[Museum Plaza]

Museum Plaza will not sit directly on main street. It will actually sit one block north of the historic buildings on main street on what is now a vacant parking lot. Let me reiterate. Musem Plaza is actually INFILL on a vacant, dead end parking lot/alley. MP is building sometheing where there is nothing but urban dead space between the backs of old buildings and a riverside freeway (which itself is an unsightly beast that should be torn down, but thats a diff story).

The buildings being "demolished" on main street are not really being demolished at all. That is just our local paper using poor word choice which is not surprising since it is a horrible paper. Rather, a group of four historic buildings will have their main street facades completely refurbished and restored to their 19th century grandeur. These same four buildings, with their facades intact, are undergoing interior demo work now. Most likely, much of the backs of the buildings will be torn down because they are so old they are unstable. Since the interior is nothing but an old warehouse, it won't matter if the whole back can be saved or not. Either way, the back of the four main street buildings will be rebuilt, and the four buildings will serve as a main street entrance to MP. So, you enter the refurbished cast iron facades on main street, and you walk through a corridor of retail (to include a small urban bourbon distillery, gift shop, and a restaurant), and at the back end of the rebuilt buildings, one can access a diagonally inclining elevator that by all means should be as much as a tourist draw as the Arch in Saint Louis.