urbanlife

It looks like the Palladium Dr is basically just a service and garage entrance road.

My guess is this would be about a 4 story apartment building. That's a good size development. This is what Norfolk really should be focusing on is improving these small pockets of urban mixed use neighborhoods. 35th from Gosnold to DeBree would make for a great urban pocket neighborhood with a two block stretch of streetfront commercial and apartments, with apartment building infill going in on surrounding sites. Give incentives to developers to build mixed income housing and startup commercial space rents to help the area be an incubator for small businesses and be an area where people can afford to live and work.

I would have imagined there would have been a new residential tower or two going up every year with the whole Pembroke area with some shorter apartment building fill ins. Then with the occasional office tower going up when the market allowed for it.

If they moved their warehouse, that would be a ton of land to expand into. There is also the possibility of the Liberty Executive Office Park and Towne Place being incorporated into this development and be an urban extension for this development. Which if that would happen, that could make a type of downtown for Chesapeake with a decent little skyline and urban city footprint.

This is going to be a really good redevelopment for the downtown, and this will hopefully make the downtown feel bigger and make the skyline look bigger.

This is pretty much it, until HRT hires outside of the metro people who are experienced in light rail and expanding light rail systems, it will continue to be a bus focused system. Though with Norfolk, BRT isn't a bad idea if its a system that is going to be built and expanded throughout the city of Norfolk. Light rail is much better than BRT with ridership, but when done correctly, BRT can have really great ridership as well, but it has to be real BRT with platform stops and designated lanes that keep the buses out of regular vehicle traffic. The light rail that exists in Norfolk should be looking at the surrounding cities to see which ones would want to have it expanded to their cities and be used more as a commuter light rail system.

Good to finally see this happening, obviously they won't be building an urban district in the traditional sense with block of developable land, but I am sure it will be something urban in design for VB. Hopefully whatever is done is connected to the Town Center and gives VB a real downtown feel.

I would hope so, it would more than double the size of the downtown, and would be an ideal spot for lots of residential buildings to go up at as well as being a major shopping district.

I will say, in Portland, when we have had our building booms over the years I have lived here, it is pretty cool having more cranes than I can keep up with all over the city and downtown. It is really amazing to watch a city change rapidly like that. I've always imagined this would happen in VB with the Pembroke area when several large sites end up getting redeveloped around the same time and creating a skyline of towers and cranes.

New York has to do one way streets because their streets are too narrow for being two lane, especially with the amount of vehicles that move around in Manhattan, plus when working with a grid system, one way streets make it easier to time lights for traffic flow. A street like Granby would make no sense as a one way street because it would have a complimentary one way street going the opposite way.

Wow, the current ballpark looks like a dump, that will be a good replacement if they go with any of those designs.

It sounds like they will be building an urban lifestyle center that will have the focal point be where the mall exists now, and then develop the surrounding land into a more urban style. It would definitely be an urban district fitting for Virginia Beach.

I don't know if that kind of growth would be that great to see in this day and age. If Richmond rapidly grew to that size, it would probably be because of rapid suburban expansion rather than urban growth. The size of the city and metro is just right, and would be best to focus on building up rather than out. Maybe even ripping out some of the freeways that the city has that it doesn't need.

It would be wise to turn the mall into a centerpiece for downtown. Possibly playing off MacArthur Square or a new square in the center of the site, something like Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland which is considered the living room of Portland. With something like this, then pedestrian focused buildings with commercial along the first floors with office, hotels, and residential above. It would easily make it a major draw for people visiting Norfolk.

The problem with Granby Mall was that no one lived down there and the pedestrian activity was basically nonexistent at the time, especially after 5pm when everyone left downtown after work turning it into a ghost town. With all of that against it, Granby Mall just turned into a strip where drug dealers and prostitutes could hang out because no one was around to care other than people looking for shady activities.

It may be a short building, but it looks like it will show up in the skyline.

It's what the Nazis did to the Polish in Warsaw, bulldozed any bit of history the city had, it is insane that a city would have ever been willing to do this to itself.

This is something that has always confused me about Virginia Beach, it has tried to be some mom and pop family friendly beach town with a huge suburb attached to it, which was fine and all for the 80s and 90s. But Virginia Beach should have evolved by now, the beach has had various versions of itself over the years and the next move should have been with all inclusive resort hotels. It would make sense for the beach to have big campus hotels that cater to their guest needs. Then have Atlantic and Pacific be the streets lined with nightlife that can also draw interest during the days. There should have been a large concert hall to attract big musicians to the beach over by the Convention Center. They should have gone to town with timeshare highrises and residential towers. So many missed opportunities over the past 20 years. Virginia Beach needs to stop acting like a suburban city with a small family friendly beach and start acting like a metro within a city because we all know VB isn't gonna work with its surrounding cities, but it can at least work within its own city.

That's great news, realistically it makes sense to want to renovate and keep the Chrysler Hall and Scope as useable structures.

This is just some dreaming of what could happen, but what the city should do is offer a land swap. The Feds should get the whole site that the Education Admissions Building in on, knock down the building and redevelop the site to match present day security needs for the Federal Courthouse. Then the city would get the old courthouse and Granby lot to have control over to redevelop. The old courthouse could be renovated as a base with a tower coming out of the center of the building. The Granby lot could then be sold to a developer to develop a present day version of a Granby tower (or realistically two towers cause that is freaking huge lot.) In the end, that would probably be three new towers for the city, a filling a weird looking field in downtown, and tear down a city building that should have been torn down 20 years ago.

Yes, systemically, between the not wanting to work with other cities in the region and the suburbia mindset it is why I moved 3000 miles away and never looked back. I haven't really been in VB since moving away in 2001 besides a trip back to show my wife where I grew up, but I imagine the systemic racism still exists there today which goes along with refusing to work with surrounding cities. VB is a city that should never have been a city, it should have been a suburban county that has a number of towns and maybe a couple cities in it, but that is a whole different issue. As for it being a suburban wasteland, that's a bit harsh on the wasteland part, but many suburban parts of the city are aging and headed in that direction. The metro itself is unique because I don't think you can find a setup like this anywhere else. If the counties and towns were merging together, it would have been better going the NYC route and create one huge city with boroughs that basically function like their own city within a bigger city. That or creating a regional metro government that takes care of regional government. Granted we would then be back to the cities not wanting to work together. This will always be the negative effect for the metro until that mindset causes the cities to collapse. As of now, it seems like cities like Norfolk needs to work with the surrounding cities that want to work together and create a metro that way while letting the cities that want to go it alone to be able to do so, and VB has always wanted to do it alone.

This is why it was a mistake for Virginia to make itself in a way that cities and counties can't work together. Virginia Beach should have just been the strip, Duck's Head, and maybe First Colonial with the rest of the city just being county and other towns.

It blows my mind how VB can screw up a project this easy. Seriously, the oceanfront should be the easiest thing for them to get just about any project developed.

The Scope is also one of the few buildings that Pier Luigi Nervi did in the US. His work is definitely worth studying, such impressive concrete work.

This looks better than the Ridgewood Club Apartments, those buildings should be torn down and replaced with a development like this.