made an offer on it the day after seeing it; methinks the builder thought we had our little hearts set on it. After a few rounds of negotiation I think he tried to call our bluff on our final offer...'cept we weren't bluffing. Also had a very negative experience with the realtor. We're moving right next to the high school, by the corner of Johnson and Kraft.

Great question, as an employee I haven't heard hardly a peep about what will happen to the older parts of the hospital. Oncology services at Blodgett will be shut down in a year or so, and brought over to Butterworth. There's been some talk about moving the Burn Center to Butterworth as well, but that's been on the drawing board for years and years. I know our IT department (think of what the Spectrum Health IT abbreviation is!) is having major headaches concerning the west building right now. As the hospital moves towards more and more electronic records, bar coded-meds, etc, it's painfully evident how inadequate the older parts of the hospital are. Lack of ethernet ports for internet connectivity, limited wifi strength due to the thick/heavy walls; shoot, there aren't even enough electrical plugs to run all the computers they'll eventually need. The rooms are tiny (about 1/4 of what the Heart Center's are). Will you settle for pure conjecture? The West building is on its last legs. Currently, it houses the nutrition department (where all the food for the patients is made), outpatient surgery beds, neonatal ICU, and 2 med-surg floors. The NICU will go to the new HDVCH. The rest could easily get rolled into what will be open space in the center building once all peds services are gone (I believe center bld was constructed in 1980s?). Then, bye-bye west building, and the next big area of focus gets built on the existing site. Maybe solid organ transplant (something still pretty much limited to U-M)?? Neurosciences (copying St. Mary's)?? Who knows!

Just have to share the good news...signed a purchase agreement on my first house last night! It means I'll be leaving downtown but it's the end of crappy landlords! My wife and I will be moving out to Caledonia towards the end of April...if anybody knows of any good restaurants/hangouts in the area it would be appreciated (already noticed the Sam's Joint).

Are you sure about that? The one in Caledonia looks pretty new, in a newer strip mall. Certainly seemed less than 10 years old.

That's for patients, visitors, and employees. Plus there's employee parking in a church out on Crescent, plus the big surface lot between the GVSU Cook center and McDonalds, and a huge employee lot out east on Michigan, between Fuller and Plymouth (I believe where the bowling alley used to be?).

It was the club over at American Seating Park...lasted 6months maybe. They painted "The Stack" in big letters along the smoke stack. Never went myself...but I know they had 20' projection screens with crazy videos playing and loud techno music. Not my scene whatsoever.

Did they have any good beers, i.e., something not pale yellow and fizzy?

$%*#! Really? I never knew that. And "event parking" is a crock as Ellis thinks there's an "event" every night of the week after 5pm.

Bingo! And in that respect GRDad's pictures, while impressive, are misleading. That doesn't mean that there isn't too much parking downtown (or at least too much real estate devoted to parking), though. My continued greivance is that if I want to run downtown to shop or grab food to go, I'm sure as heck not going to pay $7 to park in a ramp for 10 minutes, and I honestly can never find any street parking. So in that respect, there is a parking problem. One that light rail would fix beautifully, I might add.