pedestrian

My company has been working with Holder on this project from the beginning, and while it may have had some retail at one point, the final version has no retail. It has a leasing office and a business center on the ground floor, but no retail.

Assembly Station will have no retail, only apartments.

Columbia City Council emails: [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] I'm going to cc: all of them on my email.

I think people have embraced the term "village" for 5 points much too literally. It's location certainly isn't like a village. It has two major through roads and is right at the edge of downtown and USC. It's mostly a collection of bars and restaurants, and the whole place turns into a party Thursday through Saturday nights when USC is in session, hardly village-y. I think 5 points is one of the more urban feeling places in Columbia. The only thing I see that resembles a village are the low-rise buildings. It may have been a village at the edge of town when it started, but it's role has changed. I say this only to agree with what several other people have already said: people/merchants in 5 points need to embrace height (within reason, no 20 story buildings obviously) especially if it brings a parking garage.

I had an idea the other day that doesn't involve the Innovista, per se, but it does involve that area, so I'll post it here. Maybe other people have mentioned this before, but I think it'd be a great idea to bury the train tracks running through downtown that are partly parallel to Huge and cross Gervais in the Vista. A great section of these tracks is already in a "tunnel," albeit an exposed tunnel. All we'd have to do is put a top on the tunnel. Then, we'd have a linear park running roughly from Blossom all the way to Huge near Elmwood. I've looked at the masterplan slides for the Innovista, and I don't think it'd interfere with anything. I think it would be a great place for little cafes and that type of stuff, benches, trees, etc. It could even be tied into the Greenway. On a side note, I think the southern end at Blossom would be a great place for a new train station, if long-distance passenger trains ever became popular again. Imagine the view of walking south along this new park and having this big train station at the end. It'd be kind of like driving down Main St with the Capitol in the distance.

I reread a lot of different threads yesterday, and I can't remember in which thread or who mentioned this, but a while ago, somebody mentioned the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Coincidentally, I'm half way through this book right now, and it's making me think about the Innovista. I was wondering what other people who have read the book think about the Innovista. A couple things concern me, for example, having an entire neighborhood of a city built at one time (basically, I know it's going to spread out over many years) and being the same age, and also having these grassy "park" areas in the center of most of the blocks. I'm no expert on any of this; I'm just comparing some of the book with the Innovista. Thanks.

Both of these are in Columbia, SC. This first picture is of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral at night. This second one is in Elmwood Cemetery.