organsnyder

Surely they meant 18,550 10 sqft units?

It's especially amusing/aggravating to see them trying to align themselves with the progressive urbanist crowd. Replacing antique stores with housing is a progressive win. I love those stores, but my shopping experience shouldn't come at the expense of housing.

Hotel desks are desks not assigned to any specific individual. Spectrum already has them in many offices (when I worked for Spectrum I'd use them occasionally when I was at another location for meetings), but I'm assuming they'll be expanding them quite a bit to accommodate workers that are primarily WFH.

Not nearly as showy, but there is already a skywalk connection over Ottawa that connects to everything on the DT skywalk system.

It looks like a cruise ship.

Thanks for posting the pic. I kept meaning to stop and take some, but I don't walk that way anymore since I work from home. West Garfield is a really cool piece of infill: it occupies space formerly taken by part of a crumbling church parking lot. The church building is still there (I think it's casting the shadow in the lower-right), and they share the remaining parking lot plus plenty of on-street parking on Jefferson. I've been wondering if there is an "East Garfield" in the works. There's another unused parking lot on Burton next to Korean Grace CRC (former Burton Heights CRC) that could be similarly developed, I think.

When my office was in the Blue35 building, I was struck by how little activity there was in the Cooley building. Even the library (or at least what I'm assuming was the library, visible on the ground floor) rarely had anyone in it. Apart from the lack of activity, we're not losing much of value:

Based on my experience with New Hotel Mertens' Ninth Street Philly steaks popup concept (as well as their traditional fare and, well, everything they do), that poutine is gonna be incredible.

I'm the only person I know under 40 that subscribes to a print newspaper (we subscribe to two: GR Press and NY Times). The GR Press is pretty worthless at this point, with a smattering of local content at least two days old (not only do they only deliver three days a week, they must also have a print deadline of 3pm or something). The NY Times is printed in Detroit, and I rarely see a deviation from their typical 4am delivery time. The GR Press should have no problem maintaining their normal late morning Tuesday/Thursday and early morning Sunday delivery schedule. I'm surprised that Walker plant has survived this long. I'm guessing a lot of its output was contract jobs rather than newspapers (I recall that being a big part of its intended purpose back when it was built). I can't imagine who would want to buy the building now.

I can't imagine that vandalism was the cause, unless they were underinsured or something. Even with restaurants opening back up, I have a hard time seeing how they'd make it without the normal downtown office worker crowd.

That restaurant used to be exceptional. But the last couple of times I was there (for the brunch buffet) it was really run-of-the-mill—downright bad for the price. That parcel plus the one on Fulton would make quite the property.

Not surprised. It was an old-style mall theater that couldn't profit off of complementary neighboring businesses (like Studio C does with the businesses it either leases space to or owns).

Some restaurants seem to be doing well: for instance, Amore said on their Facebook page that this past weekend was their most successful in the ten years they've been open. I'm not sure how the economics compares to normal times for these businesses, but many seem to be adapting successfully. This crisis is an order of magnitude more disruptive than anything in recent memory, but I think it is demonstrating that the most successful businesses are able to adapt and survive—perhaps even thrive—under unexpected circumstances. Of course, it's possible that many of these restaurants are merely staunching the bleeding and will have to fold eventually, but I think that some of them are truly managing to thrive.

The branding has been like that for at least five years, IIRC (I worked there from 2015-2018). The delivery side (Spectrum) is blue and payer (Priority) is green. My team at Spectrum worked on projects for both, and we'd refer to them as "blue", "green", or "teal" (combined). When I worked at 25 Ottawa, the big logo on the building was for a financial company that occupied less than 20% of the building. So those logos are definitely more for marketing than to identify which employees work there. My hunch (no insider info, not even outdated) is that we'll see more of a marketing push for Priority in the future. There's simply more room for them to grow (especially on the east side of the state); it's already basically impossible to be anywhere in the GR area and not see a Spectrum logo somewhere in your frame of vision.

Videoconference pro-tip: Put the meeting on your secondary/tertiary monitor (you have multiple monitors, right?) so you're looking straight into the camera when you're doing something else.

Wise move. This is no joke. Glad to hear they're paying their employees during the closure.

We might have ridden together on occasion: I was also a SL rider, from 2015 through mid-2018 (until I got a WFH position and stopped commuting). I would usually go in early morning (occasionally as early as 5:30am, usually a little later) and go home 4~5pm. Burton was my stop. Your experience matches mine: buses were packed around rush hour, especially when GRPS and GRCC were in session (seeing how many GRPS kids need to be catching a bus at 6am to get to school on time was eye-opening for me). AFAIK, the buses bunching up isn't intentional, but rather due to congestion—the leading bus is running late, while the trailing bus is "on time". Afternoon traffic absolutely destroys on-time performance, with the main choke points being Medical Mile and Wealthy from Jefferson to Division. I'd love to see more commuter transit catch on here. Enabling low-car lifestyles is as important (if not more) than no-car, IMHO.

March 12 works for me as well. Count me in!

March 5 is a Thursday. Is it Tuesday, 3/3 or Thursday, 3/5?

Not bad at all. Thinking back to when it was a parking lot that fit about seven cars, poorly.

They're only in a small part of the Century building. Most of it is offices for a janitorial company (IIRC).

Agreed. This reminds me of the temporary walls put up at malls and airports while storefronts are under construction.

My ADU project (quite a bit larger, but still...) was over $200k. Construction ain't cheap, especially in a seller's market. And no, we're not anticipating recouping the investment (if it can be called that) any time soon.

Pretty sure the author knows his own address. :-D The city assigns a new street number for the ADU. For our ADU, the ADU is house number 2063, compared to 2061 for the main house. 535 Shirley is the new ADU address, with 537 being the house number for the main house. The ADU doesn't show up in the assessing parcel search on the city site, which is why 535 Shirley isn't listed.

I'm going to start pasting this graphic whenever anyone complains about traffic.