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Westcourt? Is it a downtown entertainment district mere blocks from a failed district from the past, or is it a facility for your aging loved ones, whether they need the autonomy independent living can provide, or the specialist services of assisted living and memory care? Westcourt has facilities across the state of Florida where you can keep them close, and even join them for our Friday fish dinner in the cafeteria!

Tech company “disruptors” do a lot of prototyping and testing before general release of products. This concept seemed to be half-baked out of the oven!

Dunno…the article says there are two locations in the works. My suspicion is they’ll cancel the downtown location…

The Parliament House is coming to Ivanhoe! Where TF are all these people going to park? https://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/news/2024/04/19/parliament-house-doubles-plans.html

My understanding is there are plans to build a residential tower with an 800-seat theater at the base in the back. Doesn’t strike me as a good location for another theater (or a residential tower); there are plenty of spaces around downtown you could put it which are more prominent.

The original vision was for plots on the left and right of the “lawn” to be commercially developed. That plan failed, so they’ve changed tact. Not sure an amphitheater is the best use of that space.

I thought they already completed the vision with Phase 2. “Phase 3” seemed to be a last minute attempt to get a horse in the race IMHO.

Also, a large property developer (Hines) who can get projects of this scale funded, because of their track record. The current owner of the Sentinel property is not a developer in Orlando; he basically buys valuable plots and subdivides it piecemeal to other developers to build. (See Midtown Miami and Society/Central Station). So you won’t see a massive project like that, and I’m not sure there are other plots of that size in the central core to do something like that. It reminds me of Water Street in Tampa, another project built by well-capitalized developers.

I dunno. I don’t think there were many great options for FTU/UCF at the time close in town, as with the convention center 20 years later. You only need to look at a Google Map of downtown to see how difficult it would’ve been for either to scale up to the size they are today in a downtown location, without wiping out the redlined areas west of Division (but that’s a whole other story). FTU was supposed to be a feeder school for the nascent Brevard space industry, so there was probably a compromise in location given Orlando’s own need for engineers working in defence. i blame the city planners (did they have any?) in the 1920’s for not having the foresight to preserve land for a 60,000-student university campus while they were subdividing lots for those Craftsman bungalows during the land boom.

It sounds to me like the Cocoa station will be the sole train station in Brevard (at least, initially). If Amtrak service is added (as mentioned in an earlier post), the Cocoa station becomes much more vital as a transfer point for a number of destinations. Another potential service not previously mentioned: SunRail service to Brevard. The Sunshine Corridor proposal, as it currently stands, includes a line from Disney via MCO to a new Sunrail station near the 528/Innovation Way, anticipating Sunbridge growth in the future. It’s not an incredible leap to consider an extension to Cocoa and Melbourne/Palm Bay for SunRail, into another large population center currently without any passenger rail service. Here’s a link to a study done in 2016 to identify potential train station sites, if you’re interested:

This quote is from the Wall Street Journal recently; Before the pandemic, some in the Orlando business community felt anxious about the spread-out nature of the city’s development and the lack of dense office space downtown, says Tim Giuliani, president of the Orlando Economic Partnership. “We were concerned there should be more towers going up,” he says. Now, though, the more-suburban nature of the city’s economic development seems better-suited to the current economic moment, he says. More companies are opening new locations in Orlando in areas ranging from aerospace to clean tech, with 35% of their inquiries coming from overseas and California, he says, an increase from years past. Does that mean downtown development is dead in the water for the foreseeable future?

(a little side topic) Going back to the Amtrak study, another thing I would hope they’d consider is replacing the old clunky Viewliner and Superliner sleeper cars with the new Siemens sleeper cars as implemented for the new European NightJet service. I haven’t taken the NightJet yet, but I want to. There’s something to be said for a leisurely train journey! Video here:

Amtrak is also studying the possibility of adding service from Dallas to Miami via Jacksonville, but…here’s the kicker…the trains would use the Florida East Coast Railway and bypass both Orlando and Tampa while adding new service to Daytona Beach and Palm Bay. This might be a net win for Florida mobility: it could hasten both double-tracking of the rest of the FECR from Cocoa to Jacksonville, along with building the Tampa extension via the Sunshine Corridor. It may be that the Chicago-Miami route also uses the FECR, with Disney or Tampa-bound passengers transferring at a Cocoa station for their onward journey into central Florida. As someone who has taken the Silver Meteor from DC to Miami (in a sleeper car) I found the Tampa-Lakeland detour a bit awkward. A smartly-timed transfer to one of the new Amtrak Charger trains (or even a Brightline train), using new Brightline tracks, strikes me as a more comfortable and faster option than those rickety ol’ CSX freight tracks!

There was a time when the most violence came from Courtney Love when she punched those dudes in the front row from the stage at the Edge. I blame rap and “EDM”. Mostly dumb forms of music which draw scores of dumb people on coke. I wonder how much mafia money has flowed downtown in recent years.

Please, no….I’m still bitter from the 90’s…