virginia pe
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Posts posted by virginia pe
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29 minutes ago, walmartjamesbond said:
Also, thinking about this.. with a four lane highway going through Craney Island and what would be amazing highway access. This is the PERFECT location for a future mega airport. I read an article about it before but the island is self is about as big as Atlanta’s whole airport.
Many Many years down the road, rebuild the airport out there. Something like Denver did with the old Stapleton airport. Demolish ORF and build well needed infrastructure.
You even have the prime location for the Tide, Amtrak, or a new private regional rail service.
Just a thought for when ORF can’t handle the traffic in 50+ years.
Craney Island is not just a vacant plot of land. It is a vital asset for the Virginia Port Authority. It provides 2500 acres of long-term disposal area for material dredged from the channels and ports in the Hampton Roads area. Without Craney Island, VPA would have to spend millions to dispose of dredge spoils offshore, including considerable time and expense for environmental permitting each time they need to dredge some portion of Hampton Roads harbor. VPA is much more important to the Virginia economy than ORF. I don’t see VPA giving up Craney Island.
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3 hours ago, mintscraft56 said:
It does not seem like thats the reason behind our police department's failure to meet the needed amount of officers. Its either, they dont advertise enough, people dont care (which seems crazy to say but is more obvious when you take a look at the big picture), or we are just not funded enough as a city to maintain a good police force with equal pay, good training, and benefits.
And it really shows, because our crime rate (as said before) is 8th worst on the rise in the United States among Major cities.Technically, the news article you posted provides the homicide rate, not the crime rate. The crime rate could be different. I don't know if the article reporting on the homicide rate, not the crime rate, makes Norfolk look better or worse.
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Here is the real reason Scope cannot be renovated - the buttresses:
For a few years, Norfolk officials have discussed the possibility of renovating and expanding the capacity of the arena, which can hold up to 13,600 people and was built in 1971. In 2017, Norfolk asked the Oak View Group to explore the idea of adding around 5,000 seats.
"We looked at it hard," Rhamstine said.The study unearthed a major construction roadblock – because of the way the Scope roof was built, it would be prohibitively difficult to to maneuver construction equipment between the top and the surrounding buttresses. The cost estimate for renovations ended up being at least $200 million or more, Rhamstine said.
https://www.pilotonline.com/inside-business/article_04cef438-3a03-11e9-8f04-f383430ceea9.html
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Is it possible that it is not the casino operating license that is holding it up? As NFK pointed out, this project involves substantial waterfront pier removal, wetlands restoration/management along a navigable waterway. All of these require permits from Department of Environmental Quality, the Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Coast Guard, and a myriad of other state and federal agencies. All of these take time, and the Norfolk Building Inspector cannot issue a building permit without all of the necessary permits in hand. Ironically, it could be the City of Norfolk is holding up its own project, but their hands are tied.
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6 hours ago, vdogg said:
Does Zoom not exist anymore? No reason to cancel this.
No, Zoom is not appropriate for this meeting. Zoom is great for penny-ante meetings like weekly status reports at work. Zoom barely works for City Council meetings. When you are trying to sell someone on a development plan worth half a billion to a billion dollars ($1,000,000,000), you want to be there live. You want to be able to look them in the eye and read their body language while you are making your presentation. You want to go to lunch with them before the presentation and have a few drinks after. Zoom doesn't work for that. Zoom would merely be a rehashing of the PDF proposals that have been posted on this forum.
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The 13News story says this project will take 16-18 months to complete. There are no buildings, just an open park with some fabric shelters. Four hours after EJ_Lewis posted this article, varider posted on the 400 Gravity thread. The Breeden Companies say they will build a six-story apartment building in 22 months. I must be missing something.
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Here's a comment from Bob Molinaro, Virginian-Pilot columnist, From September 10, 2021:
Musical chairs: With the Big 12 about to absorb three schools from the American Athletic Conference, there will be more rumblings among excitable ODU fans for the Monarchs to ditch C-USA and join East Carolina, Navy, Temple, South Florida, et al. Getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren’t we? First, ODU football needs to make itself more attractive to a potential suitor.
He has a point.
Does anyone know what the financial penalty would be for ODU to leave C-USA?
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9 hours ago, carolinaboy said:
Compare those 2 photos to a current photo of the same area and it will show that Norfolk has made tremendous strides over the last 40 years improving the urban density and development despite the prevalent feeling that it hasn't.
Unfortunately, in the photo EJ_Lewis posted, our tallest building, Dominion Tower, is barely visible. It's there, but you have to look very hard to see it.
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7 hours ago, urbanlife said:
Norfolk, 1996. This was the year I graduated high school, and this was the downtown I grew up with. This is what I thought downtowns just looked like, a street with some office buildings, another street with some old buildings, and a lot of surface parking lots. Looking at this photo with the city I grew up by, it really makes me sad how much of this city was lost to itself. When looking at this photo, it makes sense to plop a giant mall in that spot because it wasn't taking over anything of value anymore because that was already gone. Hopefully with replacing the mall, the street grid can be recreated and hopefully a new center of downtown could rise up from this.
I agree. Here’s a photo of the same area, about 20 years earlier, showing the same acres and acres of surface parking lots. The city tried to market that site to developers for decades, with no takers. When Taubman proposed an upscale mall for downtown, who can blame them for jumping at the opportunity. I agree that MacArthur’s time has come and gone, but at the time, it was the best option available.
Many thanks to NFKfloodcaptain. The best thing I got from his post on the MacArthur thread this week "When Replacing MacArthur Center, Double Down on Downtown’s Wins", was learning that NRHA has such a huge trove of historic photographs.
https://nrha.photoshelter.com/gallery-list
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After looking at EJ Lewis' photo of Main Street, I wondered what part of Main Street is shown. I found this photo of the Victoria Hotel on the Chrysler Museum website. https://chrysler.emuseum.com/objects/20165/victoria-hotel-east-main-street-september-3-1960. The website says the picture was taken looking east toward Church Street on Main Street from Commercial Place. If that is true, then the buildings shown in EJ's photo are now the BB&T Building and the Plume Lane Parking Garage.
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10 hours ago, vdogg said:
Obviously they’re trying to make the ball Park the centerpiece of the project. The hotel is designed to maximize views of the park. “Come watch the game and gamble while you’re at it”.
The Tides are scheduled to play only 60 home games in 2021. What is the tie-in for the other 80 percent of the year?
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1 hour ago, Urbanitetime said:
On a side note, do any of you believe this is really just an expansion of Downtown Norfolk, versus a creation of Midtown Norfolk? What does Midtown offer as far as services? Wouldn't a "Midtown" label ignore the geographic particulars of Norfolk as a whole?
Just thinking out loud. I am super excited about the happenings around here. Just wondering what you all think, when considering Norfolk as a whole.
Last June, there was some similar discussion about what to call this area - Midtown, Atlantic City , Fort Norfolk. Someone even suggested SoCo for South Colley. Look in the River Tower thread, towards the end of Page 13.
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On 4/16/2021 at 1:06 AM, urbanlife said:
I think there were a lot of buildings that were just fine, especially the commercial buildings.
On 4/`6/2021 at 01:40 PM, EJ_LEWIS said:
Yes I agree that many building demolished in this period were fine.
Even though many of the pre-1960s office buildings were structurally sound, it was often not economically feasible to continue to use them as office buildings. One big problem would have been air conditioning. I am not talking about the initial cost of the A/C equipment since the equipment would have been required for new construction as well as remodeling. The buildings were not insulated adequately for air conditioning, but that could be resolved by added insulation on the inside of the exterior walls and giving up a few square feet of floor area. The big problem was the ceiling heights were too low. There was not enough headroom to add air conditioning ductwork and modern lighting and hide it all with a new suspended ceiling. There was no feasible way to mitigate that problem. Another problem would have been the column layout. The construction materials and methods used back then limited column spacing to 20 to 25 feet. That was okay when everyone had individual offices, but as businesses transitioned into open offices and cubicle farms, the tenants demanded open, column-free office spaces. The older buildings could not compete.
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Dr. Chip Filer, the Norfolk City Manager, and Ronald Jackson, the Executive Director of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, addressed the inquiries and the BET program in Sunday's Virginia Pilot. You can disagree with what they are saying, but I don't think you can claim they are ignoring the residents or hiding from them.
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On 1/18/2021 at 10:54 AM, Norfolk757Kid said:
Oh yeah I understand that it's more complicated than me not wanting a shopping mall downtown (plus all the people the mall employs), but I'm just saying that it's possible that downtown could have rebounded and had its renaissance without the mall as well, just would have happened differently. I think it's significant that most of those high end retailers are not local businesses.
I have to go with Baobabs on this one. Looking at it in the context of the 1980s when MacArthur was developed, it was the right call. Yes, downtown would have developed without the mall, but when? The mall site was cleared as part of the demolition frenzy of the 1960s. For over 20 years, it was a vacant 17-acre parking lot. Yes, there was a street grid, but the streets only served to separate the parking lot in one block from the parking lot on the next. The city and NRHA tried to interest developers to develop the site, either as one megaproject for the entire 17 acres, or as individual projects. There was some interest, but nothing ever progressed enough to put a shovel in the ground. Then Taubmann came to town and said they would build an upscale shopping mall and put those 17 acres back on the tax rolls. It was hard to argue “downtown will develop on its own without the mall” after 20+years of frustration.
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15 hours ago, EJ_LEWIS said:
Here is a photo of Otter Berth in Downtown Norfolk 1980. Now the area is where the Wisconsin is docked and all of the industrial buildings and parking are now expensive waterfront condos.
The Otter Berth is where the Sprit of Norfolk is docked, between Waterside and Town Point Park. This used to be called the Banana Pier. (I don't know why.) Nonetheless, it is a very interesting picture. Thanks for sharing.
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On 11/8/2020 at 6:00 PM, baobabs727 said:
Well since they’ve always wanted to build an apt. tower, I wonder if that land would support an apt/hotel tower? That’d be one tall, heavy Bldg.
The land near the ground surface cannot support a high-rise building. All of the major high-rise buildings downtown are supported on piles. They piles are about 80 feet deep, and bear on a rock strata called the Yorktown formation. The Yorktown formation is probably capable of supporting a high-rise hotel tower.
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Most elevators have a penthouse where the motors and the control equipment is located. It is much smaller than the overall building footprint, and does not count as a floor. There might be some HVAC equipment in the penthouse as well.
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Interesting. The elevations and renderings show a few retail spaces, but the ground floor plan appears to show parking at that location.
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I moved to Virginia Beach in 1985. I recall going to Granby Mall occasionally on my lunch hour. Even in the middle of the day, it was like a ghost town. One of the reasons for the failure of Granby Mall was that, while they built an attractive pedestrian space, the improvements stopped at the threshold of the business there. They upgraded the mall, but they did not upgrade the businesses along the mall. It seemed like every other business along Granby Mall was a seedy bookstore. Walking the mall felt creepy (and lonely. No one else was there.) The department stores along the mall - Smith & Welton (now TCC Martin Building), Woolworth's (now TCC Stanley Walker Building), and Rices Nachman's (now Norfolk Utilities) - all withered away for lack of auto traffic. Keep in mind, there was not a lot of reason to go downtown if you did not want to go to Granby Mall. There was no TCC, no MacArthur Mall (it was just a vacant 17-acre parking lot), and the Hilton and Mariott weren't built yet either. On the other hand. Waterside had decent activity during the day, and a lot of activity in the evenings, especially in the summer.
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Could you do his job? No way for me.
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51 minutes ago, BeagleAccountant said:
On the agenda for the May 28th planning commission meeting are the vacation of multiple right of ways that are deemed necessary for the redevelopment of St. Pauls. It's good to see some forward movement on this project in this weird time of life in Norfolk.
http://norfolkcityva.iqm2.com/citizens/FileOpen.aspx?Type=1&ID=1339&Inline=True
It's hard to tell what's happening here, especially since north is to the right instead of the normal orientation with north pointing up. Comparing this map with Google Maps, it looks like they are re-creating more of an orthogonal grid. Freemason Street will extend to the east across St. Paul's Blvd, and Church street will be extended to the south, ending at St. Mary's Basilica, which is almost all the way to the ramp from the Berkeley Bridge.
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2 hours ago, hroads01 said:
From 1 to 6 steel girders in a matter of a few hours.
I don't mean to be to picky, but just to keep the terminology straight, the vertical members are columns. Girders are the horizontal members that go between the columns, and then beams frame between the girders. The columns are probably two stories tall.
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3 hours ago, urbanfan said:
The only shovel ready site I see downtown is the large parking lot at Virginia Beach Blvd and Monticello. Large surface parking lot shovel ready to go.
Virginia Beach Blvd at Monticello may not be shovel-ready. I read somewhere that the site is badly contaminated. There used to be a coal tar to gas manufacturing plant there, and the waste products were poured out onto the ground. Somewhere in the past they covered the site with a clay cap to form an impervious barrier to keep rain water from running through the soil and leeching the contaminants into the ground water. That is why the site is elevated.
I could not find definite documentation that the site is contaminated, but this website has good information on manufactured gas plants and the contamination they cause: http://www.hatheway.net/index.html
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Norfolk International Airport
in Norfolk
Posted
It's a good idea, but a ramp to get cars up to the second level, and another one to get back down to ground level would take a lot of real estate. I don't think there is nearly enough room.