urbanSTL

That sounds like a good ballpark village tenant to me.

Another sample museum to look at might be the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in KC.

I blogged the basic proposal.

Moorlander wrote:A St. Louis or Missouri sports history museum would be great.

for giggles check out my outdated blog. (back when I had time to visualize my dreams.)
Scroll down to bottom--

http://jamesshadrach.blogspot.com/

^ Nice! Bring it back to life!

According to the Building Blocks column on StLToday, that'll be $230M over the next 20 years, and it'll come straight from KC's coffers. Tax revenue for something else? Nope, got to go to these bonds KC supported with its full faith and credit.

Story: http://www.stltoday.com/business/column ... 2bc8b.html

I remember Cordish talked about wanting StL to fully support, with "full faith and credit", the costs of BPV, which was eventually denied them (Darlene Green, great job!). That's one of the reasons for the giant delay we have: StL denied the "full faith and credit" of the city's tax revenues.

Why is our country's economy so effed up?
Because we lived for years on the belief that real estate would only appreciate & can always be refinanced.

We dodged a bullet that would've bled us for years. We were lucky.

Side note/recommendation, read The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis. As well as explaining how we all got here with the markets, it very well tells the story of how everyone fell in love with real estate & getting loans to pay for real estate, and then it all falls down. While the most economic blood has been from personal residences, commercial projects like PBV relied on the same credit foundations. Thankfully the City sidestepped the pervasive groupthink. Great book.

Still, the site's very developable (hint hint, Cordish & DeWitt, get to work already).

This pic in the KC Star article of the KC P&L district looks like a place in 1983. Yikes.

i'm glad we dodged the bullet on a number of fronts, but urban design wise, i really dont care for developments with a sort of complex feel. that picture really does look like something from the 80s, something that wouldnt age well and would start going downhill in the mid 90s. i feel like any development at ballpark village should be flexible to different uses over a long timespan (cordish doesnt care about this)...something that incorporates modern design with the flexibility of straight forward urbanity. in other words, buildings shouldnt be designed to cater entirely to say dining, it should be able to accomodate anything quite easily, and age well with modern simplicity and quality material. the streets and sidewalks shouldnt look wildly different than the rest of downtown, clean and well lighted, with more trees, elegant yet modern. in other words, well, like a german city. st. louis could learn a lot from berlin, instead of chasing these silly trends. badly done historicism and stupid festival design (or whatever) makes me feel like the vomit scene in Team America...

IOW, nothing happened nor has happened. Got it.

Downtown2007 wrote:Admittedly, Dewitt says progress on the 7-parcel development next to Busch Stadium was effectively halted for over a year. Now he's confident the time is right to revisit negotiations with potential tenants and financing banks.

Halted for over a year? How about for over 3 years?

Downtown2007 wrote:"You know there's been some good development news downtown, in particular with the Kiel Opera House deal closing and we think it may be time again," says Dewitt.

Translation: our risk is lower

Actually building this project, per the earlier specs, would go a long way. Bill, I hope you get it. And consider that, even if it is a few basis points above what you otherwise would've taken before the credit collapse, how much in goodwill have you lost?

No matter what, make this happen.

^lol...why shouldn't it be?

Again, I'm just a somewhat educated, casual observer of these commercial real estate deals, but from the beginning I have always thought the land next to Busch Stadium was some of the most premium real estate around. Who wouldn't want to be associated with the Cardinals brand? Especially in this region, this should be "the" spot to be.

I'm really hoping that all of the short circuits will result in the right buildings going up on the site.

What corporate executive wouldn't want to have an office that's got killer views in to and of the (lower case 'c') cathedral of the Cardinals????? Add in the other myriad of renewal projects downtown and, well........