SCLA

I absolutely agree; your analogies to other roads in town (Independence, Monroe, etc.) should make it obvious how allowing retail to spread out, even in the noble attempt to create that New Urbanist mix of residential & retail, can really ruin an area if all the implications aren't thought through fully. I'm not an urban planner, but I think relying on that basic premise of nodes & passages, where to cluster things and where to not, can be an invaluable philosophy to design from.

Like everybody else nearby, I sure would like to know what's gonna happen w/ Morningside Village........so, I just flat-out e-mailed one of the developers. (Sorry, Rob, if you're lurking on this site & for some reason didn't want me speaking out-of-turn, but my impression was it's no secret.) To my surprise he says the future is totally up in the air; no hint of what's next whenever the economy gets more promising. I say "to my surprise" b/c it seems that, after all the work done to re-develop the site so far --- clearing, grading, streets, C&G, etc. --- SURELY it'll move ahead as planned. But no hint of that at all. I just find it too hard to believe it'll never move ahead as planned, albeit a couple years behind schedule. As if I know more than the developers do! I guess my greatest concern is that it'll get sold off & what we get will be a very disappointing version of what we thought. But they got the rezoning based on a very strictly-defined Site Plan; they can't do that....can they?? Note to Morningside neighbors: keep a close eye on progress when it finally comes --- as Reagan said, trust but verify.

Thanks for sharing the rezoning link to this. Personally, I rather like the idea that's presented: a higher, better use than the rundown stuff there now; an up-to-the-street urban face; internal hidden parking, w/ other street parking on the interior-n'hood side. Of course it remains to be seen what it'll really look like once the elevations etc. are completed and shared; the devil is in the details. I hafta say, I hope it looks better than the Eliz. Court project next door to it @ the corner of Firefighter & Weddington......I don't take any pleasure out of criticizing its design quality, but really, to me it's a very good example of a developer who either doesn't have the talent, won't pay for it, or simply could care less about design quality, but jumps on the bandwagon of some semblance of the NTD look just to cram in more DU/acre. I find it hard to believe that many people are attracted to staring out your back window across to your neighbor's vinyl-clad garage doors. Yuck. About the mixed-use aspect: I would suggest that maybe it's a good thing to not have it included; all those units can only help make the corner of 7th & Pecan more revitalized w/ a short walk or drive a couple blocks away. Mixed-use is great, sure, but oughta be considered on a case-by-case basis; if it only serves to further dilute commercial & office attention away from a node like 7th & Pecan, just b/c every new project "should" include it, then I think it's a negative. Assuming Charlotte comes out of this recession healthy and growing sustainably again, I can foresee that node of Elizabeth becoming really great as far as pedestrian & car-friendly, I mean even more so than it has been on its own, maybe with some minor traffic engineering improvements. It could really one day be as great as Virginia-Highlands [in Atlanta].

Glad to hear THAT! From what we'd heard, putting 2 + 2 together, sounded like it'd never get built. We'd love to be able to put one of our new Commonwealth Park signs @ his location there (once construction is finished so it's not damaged), partic. since he was a major contributor to the sign project. That next strip down CW Ave, just east of Briar Creek Rd to Woodland, is gonna be one of the next micro-'Big Thing' spots........with the two problem hotels getting shut down in May (by order of the Feds), we're hoping a decent developer will recognize the value of the 'Corridor of Crap' in front of WTVI while a lot of it's up for sale now & the price is still a steal. May require some creativity to partner w/ Storm Water Services (b/c of the floodplain issue along ther creek), making some sort of mixed-use / open space-greenway collaboration. That'd be cool.

Uh, yeah, mh108909 coulda taken the words right outa my mouth........my sentiments exactly........when I saw that Observer story & rendering for the 12th & Poplar site I had the same "Huh??" reaction........I better try to be diplomatic here; no telling who may be lurking .........but hey, if you're McDonalds why bother to go to all that tedious expense & trouble of reinventing your cheeseburger just because it worked fine for the first customer, right?

Yeah, Post's stick-built suburban-style developments, as far as the buildings, are nothing to get too excited about, but when they got into the steel-frame urban market in recent years I'd say most of their stuff is not bad (could do a lot worse!). However the news IS worthy of excitement b/c of the landscaping they're famous for (head & shoulders above ANYthing @ non-Post properties). That's one aspect where the finished product usually falls short of the sexy renderings, when developers 'value-engineer' quality landscaping out of a project during design development....but I don't think Post will disappoint at all. As far as the brownstone comment, yeah, I too am jaded enough to expect a bit less in the details than the marketing would imply........the disappointing realities of lowest-common-denominator, inside-the-box design stack the deck against cool details (e.g. the granite curbs getting axed by the city in favor of cheaper-to-replace poured concrete). Cornelius did 'em all along their main street a coupla years ago; why can't Charlotte? (All about setting a precedent, probably.)

When I talked w/ a realtor involved w/ i29 a coupla weeks ago, he indicated they expect to have the last of the units pre-sold (or at least the amt. req'd. to begin construction) in February; project to begin immed. after that. Hopefully that'll happen. On the bigger picture, tho, maybe it's kinda a healthy thing that some of this mad pace of development is cooling off for a year or so.

REMINDER! Charlotte City Council votes tonight on tough new ordinance to clean up & regulate crime-ridden weekly-rate motels throughout Charlotte, including the two on Independence @ Briar Creek Road overpass. If you want to SHOW YOU CARE ABOUT OUR EASTSIDE NEIGHBORHOODS and can show up, your presence will be greatly appreciated!! 7:00 p.m. at the Government Center (big triangular beige stone building, btwn. 3rd & 4th @ S. Davidson).

Update on the nuisance hotels: Well-attended meeting this afternoon @ the Gov't. Center, of City Council's "Community Safety Committee".....lotsa important folks there --- Chief Stephens, media, etc. Several Commonwealth Park residents, as well as Morningside N'hood Assoc., had chance to speak passionately about our great n'hood & the criminal problems of these hotels. Committee strongly recommends this ordinance go forward for Council-wide approval on the 14th. Will prob. be a short blurb on WBTV Channel 3 tonite; also look for front-page Observer story this coming Monday. Again, if in any way you can attend City Council mtg. this Mon. Jan 14th @ 7:00 p.m. (council chamber, ground floor of Gov't. Center, S. Davidson btwn. 3rd & 4th), PLEASE COME! If you think policy-makers don't take notice when citizens care enough to show up, you're underestimating; they do!

There's now a website up for Morningside Village! Right now just a homepage with a lot of fluffy, generic 'realtor-speak', but you can sign up to receive updates. http://www.morningsidevillage.com/

Oh yeah, about Duo @ BC & Central: last I heard Tuscan was at an impasse w/ city b/c they're insisting there be connectivity thru the property from Central ave. to street behind it.....& I guess the numbers don't work if they hafta give up that amount of dirt to a new street. Just a layman's hearsay; that was many months ago, heard @ Merry Oaks N'hood Mtg......would really like to know the current status myself.

Yeah, I think one last-ditch call was put out to offer it to someone who'd move it, but to no avail. (Would've loved to have it myself, on the right lot!) Oh well.....at least good to see one of our sexy new projects is finally moving forward. Am thinking the current real estate slump is having a lot to do with foot-dragging among various projects. Thank goodness Morningside started demo before the slump hit! The one I'm perplexed about is i29 @ BC & Independence........J.R. Poore was supposed to have broken ground, like, 6 months ago --- BUT instead the EXACT same design was touted in The O's Next Big Thing about 2-3 months ago for another part of town (sort of around Optimist Park, if I remember correctly). BTW, if you care anything about improving Commonwealth Park by getting the crime-infested hotels along Indep., near BC overpass (on either side of shuttered IHOP), shut down & bulldozed, PLAN TO SHOW UP MON. JAN. 14th AT CITY COUNCIL MEETING.............they'll vote on new regulations that finally allow Code Enforcement & other authorities to have clout over these transient hotels in Charlotte. Buyer is waiting in the wings to snatch up that land for new mixed-use residential project on that site; hopefully a major improvement for the 'hood.

You won't easily find info on what the "normal" life expectancy is of a Willow Oak, b/c there are infinite variables; it's easier to say they reach a certain size. But generally, under ideal conditions, it's around 85-100 years for most of them; obviously, some impressive beauties will beat the statistics & still be around many more decades than that. If planted out in a yard, or just in the wild, they You won't easily find info on what the "normal" life expectancy is of a Willow Oak, b/c there are infinite variables; it's easier to say they reach a certain size. But generally, under ideal conditions, it's around 85-100 years for most of them; obviously, some impressive beauties will beat the statistics & still be around many more decades than that. If planted out in a yard, or just in the wild, they have a great chance of reaching old age; on the other hand if they were put in a street-tree planting with inadequate root space, poor soil, butchered by bad pruning, or a host of other stresses, they're commonly replaced within 30 years or so. Willow Oaks (Quercus phellos) are a different species than Pin Oaks (which more resemble Red Oaks) but are often called that. A certain kind of fungus, which seems to like Willow Oaks in particular, hollows out the insides of the buttress roots (the big ones that structurally hold the tree upright), & can work its way up into the trunk, without affecting the leafiness of the canopy (which gets its nutrients from the outside layers of the trunk anyway); hence, the toppled-over giants we see that surprise everybody b/c "they looked so healthy". I fear that this is gonna become a major issue in the coming decades across Charlotte, partic. in Myers Park, Eastover, Dilworth, etc. Trees are just like us --- they won't live forever --- so even though I LOVE big old shade trees & think they deserve lots of TLC, my feelings are tempered by the opinion that it often makes sense to 'start fresh' & let the new trees adapt themselves as they grow to a new equilibrium with whatever new buildings etc. they're near. Ideally, the tree canopy is being replaced all along.......young ones reaching "worthwhile" sizes as the great-grandpa ones are ready to get cut down.

About all those really big trees that were cut down at Morningside Village: yeah, I was pretty not-thrilled to see that too. Charming old houses can be, and often are, replaced with a few hours' push of a bulldozer followed by a few months of assembling 2x4s and Hardiplank..........trees like those are, simply, irreplaceable in the span of an adult's life. But at the same time, (like all the other signs I see of this carefully-observed project), they seem to know what they're doing with the trees they ARE saving. Most developers naively try to protect saved trees with orange fencing (if they even take that precaution) that's hopelessly close to the trunks; they seem to think if they keep equipment from nicking the treebark that's all they have to do. The real damage is from compaction of heavy equipment, vehicles, and piles of junk over the root zone; this is one of the few places where I see they are actually protecting that zone far enough out from the trunks to be effective. Where the fencing comes closer to the trees it's at the edge of a basement, where the roots would've been naturally constricted anyway as they grew over the years. My faith in Graham's process remains high. All the trees that WERE cut were only done out of necessity, I trust (it costs money to cut them down too)..........while it may be that in some cases a building footprint could be shifted here & there to accomodate a really extra-ordinary specimen, it's true what someone mentioned that grading is the real issue.......to make a smooth transition between Point A & point B, grades simply have to change slightly over a wide area, and it only takes 3 or 4 INCHES of either backfilling or undercutting (esp. w/ our heavy clay soils) to kill a tree over a year or two's time. This is the unfortunate downside of high-density. And while it's sad to know all the Maples along McClintock are gonna bite the bullet too, they really aren't great specimens. (If I recall correctly they're Silver Maples, which are kinda "trash trees" --- fast-growing, brittle, and mis-shapen.) Someone mentioned the replacements will be at least 18" diameter; perhaps they meant to say 8" (a tree that's 9" caliper size or bigger nearly always requires a huge crane to move them).....if indeed they put in 8" cal. trees, that's a very respectable size for a large-scale street tree planting; a commitment to re-greening the neighborhood with trees that size should make everybody confident this guy's interested in not trying to get by on the cheap. As an aside: anybody notice they've been taking bucketfuls of all those bricks & grinding 'em up in a hopper, then stockpiling it? Was curious about that (didn't think you could add it to soil and get proper compaction for building on top off).....but a neighbor [who was at the early n'hood presentation meetings] tells me the plan is to mix it into the new concrete sidewalks etc., so they already look 'aged' when they're poured instead of ugly raw-grey fresh concrete. Cool.

........not good news to report...... I just came from the Merry Oaks N'hood Assoc. meeting tonite; they were supposed to have Tuscan Devlpmnt. give a presentation about Duo@BC (the cool-looking condos "in the woods" at intersection of Central Ave & Briar Creek Rd........Tuscan cancelled a coupla hours before, b/c apparently, the city is insisting they want a through-street from Central to whatever's behind the property, and Tuscan says the project just won't work for them numbers-wise if they hafta do that --- so they're taking a step back & regrouping. I think connectivity's great but this sounds like a case of theoretically-good policy being mis-used. It's not even a case of the city protecting the neighborhood; the MONA has gone on record that they don't want the cut-through either. We were told it might even mean Tuscan just kills the project. Will just hafta watch and wait...........

Just curious: with all the flurry of attention gaining momentum around our P-M/Commonwealth/Central/Morningside area --- do y'all think the powers-that-be will push up the date earlier for our streetcar dream? (Assuming the 1/2-cent tax doesn't get the ax this November.) At the transit meeting last fall, when they made it a distant priority in the big transit picture, they threw out some sort of vague future date (2023, or something like that?). I find it hard to believe there wouldn't be more noise fighting for it in the next 5 years or so if the energy keeps building around here like it's doing now.

The website for the Briarcreek/74 condo project is up and running. It takes a second to load, but it is kinda cool. Under "Location" there are links to all the fun places in PM, Eliz, and NoDa. These units are pretty cool also, the roof terrace looks pretty big. There is no pricing on the site though. I guess we will find out. Us Commonwealth Park residents are generally quite pleased w/ this future project........the present zoning could've meant we'd see low-end retail/office space there, but developer went for re-zoning to do this. The rendering should be pretty accurate to what gets built, except that it should appear less monolithic in reality b/c the site topo dictates that the bldgs. will step down in about three parts, several feet at each section. (An improvement over this illustrated version, in my opinion.) Also, developer's not quite sure of color pallette yet. We're told pricing for ea. townhouse will be 280K to 320K. (I may be off by just a few thou + or - but I don't think so.)

About the proposed new condos @ Briar Creek Rd. & Independence: See the files page on our Google Group site here for a color rendering of the proposed condos that they gave us at the meeting on Monday: http://groups.google.com/group/CPNA?hl=en For anyone willing to sift thru all the comments, click on the first topic ("Indep & BC Zoning Update"); click on Files at the bottom of screen to see the scanned archit. rendering.

Yeah, there were several of us Commonwealth Park neighbors.......will add another post w/ more comments later today or Wed. after I get past a deadline. We scanned their architectural rendering, with their permission, & once someone else has posted it to our n'hood Google Group I'll add the link here. (Don't know how to, or if I can, attach a file itself to this forum.) I doubt there'll be any opposition to it; it was recieved pretty favorably. I generally feel like it's pretty cool architecture. Will prob. begin constr. around July or so.

Commonwealth Park is the neighborhood immed. adjacent to Commonwealth-Morningside's eastern edge........it includes the area from Briar Creek (the creek itself), across Briar Creek Road, over to Eastway Drive.....and from the north side of Independence Blvd. up to Central Avenue.....with Commonwealth Ave. & BC Rd. being the main arteries. Some of the streets are Carolyn, Pinecrest, Oakmont, Woodland, Goodwin, etc. Until we reclaimed this name from property plats from the 1940s, it was called by the city 'Briar Creek-Woodland'. Within the next few months nice historic signs are planned to be erected at major entrances to the neighborhood.

This is rather last-minute, but for anyone interested in the proposed condo project at the Briar Creek Rd. ramp at Independence, near Commonwealth Ave.: there is a meeting late this afternoon at 5:00 p.m., open to the public, between the developer seeking a rezoning of that vacant lot & the Planning Commission, in City Hall (the Gov't. Center; the triangular bldg. on S. Davidson btwn. 4th & Trade). The design they've shown looks like it'd be best described as "industrial-chic" style, much like the cool contemporary stuff that's been popping up in NoDa & further up Commonwealth. This is a chance to have your say in support of (or against) it, & understand the details more of this "gateway" project to Commonwealth Park & Commonwealth-Morningside.

Charlotte Native......thanks, this made me laugh out loud! I've always figured developers must think you can add another $10K to the house price by putting an 'e' at the end of a word. Heaven help us from any more nonsensical, pretentious British-sounding names. Or, they try instead for some romantic reference to a natural, rustic landscape feature......which of course the bulldozers efficiently obliterated along with all the good topsoil. My observation is that the subdivision name glorifies whatever they destroyed to make way for the garage-mahals.

Latest news is that the Philosopher's Stone (& I think Jackalope Jack's) is moving up Pecan to the other side of Independence, near Plaza-Midwood: The Central Ave./Thomas Ave./Commonwealth Ave. core. All of a sudden Commonwealth's becoming "the next cool 'hood" (of course, nothing's truly overnite; been quietly turning that way the last several years). Phil. Stn. is moving into the old Steeple church bldg.......do a seach for it on another thread.