This move seems to be kind of another cheap out. Just a thought, but way not move City Hall to the YMCA building? It is already stripped down, and is I think much larger than the Lake Trust building. I was looking at the Y the other day and it is actually a nice building all brick with sandstone details. The Lake Trust is just another 70's cast cement office building of no significance architecturally. The folks who built the old stone Romanesque castle, and the Mid-century modern building with it's big plaza were building something to be proud of. Moving our city hall to a plain old 40 year office building seems cheap and unimaginative. Is that the image we want? It's just like that TV commercial,why do we have to be "settlers" when it comes to these things? Of course it would help that area of S. Washington to have City Hall down there, I guess we should be glad he does not want to move it out to the empty buildings on S.Pennsylvania or maybe that empty building on Holmes at S. Washington that would be even cheaper. If we can't afford a new building I think we could do some basic repairs to the current city hall now, and wait until we can afford to build a proper building for our City Hall,that would be a better way to go.
The awkward floor plates in no way would be conducive for a modern city hall usage for the former YMCA building. It is larger than Lake Trust, but not all that much, and still only about half the size of the existing city hall. A lot of that square foot is probably in the gym; it's a really awkwardly carved up building, mostly because it was built for a specific use.
I actually like the Lake Trust location for a new city hall complex quite a bit, I suggested it earlier in this thread (it was my second favorite location after the Eyde/Constitution Hall block). The reason I like it is the potential benefit to the area; it's in a relatively desolate part of downtown, but if you add over 1000 workers there (assuming a full scale move as proposed before) it would seriously change the landscape, it would give potential restaurants and retailers in the 400-600 blocks of Washington a much better chance at survival. Whether it's this or something else, a large office building would be very beneficial down this way. Sure the building is nothing to look at but they can reclad the outside, they'll already be building an annex of unknown size (probably as large or larger than the original building).
Now what I don't get is why they'd leave behind the police and courts, I assume they'd still be moving in the near future. This leaves a lot of questions, when will the courts and police move out of city hall and where will they go? Is a new county courts complex still on the table? Will all of this be placed on the Lake Trust block or somewhere else?
I'll await the State of the City address for more details before allowing myself too much of an opinion. For now I'll just say I very much like the idea of moving a large chunk of workers to this block, in that sense it would seem a good use of City funds.
All that being said, I agree with you about to benefit to the area of S Washington. Maybe they will make something decent there. I like the location of City Hall in a way facing, or confronting the more powerful State Capitol building.
I like the idea of city hall facing the Capitol also, but I don't think it's a must. It's why I still like the parking lot east of Constitution Hall as a potential location even though it'd be much less beneficial to downtown.
Yes it sure would be great to have that surface lot built on. I was looking at googlemaps, and it is kind of sad to see how much of the land there is still black top. The lot right in the middle of the whole complex behind the Hannah building is really bad. In terms of City Hall I think the Lake building would "help" downtown more like you say.
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Now what I don't get is why they'd leave behind the police and courts, I assume they'd still be moving in the near future. This leaves a lot of questions, when will the courts and police move out of city hall and where will they go? Is a new county courts complex still on the table? Will all of this be placed on the Lake Trust block or somewhere else?
I'll await the State of the City address for more details before allowing myself too much of an opinion. For now I'll just say I very much like the idea of moving a large chunk of workers to this block, in that sense it would seem a good use of City funds.