appatone, on Jan 4 2006, 09:52 PM, said:
That is good news on the FU building. Although I am not tremendously familiar with the specific building we are discussing I seem to remember it as a giant 70's un-pedestrian friendly block of concrete. Am I right? If it is the building I am thinking of then it is the most glaring problem on that little square and I remember when walking past it what a shame it was that the builders didn't put more care into designing it. Hopefully this new makeover will rectify that as the square where the building sits is quite nice and deserving of so much better than that building currently offers.
The First Union building wasn't particularly attractive, and it's certainly dated now, but it certainly was never an atrocity. It is an efficient use of space (8 stories tall), is respectful in scale of the buildings and spaces around it, and doesn't take up more street frontage than it needs on Patton. It has a reasonably friendly, glassy entrance for the bank branch that used to be located on the ground floor.
I think you're talking about the Wachovia building instead. That is a four-story building designed to resemble a concrete block. It has lots of frontage on three very important downtown streets (College, Haywood, and Patton) and wastes it all on blank walls.
After the First Union merger, both banks moved into the Wachovia building (Wachovia owned while First Union was leasing.) They modified the building to add a few more windows, but that didn't change much. It's still and ugly building. See the black/white building behind the Dhrumor in this picture:
I put some thought into what can be done with this eyesore, and my conclusion is that Wachovia needs to build a new tower somewhere else (College? Woodfin? Coxe?) and lease its current one building out to a department store. Think about it -
- Downtown Asheville has the cool thing going on. Cooler than the mall, even? Maybe so.
- The best shoe store in town (Tops) is right across the street. Anyone who's lived in Asheville for a while knows that, if you're serious about buying shoes, you go to Tops.
- There are more restaurants and boutiques than you can shake a stick at downtown. Beats the crap out of a food court. This means a theoretical department store wouldn't exist in a vacuum. It could synergize with its environment just like it could in a mall.
- Department stores can survive in malls with less foot traffic than Haywood Street.
- Asheville Mall is a dump. It also has poor access because traffic on South Tunnel Road sucks. That sounds like a perfect opportunity to attract some major retail back downtown before the mall renovates or does a teardown/rebuild.
From an operational standpoint,
- While the Wachovia building's floorplates are about half the size of a mall department store, they have four floors to work with instead of two.
- There is plenty of street frontage, which means an entrances and displays on three sides.
- The building is right across College Street from the 3-level Rankin Avenue parking deck. That places it a mere 40 foot walk from 262 parking spaces. It is also less than 100 yards from the Civic Center deck, which has 7 levels and 550 spaces.
- The bottom level is a half-basement, and is currently used for parking. It could either be kept as is for more parking, or converted to more retail space while they depend on the decks for parking.
Great idea, eh? I'm convinced it could work. Now we just need to find a developer to do the refit and a department store to make it happen...
Barring a major relocation from the Asheville Mall, are there any smaller department store chains out there with an eye for expansion and an affinity for urban locations?
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