scmarathonman07

From the Dowd today.

A few more from the Westin perch with bonus South Park in the distance.

From my vantage point on the 24th floor of the Westin.

From on top of the Dowd parking garage.

Just got back from Dallas and felt the need to share the view from my hotel room. Dallas is a pretty cool place and it definitely has a lot of character. Some elements like the historic west end, lots of quality restaurants, museums, aquarium, preservation of architecture, and multi-line light rail system would be welcome here. That said, there were a lot of homeless people (they were nice, and I never had an issue, just an observation), the light rail cars were super dated, dirty and small, the aquarium enclosures were too small for the animals, and there is seriously underutilized green space. There were paths that suddenly ended and a few random benches. The only shade was under the massive bridges that crossed the area. It was next to a river so it may flood a lot but still. Lots of unused potential. I apologize for not having more pictures but I was chaperoning high school children around so I was a little preoccupied.

I went back to the CBJ article to see if it said anything specific about the 6th/7th floor and sure enough it did... "The development will feature, studio, one- and two-bedroom units ranging from 650 square feet to 1,250 square feet. Most of the apartments will sit atop six levels of structured parking, but those first six floors will have residential units on the front side of the building, Klein says. The seventh floor will contain the amenity center for the complex, including a saltwater pool and clubhouse." - CBJ

Panorama I took this evening

Here are some pics I took today driving by the new suntrust/apt complex.

So I live about a mile from the mall, and the new Suntrust regional center is just being thrown up there so quickly. It will look interesting once its done. I do agree that there should be some sort of public transit (besides busses) going to the mall area. In Minneapolis they have just one LRT line but it ends inside the mall of america. I do realize that MOA is much larger than South Park as I spent 7 hours in the thing and still did not get to see everything, but being that South Park is the largest in NC (and arguably within 250 miles) and retail is so sluggish to catch on uptown, you would think with the influx of people to the South Park area on a daily basis, there would be a big enough need for it.