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MSU Biomedical Research Campus - Phase II


GRDadof3

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I think it's fine, actually. Not every street has to be a pedestrian utopia of perfection. As long as it's safe and isn't off-putting, it's fine for any street that isn't a retail corridor. If this were facing Monroe, then yeah, I'd have a problem with it, but this is Michigan.
I heartily disagree, especially because this section of Michigan is a vital connection between Monroe North, Bridge Street, downtown, and the rest of the Medical Mile, all of which have significant amounts of pedestrian traffic. This area will never be a pedestrian utopia, but it could at least be bearable to walk through.

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On 7/19/2019 at 6:57 PM, kwl said:

My two cents: since this is primarily a biotech accelerator / innovation hub, it will have a higher security level than a typical university research station and thus they likely insulated the major entrance and eliminated major street facing windows. Any potential tenant exploring novel drug development is unlikely to do so without enhanced access controls. 

Also, here are a few other labs in the US which seem very similar to this building. 

Makes sense. I still wish the “fancy” entrance was visible from the street (and more attention paid to the Michigan side). Looking at the other examples, it’s definitely nicer than what we could of ended up with. 

Onward and upward. I’m excited to hear about the tenants. 

Joe

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On 7/19/2019 at 6:57 PM, kwl said:

My two cents: since this is primarily a biotech accelerator / innovation hub, it will have a higher security level than a typical university research station and thus they likely insulated the major entrance and eliminated major street facing windows. Any potential tenant exploring novel drug development is unlikely to do so without enhanced access controls. 

I dunno, just because you’re running a big research center doesn’t mean you can’t have a nice ground floor restaurant or other store front business.  For years Jerry Seinfeld and his friends met almost daily in a restaurant on the ground floor of a building that houses the Goddard Institute for Space Studies which does some very important research on climate change among other things, some of it classified.  OK you’re thinking, but that show was fiction, they didn’t really eat there.  However, Senator John McCain often ate there when he visited his daughter Meghan when she was a student at Columbia University, and Barack Obama also frequented the restaurant as a student at Columbia.

Wikipedia: Tom's (Monk's) Restaurant

Wikipedia: Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Personal not very interesting story: around every other year or so I spend a week just hanging out in Manhattan by myself.  Back on a trip several years ago I had just visited Grant’s Tomb (to see who was buried there) and was planning to walk around Columbia University which is in the same general neighborhood.  On the way I ran into a street fair on a closed portion of Broadway and bought a kabob from a vendor.  I look up and I’m right in front of Tom’s Restaurant.  Maybe it was because I was already eating but I looked at the menu in the window and wasn’t impressed.  It looked like a Denny’s or Howard Johnson’s menu, and I didn’t see any of the Seinfeld gang sitting in there.   

Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?

EDIT: OK, wandering even further off topic than I already have - a couple of more things I just learned from Wikipedia about Tom’s restaurant that I didn’t know before:

Suzanne Vega used to frequent Tom’s, and wrote her song Tom’s Diner about her slice of life sitting in the restaurant.  This was a few years before Seinfeld.  So, it was both the setting for a song about nothing and later a sit-com about nothing.  (And even later someone might say, a post on this forum about nothing.)

Steering this back to research and development; Karlheinz Brandenburg, an inventor, then used the Tom’s Diner song to develop MP3 audio compression because he knew it would be challenging to compress her warm a cappella voice.  So, if it hadn’t been for having a ground floor restaurant below a research center we may have never had MP3 players.  I must admit though, a hole in this reasoning is that Brandenburg wasn’t working upstairs from the restaurant, he was working in Germany and first heard the song on the radio down the hall from his workshop.  

Suzanne Vega talks about Tom's (then sings Tom's Diner a capella)

WIKIPEDIA: the song Tom's Diner and the Mother of the MP3 player

WIKIPEDIA: Karlheinz Brandenburg 

Edited by walker
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  • 2 weeks later...

This project was awarded its Brownfield.

Construction expected to begin in October. I'm really looking forward to this one, despite the critiques above:

https://mibiz.com/sections/real-estate-development/msu-innovation-building-gets-cleanup-funding-from-city

I'd love to see the liner building on Monroe announced while this project is under construction. 

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On 8/1/2019 at 8:06 AM, GRDadof3 said:

This project was awarded its Brownfield.

Construction expected to begin in October. I'm really looking forward to this one, despite the critiques above:

https://mibiz.com/sections/real-estate-development/msu-innovation-building-gets-cleanup-funding-from-city

I'd love to see the liner building on Monroe announced while this project is under construction. 

I drove by the other day when the sprinklers were going and was wondering when they were going to start tearing up that pretty grass.

It will be nice to have another building to watch rise, it could be better, but I'll take it.

It looks like MSU owns all of the property on the NW corner of College and Michigan except for Bagel Beanery.  I'm guessing these are for long range future development?

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This project is supposed to kick off early October.  Anyone heard any updates on when construction will start? 

Per the permit application:

Description:

Health Innovation Partners, LLC (HIP) has entered into a long-term ground lease with Michigan State University (MSU) to develop, build, and manage two structures on the MSU property located at the northeast corner of Michigan and Monroe. HIP has contracted with a construction joint venture team comprised of Rockford Construction and Walsh Construction; Smith Group is leading the design and engineering. A seven-story, approximately 200,000 square foot office building (a.k.a., Medical Innovation Building) will be constructed east of MSU's existing Grand Rapids Research Center (GRRC) building; a 600-space parking deck will also be erected north of the GRRC building. The address for the MIB is 109 Michigan Street and the address for the parking deck is 432 Monroe Avenue. Construction is scheduled to commence in early October 2019, with completion of the MIB in November 2020 and completion of the parking deck in April 2021.

Status:
Sep 25, 2019 - 

 

In Review

 

GRRC-Phase-II-Rendering-2.thumb.jpg.1a940ae4fa82063918b469b27ba5e0f2.jpg

 

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For all I know, this could be something mundane (like marking locations of sprinkler heads), but driving by MSU this morning, they had a ton of flags marked on both the Monroe side (parking structure area), and the location of the new building. 

Since this is supposed to start in October, maybe prep has begun?

Also, anyone notice the new sculpture in front of MSU? It's one of Secchia's founders sculptures, commemorating women in Grand Rapids who helped develop/test the perussis vaccine (whooping cough) in the 1930s. 

Joe

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3 hours ago, joeDowntown said:

For all I know, this could be something mundane (like marking locations of sprinkler heads), but driving by MSU this morning, they had a ton of flags marked on both the Monroe side (parking structure area), and the location of the new building. 

Since this is supposed to start in October, maybe prep has begun?

Also, anyone notice the new sculpture in front of MSU? It's one of Secchia's founders sculptures, commemorating women in Grand Rapids who helped develop/test the perussis vaccine (whooping cough) in the 1930s. 

Joe

From Mlive

 

Screen Shot 2019-10-10 at 12.32.38 PM.png

Edited by ctpgr34
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I have been keeping an eye on the MSU job board since the current research facility opened and I am surprised that the only two jobs that ever seem to be posted in GR are professor and research associate. It's as if both of these large facilities have no operations/administrative staff to speak of, unless such positions are only posted internally. I expected they would be bigger job producers than they've shown themselves to be. Hopefully the new building brings more to the table.

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43 minutes ago, GRLaker said:

I have been keeping an eye on the MSU job board since the current research facility opened and I am surprised that the only two jobs that ever seem to be posted in GR are professor and research associate. It's as if both of these large facilities have no operations/administrative staff to speak of, unless such positions are only posted internally. I expected they would be bigger job producers than they've shown themselves to be. Hopefully the new building brings more to the table.

I thought the new building was going to be private companies that help bring innovation to market.  Will it even be staffed by MSU?

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1 hour ago, GRLaker said:

I have been keeping an eye on the MSU job board since the current research facility opened and I am surprised that the only two jobs that ever seem to be posted in GR are professor and research associate. It's as if both of these large facilities have no operations/administrative staff to speak of, unless such positions are only posted internally. I expected they would be bigger job producers than they've shown themselves to be. Hopefully the new building brings more to the table.

It could also be they source a lot of the operational staff through a third party like Manpower.

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On 10/10/2019 at 1:22 PM, mielsonwheels said:

Don't want to ruin anybody's excitement over this project, what with it getting started soon, but there is a chance it could be shrinking by a floor.

Sad trombone. Although 5 floor, 6 floors, does it really make that much of a difference? 

 

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On 10/11/2019 at 1:35 PM, GRDadof3 said:

Sad trombone. Although 5 floor, 6 floors, does it really make that much of a difference? 

 

I'm surprised they dont add housing above (if that's possible) aimed at medical mile employees. 

 

Maybe I think too far outside the box. I just want to see more people interacting with the north side of downtown outside normal business hours as well as height.

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