John Hargrove

For the first time in at least a year, the Plaza towers are partially lit. The south tower is purple/blue. Hopefully they're planning to light both on a regular basis. Those towers look great at night with the colored lighting.

I didn't know there was even anything in the Exchange at this point.

Well they fixed the light but now the spire is off.

Believe it's fixed as of now. I'll post a nice picture tonight,.

They're putting together a polished place. Can't wait to see it done.

couldn't resist ... went out and snapped a shot from the garage deck

Base of the spire is still darkened ... hmm.

More camera fun ...

Nice! good catch. That's a really nice building too. Glad to see it getting occupied. I think that brings the total count of new businesses opening on Church & Pine to 8.

Breaking in my new camera this evening, and I got some new night shots of the arena. There are a couple more at downtown-otown.com.

I don't know what those rings are. I took a picture hoping someone could figure it out. Best guess is bike rack, but that seems like a very weird bike rack. And yeah ... those are some nice little water features. There are a few of them over on the northwest corner of the center, near the practice court.

Amway Center Church St. I-4 Underpass Improvements Misc. Seven Eleven is nearing completion. I believe they plan to open as early as two weeks from now. Construction on Mojo is moving right along. Several construction workers in there today. Deja Vu has some exterior improvements. They cleaned up the exterior walls and re-painted the wooden elements. Well that was weird. Apparently there's an image count limit on a post. The last few you'll have to click.

I'm going to try to attend this.

Looks that way.

To increase the walkable area beneath the I-4 underpass on the south side of Church Street. There's a large sloping embankment that they want to make a flat wall that's further from the street-side, where they'll have better lingering space. This will also make all of the ground level stuff for Amway Center visible down Church St, while right now it's largely obstructed. Here's the plan: http://downtownorlando.com/sites/default/files/Interstate%204%20Underpass.pdf

Just a small notice ... I will not be posting updates this weekend, as I will be out of state. Next update will be September 8th, or September 11th, depending on my schedule. On my way to work this morning it looked like they've started cutting away the I-4 embankment, at least on the Hughey side. This is going to be awesome!

Ah, that's true. No idea then.

That's a good point ... I wonder if there are any plans to put up a list of occupants ... there are a lot of retail spots in 55 W which have no direct street visibility.

Well that's a date slip. They had been saying 3Q or 4Q 2010. Makes sense though ... FUMCO's new site won't be ready until 4Q 2010 or 1Q 2011 by the looks of it.

7-11 construction crew is working 7 days a week. They were in there today and had the whole place opened up. I used the opportunity to snap a picture and ask when they were opening. Their answer was "no later than the last week of September". So, in 3 weeks. That's pretty damn fast. A week ago there was nothing in there. Today, there is a lot of electrical work, interior facade work and coolers coming in. The picture ... forgive the quality, taken with my phone.

A particularly pretty sunset today ... taken from my living room:

Seven Eleven @ 55W Amway Center First United Methodist Church of Orlando (FUMCO) I-4 Underpass Improvements Orlando Urban Trail

Interesting point about the parking situation in downtown. With garages like Jefferson sitting nearly completely empty (yet staffed, fully lit and operation for the small amount of people that park there), you'd wonder if the city couldn't extend some kind of discounted parking incentive for businesses moving into the core. Seems like a no-brainer, but maybe the issue of the parking costs is being overstated. That said, the parking costs was a major reason the company I work for moved out of downtown Orlando in February of this year. We left, emptied 3 floors of the Wachovia tower at Central & Orange and moved our 200 employees to brand new building by Millennia. As a resident of downtown, I wasn't happy with this, but parking was costing like $30k/month or something.

The Hilton seems to have died. It disappeared from the DDB's website during the 2nd quarter business activity update. I loved the styling of that building, and I hope that project gets revived at some point. A nice new hotel almost exactly halfway between Amway Center and DPAC would be a good investment, I think.