Monday, March 05, 2007

Open Thread #17

The last open thread currently has over 50 comments...you guys did good! Can you do it again???

8 comments:

GrandForksGuy said...

I recently heard that the new UND Parking Garage is behind schedule. Has anybody else heard that? Just by looking at the structure, I wouldn't get that impression. The new housing certainly seems to be coming along.

Anonymous said...

could someone update me about what's going on with the old Civic Center?

dale said...

Was glad to see that the city went with the significantly better "Plan 2" for the welcoming sign on Gateway. Or at least that's what WDAZ reported tonight.

GrandForksGuy said...

"could someone update me about what's going on with the old Civic Center?br/>
Well, seemingly not very much. A few months ago there was talk that the city may have finally found a tenant, but nothing ever came of it. Amazon has supposedly talked about leaving the Industrial Park for a new location elsewhere in the city and there have been rumors that they were looking at the Cicic Auditorium, but nothing ever came of that.

I think the best use for that building would be a smaller sized grocery store...maybe some type of gourmet grocery store, if possible. We want people to live downtown, but there is no grocery store located there. I think a grocery store would be a GREAT fit for the Civic Auditorium. If I had any say, I would put a grocery store on the main level and put offices on the bottom floor.

If it ever turns out that the Civic Auditorium is just torn down, I hope a high density development would be built on the property. I want to see much higher density developments downtown and taller buildings too. However, the "main" downtown area (from the river to Fifth Street) doesn't have much space for large developments and tall buildings would look kind of out of place there. I think the area around the Civic Auditorium, the Metropolitan Building (now US Bank), and the Townhouse Hotel could become a high density area filled with taller buildings. At least, that's what I would like to see happen in that part of town...

GrandForksGuy said...

"Was glad to see that the city went with the significantly better "Plan 2" for the welcoming sign on Gateway. Or at least that's what WDAZ reported tonight."

They did? Thank God.

Anonymous said...

I still think Amazon would be a great tenant in either the Civic Center or in two of the corporate buildings.

Anonymous said...

In order for the city to completely vacate the civic, they would have to build some other type of storage for the police and fire departments...which I haven't heard boo about lately. (the civic is currently storage for lots of recent "homeland security" items that the police and fire depts have) It would probably cost the city more to build a facility for that than to keep the civic heated and in the state it is in now. There was talk of a joint police/fire training center in the industrial park, but nothing has been said about it lately.

Anonymous said...

Did anybody notice yesterday on the homepage of The Herald's website, The Herald had a story about local crime going down, and the feeds from WDAZ had a story about crime rates going up? It used to be a ritual for me to read the paper daily. Alas, that's long gone. The Herald has become a propaganda piece for the city of Grand Forks (nothing new here, it has for a long, long time).