Mobile Development Thread

[nimsjus]

I hate the idea of shopping further west. The city and metro are both trying to move that way and this would only further the sprawl. Plus downtown/mistown are actually in the center of the metro area so everyone may be more inclined to shop there if it is a quality project. Why not redevelop the old malls into more modern towncenters or just refurbished expanded indoor mall (maybe even consider combining the two into one large shopping destination). All the cool cities are opening modern, downtown/midtown, new urbanist, towncenters. All the suburby,sprawly cities/towns are opening big sprawling outdoor shopping venues. The problem is if the group does not want to abide by restrictions placed on the development by the city (style,scope,zoning, etc), then they will just move five feet further away in the county where they can do whatever they please. That would be depressing...

[bayourat 15]

A couple things.....






1)The condos on water street are waiting on air rights. what the hell is that?

2)Oliver ,the developer, is looking to build an office tower also.


3) Rode through downtown again last night , and Wow! Every building was lit up. I could feel the progress


4) Second Cruise ship, in order to get a bigger ship they must dredge out pinto pass for a bigger turning basin . I was told tug boats can t assist the ships , i didn t neaux that.

A parking garage is needed. Put it across the street at that dump called the Mobile Civic Center.


5)Move Labor Finders away from Bienville Square it seems to attract bums and thugs to the park and the surrounding area.

6)Royal St. is looking good , lots of development going on.

7) The RSA Tower .....wow! ...Had to wear my Costa Del Mar 's to see the crown. Wish it was lit up red ,white and blue


8) May be just me ,but when you look at the skyline from a distance it is divided in two. One cluster , the gov. plaza , the admiral sims hotel (whats up with the second tower?) and the redone Lafayette Hotel. And then u have the Rsa tower , Amsouth building , Riverview and others.
The property which sits in the middle (the old Mobile Co. Courthouse) would ajoin the two. I just hope the county decides to put a Highrise condo( check out Baton Rouge's downtown center piece called i think River ridge) with lots of retail space. There is room also for the Mardis Gras theme park if they would build it taller(40stories) and not outward. This would compromise the arguement , Condo or Park?

9) The Riverview, they are working nonstop gutting that baby out.
Work on the 100ft or more crown should begin First of the year.


10) Geauxing to get ''Wiskey Bent and Hell Bound" tonite at the Hank Williams Jr. concert in Orange Beach!

Y'all have a great 3day weekend! And Pray for our country!

[BlessedMobile]

Bayourat...the air rights issue is coming from CSX because the Water Street Landing would be partially over the tracks.

[bayourat 15]

I don t see a future for this project . do you?

[Brown Duckz]

Costa Del Mar

[Bama_75]

Why not? The convention center is built over the tracks.

[nimsjus]

Press Register Real Estate column mentioned several dowtown properties...
Sullivan-St. Clair Market ing Public Relations and local investors plan to spend $1.6 million in the purchase and renovation of a 20,000-square-foot building at 202 Government St., at Conception Street, according to Rich Sullivan , president of Sullivan-St. Clair. The public relations firm will relocate there in January, he said. The ground floor will be enclosed for parking, and the second and third floors will be offices. Zito Russell Architects designed the offices, and the contractor is Paladin Con struction Group . Grubb & El lis Peebles & Cameron handled the transaction.
A local investor paid $423,000 for a vacant lot at 55 N. Section St., at the corner of Magnolia Avenue, in downtown Fairhope, according to Blake White of Roberts Brothers in Daphne.
A 5,670-square-foot building at the corner of North Conception and St. Michael streets was purchased by an investor for $205,000, according to John Vallas of Saad & Vallas Realty Group , who represented the buyer. Part of the building was formerly a deli and yogurt shop. The buyer will renovate it for retail and office use on the first floor and put residences on the second, Vallas said. John Peebles of Grubb & Ellis Peebles & Cameron worked for the seller.
The city of Mobile is trying to sell the four-story City Hall North annex at 350 St. Joseph St., via sealed bids, according to Bill Demouy , director of the city's real estate division. The 47,650-square-foot building with a basement on more than 1 acre, also fronts Water Street. The bids will be opened June 13 at 4 p.m., he said.

[nimsjus]

I hope the guy gets to continue his good work. That area is all we have left of our most historic area. It needs to be saved before it is lost. Who thought it was a good idea to plant the Civic Center and the Interstate on top of what used to be our most historic neigborhoods. Now we have on little row of buildings surrounded by the interstate overpasses next to a hokey fake version of an old fort that is poorly maintained.

Fort Conde Village project hits snag
Developer ready to restore more houses, but lease with city expires Sunday, May 27, 2007By KATHY JUMPERReal Estate Editor
Larry Posner has renovated nine of the 13 buildings in historic Fort Conde Village off Royal Street in the last eight years and has the money to restore more, but his lease with the city has expired.

"The lease says that if the buildings are not restored by a certain time, they revert back to the city," said the Poughkeepsie, N.Y.-based developer with an office in Mobile. "I'm not willing to restore somebody else's building."

He said he has not been able to get city officials to return his calls.

"The city communicates to others and it gets back to me," he said. "Nobody says no, they just don't call."

The lease ended at the end of 2006, and the city kept extending it in good faith, according to Al St. Clair, who was a city consultant when Posner leased the land in May 1998. St. Clair now manages the Alabama Cruise Terminal.

Posner's lease agreement with the city was to have spanned 50 years with a payment of $100,000 a year or 5 percent of the gross revenue from the development, whichever is less. The contract has four 10-year options to extend the lease, the city's real estate office said.

"What's frustrating is that there's not a waiting line to do these buildings," St. Clair said.

Posner said he has the money and is ready to start work on the 1830s Hall-Ford house and adjacent 1850s Spear-Barter house on St. Emanuel Street.

The city wants Posner to complete those buildings, according to Al Stokes, chief of staff for Mobile Mayor Sam Jones. The city's legal department must first review the public/private venture documents, he said.

"I can appreciate that he's a little frustrated, but the wheels of government sometimes grind slow, and we've been tied up with ThyssenKrupp," Stokes said.

ThyssenKrupp AG announced May 11 that it plans to build a $3.7 billion, 2,700-worker steel mill in north Mobile County.

Stokes said he plans to meet with the developer this coming week. But the lead city attorney on the case is on vacation for two weeks so it's not likely that any action will be taken, he said.

"I feel optimistic that we'll work through this," Stokes said.

Posner said he has invested $1.3 million in Fort Conde buildings so far. Holmes & Holmes Architects in Mobile designed the project, including a cluster of houses dating from 1836 to 1914 which were renovated and now leased as offices..

"I still believe in the project," Posner said. "It gives me a lot of pleasure to see the buildings fixed up. But I'm not going to go forward unless the city cooperates -- and gives me a green light and a couple of smiles."

[Musicisright]

Originally Posted by timothyncrystal

i never said that waterstreet will be the highest.

timothyncrystal said:

The one [condo] on water street will not list it's status, but stated that will be the tallest in the south for residential towers...So there you go.. I know my stuff. Read the news paper in the real estate section, and you can find out a lot of information....

[Musicisright]

^ But you do have to back up your statements on here with proof. If you don't, few will take you seriously and you'll lose a lot of trust if you get caught in a lie like you did. There's no room for blatant falsehoods.

That being said, I hope we can continue with the discussion about Mobile development, an issue that I'm sure is important to both of us.

[SouthSky]

I thought this would be of interest for some of you all:
"St. Louis Street Concept Plan"
http://www.downtownmobile.org/images...uisconcept.pdf

[BamaGrad04]

Yeah, I saw that a couple of months ago; real interesting. Although it's just conceptual, it would be great to see several blocks transformed into something like that.

[SouthSky]

We desperately need most of the additions cited in this traffic report for the metroplex.

http://www.downtownmobile.org/images...al__070308.pdf
(Its a rather large pdf, by the way)

[SouthSky]

Sorry for the double post, but here is another rendering of the Hampton Inn destined for North Royal:

[BamaGrad04]

Where did you find that rendering????

[bayourat 15]

Today is the day that the city leaders look at new plans for the downtown area. The master plan will be decided late summer.(string of pearls 2)


hopefully more highrises! and tear down the civic center the last thing good thing to happen there was the Hank JR. concert back in 95

[SouthSky]

Originally Posted by BamaGrad04

Where did you find that rendering????

Downtown Mobile Alliance's website.

http://downtownmobile.org

[Exodus]

They need to remove that thing on the corner.

[nimsjus]

Another historic downtown rennovation completed...
Ten million dollars and more than two years later, Mobile's main library reopens today
Thursday, May 31, 2007By JEFF AMYStaff Reporter
After two years in shoebox-sized exile, the Mobile Public Library returns home with a dedication ceremony at 10 a.m. today.

The main library, now renamed for the late Ben May, has doubled in size after $10 million in renovations and expansion.

And users, at least, are ready.

Shelves were already filling up with books and videos that users have requested, even as library employees and workmen scurried to finish the building in time for opening day.

Overall, library officials hope the new facility will bring more people in to borrow books, borrow video and audio recordings and use computers.

"What it should mean is we're going to have more people who are going to come in and use the library," said Spencer Watts, director of the Mobile Public Library.

The changes are evident just inside the door. Instead of winding through a back passageway into the building, there's a new main entrance facing the parking lot to the south.

Inside, visitors will find a new circulation desk, plus a cafe that will be run by Creative Catering.

With the size of the building having grown to more than 49,000 square feet, there's more room for almost everything.

The children's story room has escaped from a former storage closet into something that can truly be called a room. There's also now a department for older children and teens.

And back magazines and newspapers have moved upstairs, uniting with the reference desk.

The main reading room has been painted to recapture its 1928 appearance, when the George Rogers-designed building opened. Bernheim Hall also flashed back to its original look, getting beige carpet and seat coverings.

The vacated magazine department, next to Bernheim Hall, is now a meeting room for groups seeking smaller or more informal quarters than the auditorium.


Before the expansion, computers and desks were likely to be crammed into hallways and corners of the library.

Now, a whole room on the second floor, formerly home to adult fiction, is set aside for computers. Overall, there will be 65 computers with Internet connections, up from 27 in the old building. Also more than doubling are stand-alone chairs as well as desks for reading, going from 70 to 161.

The window next to a second-floor reading desk in the new portion of the building is Watts' favorite place in the new part of the building. It looks out over the Church Street Graveyard, whose northern wall is only feet away from the southern edge of the addition.

"I love the view of the graveyard from here," Watts said.

The budget for the expansion ballooned from $6.6 million to almost $10 million, in part because of the increase in construction costs after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. That storm was also one reason the work took a year longer than planned.

Of the $10 million, Watts said $4.5 million has been raised from private donors, including $1 million from the Ben May Memorial Fund, $500,000 from the J. L. Bedsole Foundation and $400,000 from the Dr. Monte L. Moorer Foundation.

May, a businessman and founder of Gulf Lumber Co., died in 1972. He left his fortune to the Ben May Charitable Trust, an endowment that was worth $12.4 million at the end of 2005. The trust supports the memorial fund, which is administered by the Community Foundation of South Alabama. Cost overruns forced the library to raise $400,000 in recent months to be used to complete the parking lot running along Washington Avenue and to do more landscaping. That work won't be done until the end of the summer, meaning that until then, most visitors arriving by car will have to park on gravel or dirt.

The main library relocated into the Mobile Civic Center's Expo Hall at the beginning of construction, but Katrina ripped off part of that building's roof.

That forced another downsize into rented space across the street from the main library, a 3,400-square-foot, 20,000-volume operation dubbed Mini Main.

The reopened main building will house 160,000 volumes out of 590,000 in the overall system. And, unlike the pre-renovation days when intricate maneuvers were required to put books back onto crammed shelves, there will be room for growth.

"We had reached the point where every new book that came in meant an old book had to leave the collection," Watts said.

While every branch in the system will probably have the latest bestseller from Dan Brown or J. K. Rowling, less common titles are most likely to reside at 701 Government St., the system's primary reference library. "A lot of times, when we get down to a single volume for a title, this could be the place where it could very well be," Watts said.

Library employees are conscious of the role that the building has played in the lives of many local book lovers and hope that its renovation will return it to its position as a temple to reading.

"For a lot of Mobilians, this was the library," Watts said. "A lot of people, as children, were introduced to books and reading here. When they think of a library, the image of this building is what pops into their mind."

[pkp]

That site is great - here is another item I found there - this is a street seriously needing some TLC:

http://downtownmobile.org/images/new...uisconcept.pdf