ypsi~dixit

Very nice. It's good to see Ann Arbor leaders finally starting to really embrace density in the past couple years.

OWS residents won't be terribly thrilled, I'll wager.

Ooooh! I'll have to remember to go Recycle Ann Arbor after they start demolition. The dome would make an excellent top for the grain silo I'm building in the backyard. (I'm starting to stock pile my chicken feed.)

I too was wondering about the stained glass and the dome--even the bricks could be salvaged. Someone please tell me that they won't just destroy it all. Please?

Stockpile that chicken feed! Once the chicken initiative is rammed through Council, everyone will be allowed to have up to 50 backyard chickens! A poultry tsunami!

Actually, it doesn't come close to the Old West Side, which stops at Huron... the Old Fourth Ward is rather nearby, though.

Waaaa . . .

It'll be interesting to see how it changes the character of Kerrytown, if at all. I do wonder where the cars will go--the one area surface lot, behind Aut Bar, is usually full, though on non-market days there's always spaces in the Kerrytown lot.

Waaaa . . .
This "teardown" mentality has got to stop! (I hate the word teardown actually. New lingo for the why-value-history age.)

As people's attitudes toward teardowns have changed, so has the vocabulary used to describe it. "Redevelopment," "reconstruction" and "rebuilds" are words used, . . . avoiding "the emotional connotations associated with terms such as teardowns."
--Janice Rosenberg, Chicago Tribune, 30 July 2006

(looks around) is there a cat around here? :)

One does wonder if the church could not have been remodeled into condos. Surely it could have, like the Armory, thus preserving that lovely old building, or that old white church on the West Side (?) that they remodeled into condos.

Better enjoy that beautiful building while you can. 'Cause it's doomed to "aesthetic site refurbishment."

The cars will go underground - the project involves 200 or so underground parking spaces, as I understand it.

The problem I see with remodelling it into condos is that lofts are something you do with *cheap* real estate. The layout of a church is nothing like the layout of condos, and it would have required a lot of expense to carve it up - and, anyways, would you be much happier if they kept the roofline but punched all the walls out to put in as many windows as one wants in a home?

I do like the building, but I consider it a victim of land values. I have no doubt that the land was expensive enough that nothing could have been economically built from the shell. I'm told, similarly, that the Armory is a "failed" project - the developer went bankrupt. The Orthodox church "surely" could have been rehabbed - but economically? Development is, of course, a business, and must involve some net profit.

The only way I see that the building could have been saved in a redevelopment would be to do it as part of a larger site plan - Peter Allen's Kingsley Lane project, at Kingsley and Ashley, is going to incorporate a pre-war building on the site, building next to and behind it. The church here might have been incorporated into a larger site the same way, with the other part soaking up some of the cost of rehab...but the earlier site plan that came for this site involved replacing two or three houses adjacent to the church, and was shot down in part based on saving those houses. Maybe that doomed the church...

Murph: That's an informative comment. I see your point about how form follows land values.

(sigh) still a shame, though. Though you're right, it's likely the church would likely have been carved up & windowed into a permutation unlike its former shape, so...

I just don't have much to say recently. Such is life. I've basically been doing nothing. Basically nothing seems worth bothering with. Oh well.