electricmonk

Reminds me of the vegetarian restaraunt downtown, might have been called Eden's Way but I'm not positive. Anyway the owners there were devout Christians too. I forget what branch they followed but because of their beliefs they closed at 6pm on Friday and were closed all day on Saturday. They got into a finacial bind and got all sorts of press because they were on the verge of bankruptcy. They ended up getting a bunch of donations and were able to pay the back rent and other bills. I thought it was silly to try to run a restaraunt and be closed on the two busiests dining out nights of the week and then whine about not being able to make enough money to stay afloat. Not knocking their beliefs but maybe they should have thought their business plan through a bit more. Same with the Noketown owners. I think the first chapter in any guide to starting and owning any business but especially a restaraunt is going to mention how much time it takes.

Yeah that's where it is. This view is from Penn Forest Elementary. I think to actually get to it you would have to turn off of Starkey where the fuel depot is. I can't remember the name of the road. As for the old one I guess the lots will sit empty for awhile until it's needed. According to the site plan that side of Jefferson isn't even in the master plan. Site facts PDF I would like to see them save the largest of the towers there, the rectangle one that has windows, and convert it into condos like what's been done in other cities. But I don't know if that's feasable from an engineering point of view or if the market would support such a plan.

Cave Spring getting it's first highrise. Ok so it's a grain tower but it still looks kind of cool at night. This is the replacement for the Roanoke City Mills that will be torn down to make room for the biomedical park. Amazing how fast this thing went up. It wasn't there Saturday night. I remember reading a month or so ago that they needed a noise ordinance waiver to work around the clock because the whole thing had to be poured at once to make it watertight. If I don't have too rough a night at work I'll try to get some better shots of it after work. I wasn't expecting it tonight but when I was leaving work and saw it glowing in the distance I had to pull over and take a few photos.

The city mails a magazine out quarterly about what all the city government is up to. In the latest one is an article about downtown living and there's an interesting quote from a city official that lives downtown. Housing and Neighborhood Services Director Ford Weber, "I have to drive a couple of miles to go to the grocery store but a lot of people who live near a grocery store have to drive 10 miles to go to work. I've always wondered why so many people think it's important to live near a grocery store and not near where you work." I agree with him on that. The nieghborhood I live in is the same distance to a grocery store as any place downtown would be so I don't think that would be too big a deal. Oh and yeah Poe & Cronk are pretty decent. I rented from them when I first moved back to Roanoke and don't have any complaints about them.

I'm going piggy back on your thread for this photo. This is one of my favorite buildings in Roanoke. The Shenandoah Life building on Brambleton Ave. Finally remembered to throw the tripod in the car and took this tonight on the way home from work.

I drove by the Ivy Market site Sunday and it's coming along nicely. Still quite away to go to make the November deadline to get the incentive money. I'm kind of surprised they aren't working around the clock.

I had an apartment through them and had been a model tenant for 3 years. Never late, no damage etc. When I went to move out I did everything by the book and followed what my lease said for things like written notice and 30 days notice. After I was all moved out and was ready to do the walk-thru to get my deposit back I was supposed to call them and set up a time. I called three times during normal business hours and never talked to a human. 4th time I left a message saying I would be there at the apartment the next day at so and so time and due to my work schedule that was the only time I could be there and for someone there to please call me back. No one did. Next day I waited for 4 hours for someone to show up and no one ever did. So I left my keys on the mantle and set the door knob lock and left. Three weeks later I get a subpoena for non payment of rent, abandonment, and locksmith charges. They claimed I never told them I was leaving even though I had a copy of the move out notice and they said they had to hire a locksmith to enter the unit which was also BS becuase their maintence people had been in there quite a few times when I wasn't home. Anyway we went to court and I didn't have a lawyer so we settled for the amount of my security deposit. I know I could have won if I had had a lawyer but it would have cost me more than the suit was for. My sister had a place with them on Grandin Rd and had to get the city to condemn it before they would repair her collapsed kitchen ceiling due to a roof leak and they still tried to hold her security deposit too. She won and got her money back. I know other people that have had issues with them also but those two are the only ones that I'm close enough to to give details for. Oh one other thing, I often paid my rent in person so I could get a signed reciept and their office was staffed by some of the rudest people I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with. I'm sorry but if I'm handing over 400+ of my hard earned dollars I expect a smile and thank you. I'm funny that way. It was like it pained them to deal with a lowlife renter.

A friend of mine lives there and he likes it a lot. If it wasn't for the fact that Hall Associates manages it I would consider it for myself, but I wouldn't rent an outhouse from that company though.

Lots of places in my neighborhood for cheap. As long as you don't mind a few gun shots some prostitution and things like that. It's within walking distance of downtown and it's sort of on the rebound. I actually turned down a sublease out at Stratford Village because I would rather live here than in a generic apartment complex.

I guess I'm the resident oldster. I used to play in the field where Tanglewood sits now. 419 was a 2 lane road and the Country Store was a country store. Me and my brothers were really bummed the day they put up the fences and started bulldozing the lot for Tanglewood.

A long time ago, mid-80's or so when downtown was still a bit shady, I was walking up Salem Ave behind Southern Pawn late one night. Some dude standing in the shadows asked me if I had seen any cops around and I said no and kept on walking. A minute or so later I heard the burglar alarm going off there.

The City Market District Plan can be downloaded here. I hope this wasn't posted already if it was I missed it. I'll be reading it over the next couple days and will have some comments about it then. I will say that I like the highlights of it.

Some photos of projects going on. I didn't put too much effort into composition or anything so these are basically just snapshots. Site of the new fire station headquarters. Claude Moore Education Complex location of the new culinary institute. Dumas Center restoration. Another part of the culinary institute. The bulding will be built around the fragments of brick walls left standing from the original structure so it qualifies for historic preservation credits. Civic Center Convention hall expansion. Another view. From the Performing Arts Center side. Wider view. Old Virginia Railway Station that will hopefully be restored some day. Biomedical Park building. Site of the proposed hotel at the biomedical park complex Fairfax condos. Fairfax condos. Hospital expansion nearing completion. Ukrops site. Ukrops site. The Finks center. Don't know the official name of it

A Home Depot.

There's nowhere in the city limits large enough for an auto plant so it would definitely be in one of the surrounding counties. Franklin would have the benefit of a large labor pool because it's close to Martinsville and other southside areas that have lost 1000's of manufactuing jobs. Bedford could draw from both Roanoke and Lychburg. Botetourt has the best transportation options; close to the airport, rail and I-81 plus a few car part manufaturers already. Pulaski has a Volvo truck plant so there is a potentially trained labor force there for them to poach from. So they all have some positives for Toyota to chose from if they pick this area.

I had planned on getting out this weekend too and taking some photos but I sliced my hand open last night and can barely hold my camera. Hopefully it won't hurt as bad tomorrow and I can get out some.

Brief article from Roanoke.com says a new hotel is planned for the biomedical park. "In a project that adds food and lodging to Roanoke's biomedical park coming online this year, a developer has committed to building a 127-room Cambria Suites hotel and a restaurant on Reserve Avenue at Franklin Road." Link probably won't last long but for the time being here's the story. Being a bit generous there calling the other building under construction a tower.

I think a lot of people from Craig come over to Roanoke to work and were probably making that drive before Blacksburg/Montgomery Co. started to really grow. I work with 3 people that I know of from Craig Co. there's probably more in other departments. There's easily over a dozen people there from Floyd County. To me the NRV and Roanoke MSA's should be combined. There seems to ba huge overlap. I know people from Blacksburg, Radford, Floyd and Christiansburg that drive to Roanoke to work and I know people from Roanoke that drive to Floyd and Blacksburg to work. Then there's the shopping, business and cultural things that are onl available in Roanoke that people from the surrounding counties come to town for.

I'm excited about it. About 5 or 6 years ago I did a photo shoot with a local band and we did all the photos downtown on a Sunday. We were able to get up on fire escapes and the parking garages and other upper floor spots and one thing we commented on at the time was the amount of unused space on second, third and fourth floors all over downtown. We would look into a building and say something along the lines of, "damn that would make a cool apartment". I'm hoping the art museum will spark the owners of Billy's Ritz to do something with the upper floors there. I've been through the upper floors there and it would make awesome apartments. Also I'm hoping that with all the interest in downtown now some places will come available that don't cost an arm and a leg. Some nice 1 bedroom units for 500-600 a month is right up my alley.

That's actually Day Ave. I live on Marshall a few blocks up from there. I just wish they would move forward on the Cotton Mill project that was supposed to happen on 6th St near Marshall Ave. I found this older article about that. Also mentioned in this article is the Can Company. I went to a couple parties there last spring and summer but then they quit having events because the building wasn't up to code yet. I haven't heard anything else about it since at least July and their website just says "coming soon" so I'm not holding my breath.

Glad to hear the area is still pretty diverse. Pretty much figured it would be but it is something to keep an eye on. I lived on the 1100 block of Grace and my roommate was a VCU student but I wasn't. The majority of our neighbors both in our building and the rest of them on the block were students. When I moved to Carytown it was like a different city though. A few students but mostly people in their mid-20's to mid-30's without kids. I miss Carytown, I don't miss Grace Street.

Junkie Weathermen would be a great name for a band. I hate to make light of their problems having known my share of adicts and having lost a few friends to heroin but still there is a bit of dark humor in the story. We were joking at work last night that it's that Viper Radar that drove them to it and that Robin Reed is going to have to kill somebody to take the attention away from channel 10. A friend of mine is a cameraman for channel 10 but I haven't talked to him since all this broke.

Yeah, that's the airport.

Anytime I read about VCU developments I can't help but think of the song Scuffletown by Avail and this verse in that song: Oregon Hill is at end time VCU crept up and lit the torch West ave. honkeys don't forget That trains still run north Still it's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful day And the sun is still shining, shining, shining, shining OVER THE JAMES ----- When I lived in the Fan in the late 80's we used to joke about VCU taking over all of the Fan. One of the things I liked about living there was the way it was different segments of society all in one relatively small area. One block would be ghetto a street or 2 over would be million dollar homes, thousands of students over here, an old folks home right in the middle, etc. I just hope that the area doesn't become homoginized into a student enclave. But then it's been awhile since I've spent much time there and it may have already.

At my last apartment my next door neighbor drove a plow for the city. I never could use the excuse that my street was snowed in to lay out of work. It was always spotless. The city has started using a chemical mix that they put down before the first flake or ice pellet comes down. I noticed that made a huge difference in those December ice storms.