lammius

VERY cool project. I do hope the design changes, but this would be a great attraction for Norfolk. Looks like a new LRT station too?

Here's a sneak peek at the eventual redesign of Gateway:

Well, that's underwhelming.

$14 a ride for adults and $12 for kids tho? Do you want to take your family on a Ferris wheel ride or feed them for a week? Not even the Coney Island Cyclone, long the benchmark of amusement ride ripoffs, approaches that level of extortion. </cheap old guy rant>

What a disappointment. This really sucks, not just for ODU but also for downtown. “40% of trips to the base come from Va Beach or Chesapeake.” Today. Using that as a reason to discount a west side line fails to recognize that good transit can change that paradigm. It can make downtown Norfolk a more desirable place for 19 year old service people and students alike. Having downtown as the center of the transit network would have done great things. Instead, downtown will be on a cul de sac.

Ride the Tide?

I do dislike the sky bridge. I get the need to safely move people to the parking across the street, but man, does it disrupt Scope's design.

^ I'm confused. Brambleton Station and the rendered parking deck at St. Pauls and Brambleton are two different things, right? Where is Brambleton Station proposed? In those Scope conceptual renderings it looks like they're planning to replace the surface lot at Brambleton and St Pauls with a giant parking deck, which would add lots more parking supply there. I wonder why the need for so much more parking. Is there a shortage during events at Scope now?

I agree ODU doesn't fit in with the majority of ACC institutions, but the ACC kind of threw the implied academic prestige criterion out the window when they invited Louisville, tbh

NCNB became NationsBank in 1991, so that ain’t recent! Back then most of E City Hall Ave was parking lots and tumbleweeds, so who can even guess where exactly this was proposed?

I hoped for a tower but this could be a good thing if it’s done right. We could end up with a nice space like the Piazza in Northern Liberties, Philadelphia or a more open-air Palmer Alley in DC.

As rendered, this looks short of 300 feet. Those first 8 floors look like parking. I’m guessing this comes in around 260-270. Need the study to find more demand or that a smaller floor plate (sq feet per floor) is a smarter move for some reason to increase the number of floors.

Looks like a spec building, so I'd expect a conservative office footprint. Would love to see hotel, residential, civic, something to raise the roof. Also, I just noticed it looks like they're going to de-map Union Street. So if you have a parcel stretching from the LRT tracks to Waterside Drive, that's ~1,000 feet and plenty of room for two towers, with room to spare, or even three with less room to spare. Y'know, that would make a lotta sense!

It's a good space-filler. Would love to see a 35-story residential/hotel tower rise above the corner portion of this, though. Also, re: the ferris wheel. A 20-story wheel will lift passengers 12 stories above the Elizabeth River Trail? Is the trail going to be raised onto an 8-story high skyway?

Exciting about the building at St Pauls and Waterside. I wonder if this is a new concept for those "gateway towers" that we thought might come to the Civic Plaza station area?

SPQ should have been the site of Norfolk's Amazon HQ2 proposal. HQ2@SPQ

Sorry I didn't get to this sooner. Work has been trying its best to kill me. Here's what I've got on the Fort Norfolk developments. I took quite a few liberties on site plan/dimensions, but hopefully these massings give an idea what the area might look like in years to come. I didn't include the "possible new building" at Front Street Flats because there are no known specs. But, we have River Tower, Beau Rivage, CHKD, EVMS, and Tarrants Bay shown. Here we go: 1. From the Brambleton Ave bridge, heading west: 2. Eastbound Brambleton Avenue at "the bend" 3. Southbound Colley Avenue at Brambleton 4. From the Berkley Bridge (I had to draw in the Hilton too) 5. From Crawford Parkway in Portsmouth 6. From Hospital Point in Portsmouth 7. From West Norfolk Bridge 8. From the Hampton Blvd bridge over Lafayette River 9. From the WAVY TV 10 Tower Cam

Ok with that rendering I now understand where this is going exactly. The other rendering was/is hot, but I wasn't sure exactly where it was. I haven't been to that part of Norfolk in a few years. So this, river tower, Toronto bay, what else is going in this area? I've lost track (a good problem to have in Norfolk)!! Ill sketch something up tonight or tomorrow night.

The Tide crosses Boush at Bute Street. So this branch would take a lane of Boush from that point north. There are 6 lanes of traffic plus a bit of median on the block between Bute and Brambleton, then 4 lanes north of that (which I don't think are used to capacity by autos). On Llewellyn, yeah it would stink to lose the median or the bike lanes, but it's one of the only north-south thoroughfares in that part of Norfolk that has enough space between the curbs to make this thing fit along with a couple of traffic lanes. It's wider than the southern end of Hampton Blvd or Monticello, and carries less traffic (I presume). The 21st Street businesses can consider whether any loss of pass-by traffic is made up for by foot traffic coming from a LRT station or two in their district. Poor Portsmouth. Or Poortsmouth.

There's no obvious solution to the west side problem, other than tunneling. Maybe you could have a branch break off the Tide line onto Boush Street, reconfigure Llewellyn Ave to have a LRT lane, traffic lane, and possibly remove the center island to accommodate the bike lanes too, in each direction. Then turn 21st and 22nd Streets into one-way pairs with a traffic lane and LRT over to Colley, use that wider part of Colley going north to accommodate LRT with a lane of traffic each way, and then use 26/27th Sts or find a way to meander it up to Monarch Way (do away with the on-street parking) before merging into Hampton Blvd for the run up to the Base. As for Chesapeake, yes, it may have 250,000 people sometime soon, but spread over 300 sq miles, there's as much corn as people. Unless Chesapeake is interested in densifying along a LRT corridor and focusing future growth there, it would be really hard to justify any form of rail transit out there. Maybe just as a park and ride setup to start?

Are three-martini lunches not a thing with the business crowd anymore?

I thought this study was started in 2015?? If they haven't even selected the alignment yet, it absolutely will be ten years. The starter line was easy, as most of it was existing ROW, and only downtown was hard. The Westside Connection (please let them call it that) will be much more difficult. Most, if not all, of it will be in-street. There's a lot of traffic impact analysis that has to happen, environmental, community engagement, demonstrating to residents that the catenary wire won't give the kids cancer, etc.

Took a quick trip to Tidewater just before Christmas. Here's a pic of the Norfolk skyline taken from the Renaissance Portsmouth hotel

I got you. I took a shot at it (I had to do a little homework, since I'm not as familiar with Richmond or what's going on there). Check it out: First one is free

You guys' friend blopp1234 stopped by the Norfolk forum and asked me to mock up a massing of a few of the new additions to Richmond's skyline in Google Earth. First, I took a look at the development map and found two projects that are likely to have a real impact on the skyline. In the case of the Dominion Energy building, the height is known (413 feet), so I used that height for the building on the parcel on 6th Street. I wasn't sure, based on the development map, but is the second tower supposed to be on the spot where an existing tower sits? I assumed so, so I didn't draw the second tower, as the existing tower covers it. Second, I added the locks building. The height was not stated, but at 21 floors of mixed-use, I assumed a height of 280 feet. If its height is known to be more or less, let me know and I can change it. If there are any major projects I missed, or if I got the details on these two wrong, let me know. I just need the location, height, approximate width/dimensions, and I can plop a box on the map. Please enjoy this look at Richmond's future! 1. From a bridge. See the gray, faceless boxes representing the new buildings. 2. From another bridge! See 'em on the left? 3. From a highway. The Dominion Energy building dominates this view: 4. And finally, the sexy helicopter flyover: