83alphaunder

Fantastic find! I love the flybys and oh how much I would kill for that view when I woke up in the morning! Anyways by the flybys it looks like the vue will be only a little shorter than hearst.

Charlotte Plaza isn't on College and Trade... Its on College and 4th. I think we are all referring to the omni hotel...

The spirit square plan seems to be much larger than we originally thought it would be. It gives mixed use a whole new name for Charlotte. 500,000 square feet of office space in a 15-story tower. 40,000 to 60,000 square feet of shops and restaurants. 100 to 125 apartments or condominiums. 150,000 square feet for the new library. A boutique hotel. 1,000 to 1,200 parking spaces. The thing that excites me most about this is its multiple uses and the fact that hopefully it will orient both towards college and tryon. I'm thinking that it would have to mostly orient towards college, due to the old church and fox and hound. There are a few things that I hope happen because of this project. Hopefully we can get a decently substantial hotel, maybe we can dream for more than 150 rooms, unlike the hotels we have been attracting lately. I also hope we go more towards apartments than condos, I imagine that will be the case due to the fact charlotte hasn't yet exhausted the apartment market. I also look forward to the day when there will be bars and restaurants on both sides of college st. I think this project, the winter garden/bofa/ritz, epicenter, the founders hall renovation, and the opening up of the omni will create a fantastic stroll district in the future. The only thing I don't like about this plan is the fact that the new library will be no larger than the old library. The old library was 157k and this one will be 150k, I was hoping for closer to 225k honestly. Another thing, 500,000 seems awfully massive for a 15 story building, without taking up way too much room.

Circle Southend has an ugly prefab elevator shaft up, looks like we're about to see some verticle movement. You usually don't actually see prefab elevator towers, usually they are at least cinderblock or poured in place concrete.

Actually you are not going crazy. It has been moving. They are completing the curve of the amenities deck if you look at the webcam. However they are not working on the tower itself. We got another few weeks before all he problems get resolved on the tower.

Um..... Maybe not what you have expected, I don't know how you can say "we." This is what I expected, charlotte is a smaller undervalued and underappreciated market and will continue to be so until we do something groundbreaking. Michael Kors and GEOX, I don't think thats bad at all. Honestly Charlotte needs more (actually more than none) niche districts with locally started boutiques, not pretentious single merchandise stores from LA and NYC. Whats wrong with boutiques that carry everything you can think of? Luxury Retail at a suburban mall doesn't make or break a city, not having prada or A/X (barf) is not going to bring us down as a city. I think we should shift our retail focus: 5 points and central and thomas in Plaza Midwood Camden in Southend, Brevard in downtown the Winter Garden and the Founders Hall Redo Wachovia's 50k sq feet of retail Epicentre Elizabeth Ave. Providence Rd around Cherokee. We need shopping streets, not shopping malls.

I've been seeing it for the past month or two whenever I need to go up to the University Area (the closer Trader Joes to downtown) It is pretty large.

I'll PM you the info I can get, I'm not sure that they are really making plans with the space yet but October is the perfect time to have a private event there, as only the two towers will still be U/C and Epicenter should already be silencing the critics.

The rentable space is the top floor of the center building. Its mostly outside, with a bar/convered area in the center. I believe its simply called roof terrace or something like that. Ghazi/ The Bar Management group owns it and I don't think you'll be able to rent it out until around June.

I actually goofed on the massing graphic, I appologize, here is the corrected one. Yellow=Condotower RedishPink=Office Tower Blue=Hotel.

Yellow represents the condo tower in the massing diagrams, and the "residential lobby" in the siteplan. Pinkishpurple represents the elevators. The walk ups are just 4 townhomes, but there is a seperate residential aspect to this project.

there are three towers. Residential spans the light rail side Hotel is on the front part of the complex facing South Blvd The Office tower, in all its glory, spand the entire Carson Blvd Side fo the building At least thats how I interpret the site plan and massing diagrams.

2inthePink is not going to be very happy, maybe they'll add a hole in the top of the building just for him. I dig the site plan, I don't like the mass of the building it seems a bit excessive, its unfortunately another charlotte "superblock." I kind of get the idea that there will be some nice curves on the office building, at least by the site plan and "carson station view."

There are entrances to the building on the Kings Side of the project, however I'm not sure that it is best buy or not as this building will house marshalls staples and best buy in a 2 floor stacked nature I believe. My question is are there any larger best buy signs than this because this one seems rather small compared to the target and homedepot signs.

So it appears they have added a 4th view of nascar hall of fame construction. There is now one that looks directly up to see how construction on Nascar Plaza itself is going.

The pix were taken a week+ ago, and yes they are at least shooting for March 19th, but the website doesn't even have a date for opening on it so we'll see.

whisky river sneak peak! and yes guys the sign is neon thankfully!

Thats what I had thought as well. Seems to me that if catalyst, with similar sized floorplates can be built 4-5 days per floor then 210 trade could definately go faster than 8 days. If they are taking 8 days per floor they better be working 7 days a week, or that will translate to a floor virtually every 2 weeks.

Not sure if this has been mentioned before but I heard from a buddy that Tuscan has dropped Duo. I'm sad to see it go, but I never thought it would have much of a following, modernism/minimalism can get very redundant when done in large numbers, especially when everyone of the condos looks exactly the same.

I too have notice this, and all I can think when I see people pushing around the carts is, don't these people realize how silly they loook pushing a shopping cart around a mall?

I don't know if anyone has noticed but they have hung some windows on the Bank of America Facing Side of Catalyst around the 3rd and 4th floors, Pretty exciting!

Now instead of functional Pipe Foundry, we'll just have abandoned industrial waste for a couple years, JOY!

Its the Central Avenue Bridge, Its also the best place to take a pano, it makes charlotte look very big thanx to the Blake and the Government buildings, but nobody ever shoots panos here. HINT HINT.

I dropped by Founders Hall at lunch and took way too long and studied the model very very closely. I noticed that there is a lot of information lost by the rendering and the pictures of the model. There is so much lost that people seem to be automatically discounting the design of this building. There is actually a whole lot going on. The building is much more than just a rectangle folks, its actually quite interesting. Its hard to tell from the photographs and the rendering but the there are cut outs at the top of the tower where the top "natural area" is actually outside. The Natural Areas themselves are actually set into the structure a bit breaking up the complete rectangle feel. Then the curtain juts like a fin out the distance that the natural area is set in to make it look like a complete rectangle, this feature is represented in white. I also represented the curved wall at the corner, but I don't know how easy it is to see. Another interesting feature of note is the fact that at least 25 % of the towers mass seems to canteliever over a central point above the base and the wintergarden.

I think this was mentioned before but Neimens and Saks in the same mall, in a market the size of charlotte, that is business suicide. It would put both stores of of business, or kill Neimens. Even though I believe Neimens is on a level above saks, it doesn't have the name recognition Saks does. Lets list a couple names, and see if they have both names. Lennox Square: Nope, King of Prussia: No, Fashion Island: No, South Coast Plaza: No. Tyson Corners: No Biltmore Fashion Park: No Woodfield: No Of the most luxurious, largest, and most well known malls in the US, I can only think of three malls that has both, the Galleria in Houston, Somerset Collection in Troy, MI, and Cherry Creek Shopping Center in Denver. Atlanta has them accross the street from eachother but not in the same mall. I could be wrong, but even if there are others, I guarantee you can't find any charlotte sized markets that have a mall with both.