urbanlife

It is a shame this Norfolk no longer exists. Imagine if much of this would have survived, it would have been such a unique urban downtown. Figured it would be good to put these two images together.

I'm with you on this, the whole counties merging with towns should have never been allowed in Hampton Roads. It would have been much better off letting the counties, towns, and cities to all exist together. Then Virginia Beach could have continued to focus on being a resort city, Pembroke could have become a growing city in Princess Anne County, and the county could have continued to be half suburban sprawl, half farm land with some swamps mixed in.

Good to see those old architects that designed all those buildings are still finding employment....

What the city should do is bulldoze the whole mall, garages and all. Reconstruct a new street grid, and then put together a development commission that is in charge of working with developers to get the lots developed. The Dillards building would be a great location for a plaza. The city could work to get something like an Urban Target built to replace the loss of the mall. With having a development commission, they can guide the growth of the area by requiring specific commercial corridors, and even work with developers when it comes to any new garages that would need to be built, though it would be ideal to focus on housing since office towers are becoming relics of American cities.

My guess would be either Baltimore/DC or Atlanta, with Baltimore/DC being the likely location. This definitely sounds like they are moving on from the Virginia Beach Town Center, which is unfortunate and could be a good thing in the long run by potentially having various other developers expanding the area rather than it all be built by one developer. Interesting to see that VBTC was basically the springboard for the company to help them jump to bigger markets, which sadly says something about VB and the rest of Hampton Roads.

Progress?

This would be really unfortunate if that is what ends up there because the land for this part of the downtown could easily be 6 blocks of urban development.

I honestly thought that area would be developed for an all inclusive resort.

That definitely doesn't look like the convention center area from my childhood in the 80s. Talk about a huge upgrade to that whole area.

Hopefully a cluster of residential towers.

I'm not getting into that, so let's move on.

My two cents on this is the whole "the virus is only dangerous to old people" was a false narrative because I wouldn't be surprised if it is what is causing serious health issues in young people that got infected and survived. With that said, we should really be focused on the conversations around Richmond and not on the topics of the pandemic since society has turned that into such a polarizing subject that is full of misconceptions and false information.

Both of those areas need a building boom of 250-325ft buildings. That would greatly expand the skyline and add some serious downtown feeling density.

This actually makes a lot of sense to use this site for any new stadium. It would be a good way to incorporate the bus terminal into the development, there would be room for any new parking garages that might be needed...though I think it would be better to rely on the garages that exist in downtown and encourage people to park and walk or park and take light rail to get to any events. Another reason that would be a good location is that it would open up the possibilities with what can happen to the mall and possibly the Scope and Chrysler Hall if/when those sites get redeveloped and hopefully incorporated back into the urban grid.

I'm pretty sure Richmond has a better chance of getting a new arena built that Hampton Roads does.

Hopefully some residential towers will get built in the Pembroke Mall redevelopment because the downtown could definitely use some tall residential towers.

Oh man, just reading this reminds me why I moved away and never came back. The whole metro should have created a regional government for big things like these rather than rely on all the cities to work together on their own.

The revival of City Walk should happen on a portion of the Pembroke Mall site. Give the site a collection of residential towers and a pedestrian square to build off of and connect it to the existing Town Center.

Measuring this area, I just realized it is slightly smaller than the current Town Center in VB. It's impressive how much has been built so far with this development. I wonder if there is plans to ever relocated the distribution center to open up all that land for redevelopment.

That flatiron building would have been one of my favorite buildings in the city, but all I ever got to see was the shrubs it was replaced with.

Who does Armada Hoffler think they are? Taco Bell?

It's kind of nice, but it took work to get here. When the Boomers tried to pick on us, they quickly learned we didn't care. Also, the whole "negative" term calling us Gen X, we took that as a badge of honor and took that weapon away from them.

Someone sounds drunk on their avocado toast.

That is about on par with the cost for any arena renovation. Baltimore is doing a renovation right now to their arena for about that same amount. Sacramento built a 19000 seat arena in 2014 that cost $558 million. So you got to think about it in that sense, even an expensive renovation to the Scope would be cheaper than tearing it down and building a brand new building. Now, if Norfolk gave up on the idea of having an arena downtown to make it more appealing to others in the metro by having it at Military Circle, then it makes no sense to having a second arena downtown. At that point it would be better off to build a new opera house and redevelop the whole site. Even better if that redevelopment is tied to MacArthur Mall and it involved putting in a street grid and selling off property to developers that are ready to develop residential mixed used towers now.

Mall owners have a hard time thinking about anything outside of how traditional malls function. So we end up with a redevelopment that struggles to act like a mall while also acting like an urban redevelopment. That is why it is better for mall owners to sell out to urban developers that know how to redevelop urban districts. The Pembroke Square will probably evolve into a galleria with mixed use surrounding it.