Tyrone Wiggum

I still think this building looks like a homeless man's One Atlantic Center. How could my mind be changed?

Meh, could be worse

Huntsville Alabama is #7, so I'ma hold off on putting a lot of stock in that list, especially given that US News has 37 readers left.

So we've spent a couple of pages now talking about a one story and three story building. Never understood why this is a "midrise" thread considering there isn't a single mid rise building in South End that doesn't have pink glass, but when in Rome I guess.

Am I smoking crack? Even the BB&T guys I know in WS refer to it as "the p*nis tower" because, ya know, it looks like a stubby p*nis. IMO that's an ugly building and the architect who built it was probably the inspiration for that one episode of How I Met Your Mother. Probably. So, here we are: we got a homeless man's version of One Atlantic Center, but at least it's not a p*nis tower. W00t1!?

Well, you've got baby blue, powder blue, cornflower blue, navy blue, blue steele, bleu cheese, Eiffel 65, BB King, Smurf blue, soul sucking garbage architecture blue, and asphyxiation. It's actually a pretty wide palette.

Build faster plz. Concourse B looks like the hellmouth every time I come down the ramp from the atrium. And, once you get past Bojangles, there are days where you're literally standing shoulder to shoulder with people. It's great from an optics perspective IMO, in that you walk through similarly-sized cities' airport's and you wonder where the hell everyone is by way of comparison, but I dread the B&D concourses when I'm headed home/connecting. The Forbes article is really great news, in that I seem to remember people being worried the merger might lead Charlotte down the path of Pittsburgh from years ago; given its profitability and location, it seems like American will up aircraft movements as fast as CLT can build capacity. Hopefully future expansion will continue to address the ingress/egress issues.

Answers seems kinda obvious, by proxy: "Amazon told Detroit that it was primarily a lack of a talent pool...." Nashville, Columbus, Austin, and Pittsburgh have major research universities literally downtown; IU and Purdue are less than 45" from downtown Indy; Raleigh is unique for a city of its size in terms of academic horsepower. Charlotte has a 4th tier university that's a few points from being unranked. I bring this up for two reasons: 1) For all the hemming and hawing from the city, ya can't have a large university as an afterthought on the outskirts of town and clutch your pearls when you're overlooked by a company incredibly dependent on brainpower, and; 2) This will happen again, and sooner than later, so what's the plan going forward from the legislature and/or the city elders?

So, Hickory, NC got a higher grade than Chicago in this ranking?

I don't have a dog in the fight, but I'm not sure what Charlotte is *supposed* to be. It's the 22nd largest metro in the country. Have those folks been to Orlando? San Antonio? Portland? Sacto? Cincy? Or, in the other direction, Bal'more? Tampa? San Diego? Detroit? Phoenix? From where I sit, Charlotte is in the group of "cities with skylines disproportionately large to their size," and it's a short list : Minny, Seattle, Pittsburgh are the only others that come to mind. And, it's recently handicapped by the NC legislature, so that's (maybe?) an obstacle. But, keep filling in those (fewer and fewer) remaining holes and get another signature tower or three and there's a lot to admire about the city's business clout. Not trying to damn with faint praise, but here's Charlotte's two current bookends. So, yeah, um, what's those critics' point?

That's one of those buildings where i'd put a little park in the 9th slot and wait for the infill to turn to the R-1 color. Woof that's fugly. In Midtown Atlanta for a skinny minute, and there's still quite a few surface lots (that are, granted, being converted to condo towers) left. Same thing in South Loop in 312. Good news is Charlotte's downtown surface lots are getting gobbled up at what appears to be lightning speed. Bad news is that, if you drive north or west six blocks from BAC 1, you've got giant wastelands of industrial blight. That will take decades to change, and that would be more worrisome to me.

312's population has been pretty flat for a long time. That said, the Grant Park Condo Tower is gonna be a monster, and given all the construction in South and West Loop, that's really surprising. And encouraging.

If Lincoln Harris wanted to build a junior One Atlantic center why didn't they just save themselves a bunch of money and take a field trip to ATL? It's almost as bad as Vanilla Ice ripping off Queen; no, no, ours is different, see; theirs has a little gold doodle thingie on top! Not the same at all!

Well, in their defense, it does beat the original choices. To wit:

Would seeing this guy on site make you happy? WOULD IT!?!1?

Why do you not like the design color, comrades?

You forgot the N64. And Poland.

Given that anecdotal evidence is the best kind of evidence..../s When I lived in Oak Park, I was technically a "suburbanite." Nevermind that Chicago overlapped our northern border, or that we directly abutted to the murder capital of the city, or that it took me less than half as long to get to the loop from my house as it did from ORD; we weren't TRUE Chicagoans (no true Scotsman! Like such as. And also...). The property taxes on my nice but modest 2,100 sf home last year were nearly $17,000. Subsidies? My taxes helped pay for the village schools, roads, libraries, OPRFFD/PD, water district, community college, etc. Come to think of it, the only thing that that was subsidized was taking the IKE downtown, which I didn't do a whole lot since I could hop on the L and be at State/Lake in 20-25 minutes on my Ventra card. OTOH, when we looked at moving to Gold Coast, my property taxes would have been cut by over 60% for the same size house with the same size mortgage. Granted, the kiddos would have wound up in private school, but Illinois' tax code - and its effect on public schools - is a cluster of such epic proportions that I probably don't need to rehash it with a bunch of fellow data wonks. I realize that Fort Mill and Lake Norman != Oak Park (or Schaumburg, or even Barrington), but I was fortunate enough to pay for the privilege of living in a better school district with almost no crime and phenomenal services that ultimately wound up having me subsidize Chicago vis-a-vis sales and income tax. Corporate welfare is bad. Cognitive dissonance is bad. White flight is bad. But, two things: 1) I already get subsidies from empty-nesters and retirees and DINK's as it is, and I will be subsidizing schools myself before I know it, and; 2) income redistribution happens across the entire swath of the tax code, and though I'm in the camp that it's the price of civilization, them's the breaks. Finally, I realize OPRF is over 11k/sqmi, so it's not exactly low density, but I've heard the same argument in the 312, and every time a simple "so what did you pay in property tax last year?" ends that convo with all haste. /Rant

#1 Makes just as much sense as the current mural #2 #toosoon? #3 Basically what they did

At the same damn time?

I am extremely butt hurt. As a Chicagoan (by way of Charlotte), nothing galls me more than thinking that Tryon Street is inferior to MagMile. Nothing. Anyway... This building is awful. Not First Union Plaza awful (which is awful for entirely different reasons), but a squat, third derivative building that would get lost in South Loop isn't exactly the signature project I had in mind looking outside in. On a positive note, it's nice to see so many people saying WTF? Twenty years ago Charlotte would have been thrilled to get this building. Now, it's like, really gang? REALLY? /butt hurt