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Originally Posted by Arch City
This proposed project will be near the large Washington University in St. Louis Medical Center and the newly redesigned Kingshighway Blvd./I-64 single-point interchange.
Hotel developer Charles Drury and associates gave the public on Tuesday an early glimpse of their still-evolving proposal for two 16-story hotels overlooking Forest Park along Kingshighway, just south of the newly opened Kingshighway and Interstate 64 interchange.
The approximately $100 million hotel project would be the largest in terms of size and expense for Drury Development Corp. since the family-owned business built its first hotel in Cape Girardeau, Mo., in 1969.
The Kingshighway project would include two hotels, each with 345 rooms, three levels of underground parking and some surface parking. It would cover four acres, some of it on land no longer needed for the highway interchange that Drury Development wants to buy from the Missouri Department of Transportation.
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I gotta say that this project is lame and I hope it doesn't happen so that eventually a better use of the land can be realized. The project does a poor job of addressing the street (it doesn't at all, really), and features a lot of surface parking w/ a green space "strip" that will never be used. Can you imagine walking next to this thing? It would be unpleasant, and I'm sure any pedestrian in the neighborhood would choose the other side of the street to walk, next to two-story homes & businesses. Plus, the renderings are teh suck. Looks like they were designed in a video game, like Sim City. I know it's an early design, but come on, architects will often work for free with the hopes of landing a job and can provide an attractive napkin sketch to sell an idea, at the very least. Lastly, this project will require the demolition of a handful of historic brick homes. This is a step in the wrong direction.