urbanlife

Hopefully some residential towers will get built in the Pembroke Mall redevelopment because the downtown could definitely use some tall residential towers.

Oh man, just reading this reminds me why I moved away and never came back. The whole metro should have created a regional government for big things like these rather than rely on all the cities to work together on their own.

The revival of City Walk should happen on a portion of the Pembroke Mall site. Give the site a collection of residential towers and a pedestrian square to build off of and connect it to the existing Town Center.

Measuring this area, I just realized it is slightly smaller than the current Town Center in VB. It's impressive how much has been built so far with this development. I wonder if there is plans to ever relocated the distribution center to open up all that land for redevelopment.

That flatiron building would have been one of my favorite buildings in the city, but all I ever got to see was the shrubs it was replaced with.

Who does Armada Hoffler think they are? Taco Bell?

It's kind of nice, but it took work to get here. When the Boomers tried to pick on us, they quickly learned we didn't care. Also, the whole "negative" term calling us Gen X, we took that as a badge of honor and took that weapon away from them.

Someone sounds drunk on their avocado toast.

That is about on par with the cost for any arena renovation. Baltimore is doing a renovation right now to their arena for about that same amount. Sacramento built a 19000 seat arena in 2014 that cost $558 million. So you got to think about it in that sense, even an expensive renovation to the Scope would be cheaper than tearing it down and building a brand new building. Now, if Norfolk gave up on the idea of having an arena downtown to make it more appealing to others in the metro by having it at Military Circle, then it makes no sense to having a second arena downtown. At that point it would be better off to build a new opera house and redevelop the whole site. Even better if that redevelopment is tied to MacArthur Mall and it involved putting in a street grid and selling off property to developers that are ready to develop residential mixed used towers now.

Mall owners have a hard time thinking about anything outside of how traditional malls function. So we end up with a redevelopment that struggles to act like a mall while also acting like an urban redevelopment. That is why it is better for mall owners to sell out to urban developers that know how to redevelop urban districts. The Pembroke Square will probably evolve into a galleria with mixed use surrounding it.

That is because they built a new state of the art arena under an existing roof. That would be the same for the Scope if a new state of the art arena was built under the existing dome. Granted the Key Arena spent that much for a pro team and will eventually have two pro teams playing there. That is a big difference.

You are confusing the King Dome with the Key Arena. The Key Arena is more like the Scope. Seattle just did a massive renovation to it for it to be the home of their new NHL team and will be the future home of their new NBA team when that happens.

This is what Young Terrace used to look like. View of downtown pre-urban renewal. The ferry terminal in the bottom right corner. Looking north of City Hall Ave. This is where the MacArthur Mall sits today. View of downtown looking north. Buildings that used to exist on East Main St. And Church St looking south. In the middle bottom you can see the Attucks Theater and Virginia Baptist State Convention.

What??? There are lots of amazing pieces of architecture built in the 60s and 70s. The Scope is one of them. Now think of this, this building is 50 years old. When Norfolk decided to tear down their downtown core, they tore down a lot of buildings that were about 50 years old. Now here we are 100 years from that time Norfolk tore down it's downtown core, and I know you can't tell me that was a great idea for them to have done. The Scope isn't some cheap building that wears out after a dozen years, it will be an icon for the city for generations to come. Since Norfolk is never gonna get a pro team, it makes no sense to tear down the Scope to replace it with an arena of a similar size. It makes sense to take a stand and actually preserve a piece of Norfolk history and improve on it because the beauty of the Scope is that you can remove the entire inside of the building and it will still stand because the weight of the dome is transferred through the buttresses.

Such a dramatic video just to say they will build a bland suburban apartment development that will disappear into the background until one day when you say to yourself "how long has that development been there?"