[I meant to post about this earlier, but I've been out of town. Sorry for the extremely short notice...]

Today at 4:45 the DowncityDesign Review Committee will be hearing a request to demolish the old bank facade at 35 Weybosset Street (next to the arcade, in the Architectual Ruins District.)

If you recall, back before the bubble burst the OneTen was supposed to be luxury condos and the tallest building in the state.  When the market/insanity collapsed, the idea was scaled back, and then it was rumored that luxury hotel chain W was going to put a hotel there instead.  (I liked this idea, since W lobbies are always well-stocked with shiny green apples.  Stealing is okay sometimes, as long as it’s from a hotel and fruit is involved.) more »

David Brussat had a wonderful column in the ProJo yesterday about the sweet little Arnold Building on Washington Street (the shallowest building downtown) which suffered a fire last month.  Apparently the damage wasn’t too terrible and there is hope that it can be saved, and not turned into another parking lot. His larger point is a good one, that “Parking lots are assassins of downtown.”

Buildings surrounded by parking lots tend to have down-market tenants. The more that a downtown’s buildings have been replaced by parking lots, the easier it is to find parking — and the harder it is to find a reason to park.

He’s exactly right. I go downtown frequently, night and day, and I have never not found a parking space eventually; and often right away and very near my target. The people who say they never go downtown because there’s no parking never go anywhere anyway. And there is so parking.

The Projo’s reporting on the proposal for a Ferris-wheel-ish parking structure on Weybosset St:

PROVIDENCE — A Florida company is proposing what may soon be the strangest part of the Providence skyline: a pair of 13-story, translucent parking towers that operate like Ferris wheels, loading cars at the ground level and then moving them high up into the structure for storage.

The Weybosset Street project would be the first public parking garage of its kind in the continental United States, said Douglas Dodd, chief operations officer of Mechanical Vertical Parking, Inc., the West Palm Beach, Fla., company backing the project.

Here’s footage of one of these things at work:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8plkhJM4Qwo&feature=related]

The 216 spaces that the project would house amount to maybe 10% of those that downtown needs right now. (It’s an awkward situation: I’d rather people not drive, but in order to make downtown a place where people want to work and live — which will mean more density there, and a better public transit system — we need more parking first.)

Greater City Providence has some great/disheartening picture (via google’s creepy Street View) of Providence’s burgeoning asphalt jungle.