The Redevelopment of Detroit

[LMich]

Three basement floors, which originally housed industrial printing equipment, will be refurbished as a parking garage.

Glad to hear they wont' have to build a parking garage across from it, and/or tear down some other historic building for parking. lol

That said, the average rental rate seems pretty high for downtown Detroit, which is still much in flux.

[DetroitMan]

Hostel to open in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood
By ELLEN CREAGER
Free Press Travel Writer
December 15, 2010

Hostel Detroit is to open in April at 2700 Spruce St., in sparsely occupied North Corktown, north of the site of long-gone Tiger Stadium. It will have nine bedrooms, a total of 20 bunk beds and four double beds. Rates are $25 a night for a single, $45 for a double.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/a...te=fullarticle

Eureka! Patent Office picks Detroit
By TODD SPANGLER
FREE PRESS WASHINGTON STAFF
December 16, 2010

The U.S. Patent and Trade Office is opening its first-ever satellite office in Detroit this summer and is expecting 100 patent examiners to help reduce the agency’s vast backlog of patent requests. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke – whose department includes the Patent Office – made the announcement this evening, saying Detroit will be the first in what could be a few satellite offices scattered around the country.

http://www.freep.com/article/2010121...-picks-Detroit

[Rizzo]

The hostel sounds great. Currently it's pretty expensive to stay in hotels downtown so the hostel offers a nice alternative.

[DetroitMan]

Restaurateurs see growing Corktown population as solid base for business
Nathan Skid
Crains Detroit
December 16, 2010

While six restaurants opening in a city with a 140 square-mile footprint isn't earth shattering news, it is a big deal when those restaurants are all located within a 1.5 square-mile area.

In fact, the density of the neighborhood is one of the biggest draws for restaurateurs weary of a heavy reliance on workers' lunch habits.

Slated to open next year are: Onassis Coney Island on the corner of Michigan and Trumbull avenues; Astro Coffee at 2124 Michigan Ave.; the Sugar House Bar at 2130 Michigan Ave.; Mercury Burger Bar in the former Mercury Coffee Bar space; an Italian eatery directly across the street from Nemo's; and the reopening of Baile Corcaigh at 1426 Bagley St.

http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article...olid-base-for#

[Warrenite84]

It's great news to hear Baile Corcaigh is reopening. I hope it remains a mid to upscale Irish food establishment. Everyone my wife and I brought there raved about the food.

For those who aren't familiar with it, the interior is dark paneled with stained glass lights above the bar, a stone fireplace, and an old fashioned cosy pub atmosphere.

[DetroitMan]

Detroit's London Chop House to reopen in early 2011, owners say

By JOHN GALLAGHER
Free Press Business Writer
December 18, 2010

The London Chop House, a legendary downtown eatery that closed in 1991, will reopen early in 2011, owner Nico Gatzaros and his father, developer Ted Gatzaros, said Friday.
Located on the lower level of the Murphy-Telegraph Building at 155 Congress, the London Chop House long reigned as one of Detroit's A-list restaurants, drawing the powerful and well-to-do for its cuisine and attentive service.

http://www.freep.com/article/2010121...reopen-in-2011

[LMich]

Not too shabby:

8 big metro-area hospitals to hire 14,000 workers this year

BY PATRICIA ANSTETT
DETROIT FREE PRESS MEDICAL WRITER

February 20, 2011

Nicole Everett had to wait two years just to get into a Baker College program to become an ultrasound technician. But her patience paid off last fall, when she began her new part-time job in the field with full benefits at Hutzel Women's Hospital in Detroit.

A former legal aide, she typifies job searchers who are turning to hospital careers that offer good pay with benefits and a promising outlook. And it's with good reason.

Health care leads every other occupational field for job growth in the next seven years, according to the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth.

...

Eight major hospital systems in southeastern Michigan plan to hire as many as 14,000 people this year, from doctors and nurses to chaplains, medical billing coders and information technology specialists.

The need for people with computer skills in health information technology is so great that "we can't train them fast enough," said Anne Rosewarne, president of the Michigan Health Council, a nonprofit Okemos organization. She warned, though, that given the complexities of many health care jobs, "there are no shortcuts" and "sometimes upward mobility is hard without further training and education."

...

Here are the current openings or projected number of new hires in 2011 by the eight systems, along with a few hot jobs they especially hope to fill. The list excludes positions such as doctors, nurses and therapists of all kinds that nearly all of the systems need.

• Trinity Health, Novi. Currently, 385 job openings, including 107 at the system's headquarters, including: attorneys, benefit specialists, clinical engineering technicians, senior-level process improvement consultants, managers, medical technologists, clerks, administrative aides and financial analysts. Information technology openings range from entry-level to highly experienced.

Trinity also is looking for clinical engineering technicians who service and maintain medical machines, as well as senior-level process improvement consultants.

• The University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor, which hired 2,000 people last year, is looking for clerks, technicians, aides, security guards, housekeepers, nutritionists, chaplains, laundry staff and information technology specialists.

Brand-new jobs include milk bank technicians, medical delivery pharmacy technician, researchers and several new positions in U-M's pediatric emergency department.

• Beaumont Hospitals, Royal Oak. Some 1,800 hires, including medical coders and documentation specialists who understand medical billing issues, audits and other types of document reviews.

• McLaren Health Care of Flint. Some 1,750 hires. Hot jobs: biomedical, nuclear medicine and other imaging technicians, physicists, insurance sales executives and general administrative positions.

• Henry Ford Health System, Detroit. More than 3,500 hires. Hot jobs: pharmacists, surgical technologists, medical lab technologists and radiographers.

• Detroit Medical Center, Detroit. Some 2,000 hires. Hot jobs: special procedure technicians, pharmacists and medical technologists.

• Oakwood Healthcare, Dearborn. As many as 1,300 hires. Hot jobs: cytotechnologist; medical illustrator and medical assistants.

• St. John Providence Health System, Warren, expects 1,800 new hires. Hot jobs: Medical assistants; health unit coordinators and patient care technicians.

...

[Rizzo]

This is really good news to hear. Alot of these hospitals are in urban areas too. I remember Saginaw awhile back had a plan to offer up renovated housing stock close by hospitals for medical professionals at super low prices. I wonder if a program can be developed to house many of these new hires.

[fishrose]

Originally Posted by Hayward

This is really good news to hear. Alot of these hospitals are in urban areas too. I remember Saginaw awhile back had a plan to offer up renovated housing stock close by hospitals for medical professionals at super low prices. I wonder if a program can be developed to house many of these new hires.

5,500 more jobs in the city is very good news. There is a program already in effect to draw Wayne State, DMC, and Henry Ford workers to Midtown and New Center. Hopefully the rent/homebuying incentives for hospital employees will cause many of them to move to Detroit.

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/in...medical_c.html

[DetroitMan]

Plans unveiled for $221-million Cobo Center facelift

In the years past, local leaders talked about boosting Cobo’s existing 700,000 square feet of exhibit space to as much as 1 million. The new plan doesn’t do that, but rather reconfigures Cobo’s existing spaces in major ways to carve out more than 100,000 square feet of extra exhibition space.

The plan converts the existing Cobo Arena to a 40,000-square-foot ballroom and exhibition space. About 25,000 square feet of new room will be added to the show floor in Cobo Center. A new three-story “signature space” atrium entrance will be added on the river side of Cobo.

Many of the changes will create what promises to be dramatic new vistas of Cobo from East Jefferson and from Windsor. On the Jefferson Avenue frontage, a big high-tech “media mesh” will be created on which images of the annual auto show and other current or future events can be displayed to passersby.

http://www.freep.com/article/20110302/NEWS01/110302022/Plans-unveiled-221-million-Cobo-Center-facelift?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

[fishrose]

No more plans to knock down the Joe? I wonder what this means for the much-speculated-upon new Wings arena...

[Folk313]

The real solution is to demo Cobo and the Joe, reconstruct the Lodge spur into a boulevard, and use reclaimed parcels to construct a convention center that doesn't depend on piecemeal, ad-hoc, layered reconstructions every 20 years like the current Cobo does.

It's nice to see some legitimate improvements to Cobo: windows, new public access, emphasis on the river. But the truth is that Cobo is a liability for the city, from an urban standpoint. If officials were truly critical, they would sacrifice the old-timer they have now and support something truly visionary, relying on solid, intelligent architecture to meet needs and control costs, with the bonus of removing infrastructure, removing Cobo as a blockade on the riverfront, and asserting a meaningfully progressive statement for downtown Detroit.

Sorry, but a gigantic video screen is not a meaningfully progressive statement for the city.

[fishrose]

Originally Posted by Folk313

The real solution is to demo Cobo and the Joe, reconstruct the Lodge spur into a boulevard, and use reclaimed parcels to construct a convention center that doesn't depend on piecemeal, ad-hoc, layered reconstructions every 20 years like the current Cobo does.

It's nice to see some legitimate improvements to Cobo: windows, new public access, emphasis on the river. But the truth is that Cobo is a liability for the city, from an urban standpoint. If officials were truly critical, they would sacrifice the old-timer they have now and support something truly visionary, relying on solid, intelligent architecture to meet needs and control costs, with the bonus of removing infrastructure, removing Cobo as a blockade on the riverfront, and asserting a meaningfully progressive statement for downtown Detroit.

Sorry, but a gigantic video screen is not a meaningfully progressive statement for the city.

I think you're exaggerating the negative impact Cobo has on the riverfront. Sure, it's somewhat of a monstrosity currently, look at the renderings. It looks much more pedestrian-friendly, especially along Atwater. Having to walk an extra two blocks (down to Atwater from Jefferson, then back up to Jefferson, or up to Fort St. and back down) hardly constitutes a "blockade."

Detroit doesn't need a bunch of buzzwords, we need pragmatic solutions to immediate problems. This renovation appears to be just that.

Where do you expect the money to come from for your "visionary" project? Detroit can't even keep the fucking streetlights on, and the Cobo authority isn't going to subsidize a massive restructuring of the downtown streetscape.

[Folk313]

wow fishrose, i didn't mean to get you riled up. firstly, it's not "my" "visionary" project. it's simply a more common sense idea. it's nobody's project. 221 million dollars is a lot of money for caking on some layers on a building that, at its core, is inept to be the type of facility that is obviously desired. if you're concerned about pragmatics, what do you make of a big ass video screen (for a city that can't keep the lights on) and $221 million for a large-scale renovation? is that really pragmatic? think about this fishrose--what is pragmatic for detroit? pragmatic is to reduce infrastructure liability in the future. in fact, that is exactly what detroit is attempting to plan at this moment. do you really think that the current Cobo, which will persist underneath the caked-on layers of the Cobo addition, will not be an infrastructure liability in the future? $221 million is a lot of money for cosmetic and prosthetic upgrades. it just doesn't seem like an investment that encourages meaningful spin-off in the city surrounding Cobo resulting from its reconstruction. at the end of the day, it's still an immense tumor in an already-dissected and corroded urban core.

[hudkina]

I think it looks fine. Cobo isn't as bad as a lot of people say. It is still one of the largest convention centers in the country and this renovation will address virtually every problem that currently exists. The "Cobo Arena" portion is awesome and the massive lobby facing the river will be a welcome addition.

[Jasoncw]

Visually I think it's pretty generic-new-convention-center looking (it even has that horrible carpeting that convention centers seem to have). It's too bad we still don't have the original Cobo. It was originally clad in white marble, with glassy sections being in green glass and aluminum frames.

As far as the function of the building goes though, it looks like they did a really great job sorting out the interior. The atrium seems to really solve a lot of problems.


I think the ideal project would be a complete rebuild like the one Folk313 described. But a few years ago the cost was going to be a billion dollars to rebuild it. And I think the quality of the design we'd expect would cost more than that, not only for the better building(s) but for all of the infrastructural work. If the city had one or two billion dollars to spend on something, I'd rather they spend it on transportation infrastructure. But Cobo only got 221 million.

Cobo is an asset though, and not a liability. It was a bad facility and it was poorly managed, but recently it's been able to attract a lot more conventions than in the past. In a lot of ways Detroit is declining (and even with the decline it's still a large and important city), but in other ways its improving. It's worked at becoming more appealing to conventions and it's been successful.

[Rizzo]

What you are seeing here is a practical solution, and a pretty damn good one too considering I never thought this project would move forward, and the architecture is actually decent. Seriously, the most I was expecting was a couple coats of paint, demolishing the arena and maybe some updated ballrooms, but this goes beyond it.

While I think the giant video screens are getting to be cliche, it's at least an update to the rubiks cube facade that screamed early 80's for the past few decades.

------------------------

Oh this takes me back. My project for my senior year of architecture school was COBO. I chose to level the thing entirely, push it closer to the river, and stretch it lengthwise along the river, leveling the Joe. I had Hart Plaza wrap up over top of it with breathtaking views of the city and the river. With the shift in footprint, I was able to restore the street grid and create urban connections and architectural scale that would attract and hold a retail and restaurant environment, anchored by the hotels and office buildings nearby.

The spatial arrangement had excellent clarity, a definitive rectangular extension of Hart Plaza and a hard edge where city met park. Think of the way Chicago's buildings meet Milennium Park. I wanted it to be like the Convention center, freeways, and parking decks never existed. Oh yes....the parking decks. I tore down ALL OF THEM. No parking deck was spared!!! Since I double decked part of the exhibition space with 200' spans, I needed extremely deep trusses to support heavy loads of convention space above. I was able to bury 3 levels of parking within the plenum space of the truss, while replacing all the lost parking and then some.

I never would have thought of adding a screen. That's not architecture, it's advertising. At the end of the day when the screen shuts off, it's just a dark array of lights. Again, that's not architecture.

It's interesting to hear people's criticisms. While I totally agree, my solution to similar ideas would have cost in the billions. But it was architecture school, we didn't have to worry about that. The area has ridiculous potential if the convention center were to be built from scratch and alot of money was available, but there's no way it's going to happen. Is COBO a good building, architecturally? No, it's terrible. Convention Centers look awful in downtowns anyway. They are suburban structures and tend to feel disjointed from the urban fabric However, it's inherently profitable downtown, so it's here to stay. Kind of makes me thankful McCormick is so far south of the loop so it wouldn't kill any good urban neighborhoods with its boxy white structures.

Idealy, I would like to see more cities build their main convention centers on the periphery close to expressways, not downtown. Larger cities can still provide supplemental space downtown, but make sure it's hidden. There's a fairly decent sized convention center in the Chicago loop beneath the Illinois Center on Michigan Ave, yet no one would ever know it's there. But it's always very busy.

My COBO project is backed up on a hard drive somewhere. I'll have to dig it up.

[LMich]

Originally Posted by Folk313

The real solution is to demo Cobo and the Joe, reconstruct the Lodge spur into a boulevard, and use reclaimed parcels to construct a convention center that doesn't depend on piecemeal, ad-hoc, layered reconstructions every 20 years like the current Cobo does.

That's kind of my thought, too. It's putting lipstick on a pig of an interior/floorplan, which is the real problem. Maybe it's really nice makeup, but it's still on a pig, ultimately.

For what they have to work with, monetarily, it's not bad; it's just not nearly enough. But hey, if it's good enough for the NAIAS, why should I complain.

[EuphoricOctopus]

Originally Posted by LMich

That's kind of my thought, too. It's putting lipstick on a pig of an interior/floorplan, which is the real problem. Maybe it's really nice makeup, but it's still on a pig, ultimately.

For what they have to work with, monetarily, it's not bad; it's just not nearly enough. But hey, if it's good enough for the NAIAS, why should I complain.

Good. I thought I would be the only one thinking this. I love how they expanded it for the future.

[fishrose]

Originally Posted by Folk313

wow fishrose, i didn't mean to get you riled up. firstly, it's not "my" "visionary" project. it's simply a more common sense idea. it's nobody's project. 221 million dollars is a lot of money for caking on some layers on a building that, at its core, is inept to be the type of facility that is obviously desired. if you're concerned about pragmatics, what do you make of a big ass video screen (for a city that can't keep the lights on) and $221 million for a large-scale renovation? is that really pragmatic? think about this fishrose--what is pragmatic for detroit? pragmatic is to reduce infrastructure liability in the future. in fact, that is exactly what detroit is attempting to plan at this moment. do you really think that the current Cobo, which will persist underneath the caked-on layers of the Cobo addition, will not be an infrastructure liability in the future? $221 million is a lot of money for cosmetic and prosthetic upgrades. it just doesn't seem like an investment that encourages meaningful spin-off in the city surrounding Cobo resulting from its reconstruction. at the end of the day, it's still an immense tumor in an already-dissected and corroded urban core.

You didn't get me even close to "riled up." My point is the Cobo authority has $226 million left in funding, and plans to tear down and rebuild were projected to cost over four times that much. The state government isn't going to allocate them any more funds, and good luck getting Oakland or Macomb to chip in. Detroit can't afford to make up the difference, so a complete rebuild is out of the question.

You do realize that this is not being funded by the City of Detroit, right? Cobo is managed by a regional authority with representatives from Wayne, Macomb, and Oakland Counties and funding from those counties and the state. The video screen isn't a waste of money for the city because it isn't the city's money to waste. It directly caters to Cobo's main event, the NAIAS, and that's okay in my opinion. I can also see them doing some very cool things with it during DEMF/Movement.

You say that this won't create "meaningful spinoff," and maybe you're right, but it depends on how you define your terms. The improvements on Atwater and the riverfront immediately make the area more walkable. That's a positive step. Sure the parking decks and the freeway spur layout aren't ideal, but are they really getting in the way of anything right now? They make it a pain to get to The Joe (solved by the new Atwater improvements) and the Riverfront Towers condos, whose tenants would arguably prefer to be isolated. Everything else in the immediate vicinity is easily accessible via Fort St. Even if they had the billion+ to tear down Cobo and rebuild it, the lots where the old parking decks were would sit vacant for years.

This is a practical solution given the current state of the market and the funding they have available. All they hyperbole and metaphors in the world won't change that.