urbanlife

That's great news, realistically it makes sense to want to renovate and keep the Chrysler Hall and Scope as useable structures.

This is just some dreaming of what could happen, but what the city should do is offer a land swap. The Feds should get the whole site that the Education Admissions Building in on, knock down the building and redevelop the site to match present day security needs for the Federal Courthouse. Then the city would get the old courthouse and Granby lot to have control over to redevelop. The old courthouse could be renovated as a base with a tower coming out of the center of the building. The Granby lot could then be sold to a developer to develop a present day version of a Granby tower (or realistic

Yes, systemically, between the not wanting to work with other cities in the region and the suburbia mindset it is why I moved 3000 miles away and never looked back. I haven't really been in VB since moving away in 2001 besides a trip back to show my wife where I grew up, but I imagine the systemic racism still exists there today which goes along with refusing to work with surrounding cities. VB is a city that should never have been a city, it should have been a suburban county that has a number of towns and maybe a couple cities in it, but that is a whole different issue. As for it being

This is why it was a mistake for Virginia to make itself in a way that cities and counties can't work together. Virginia Beach should have just been the strip, Duck's Head, and maybe First Colonial with the rest of the city just being county and other towns.

It blows my mind how VB can screw up a project this easy. Seriously, the oceanfront should be the easiest thing for them to get just about any project developed.

The Scope is also one of the few buildings that Pier Luigi Nervi did in the US. His work is definitely worth studying, such impressive concrete work.

This looks better than the Ridgewood Club Apartments, those buildings should be torn down and replaced with a development like this.

With the building booms so many cities saw during the 2000s before the recession and then this recent building boom before the pandemic, it is really sad to see a city like Norfolk not benefit from either of this. You would have thought the whole Fort Norfolk, the Neon District, and St Paul areas would be in full force urban redevelopment.

Norfolk, 1996. This was the year I graduated high school, and this was the downtown I grew up with. This is what I thought downtowns just looked like, a street with some office buildings, another street with some old buildings, and a lot of surface parking lots. Looking at this photo with the city I grew up by, it really makes me sad how much of this city was lost to itself. When looking at this photo, it makes sense to plop a giant mall in that spot because it wasn't taking over anything of value anymore because that was already gone. Hopefully with replacing the mall, the street grid can be

The long sidewalk of dead space is a bit concerning about how this whole development is going to turn out. It doesn't look like it will be that active of a district.

It is so sad what racism did to that street and neighborhood.

One thing that has always confused me about the history of Norfolk is when the redeveloped downtown in 1955, why did they tear down all the old buildings along Main when they could have just put all the new office buildings along St Paul, which was a new street that they cut through the old street pattern. That way it would have been an expansion of downtown rather than knocking down the existing downtown. Unfortunately that decision wasn't made back then.

Wow, good to see that lot finally being developed.

Not that any of this will happen, but just looking at this map, I can see directions the city should go with light rail and BRT. Bus Rapid Transit from the Naval Base to Military Circle does make sense, what doesn't make sense is stopping light rail at Military Circle. Light rail should run up to the airport and have multiple connections with BRT during that stretch. It would help maximize the two transportation systems. From there, a second light rail line should run up Granby to Oceanview, through downtown, and over into South Norfolk. From there, the city could expand BRT to where li

Those two buildings turned out really well.