Gallery First & Tenth | 60m | 19s | Truman

If it's intended as a restaurant (actual restaurant, not a coffee shop) then it's usually planned as that with kitchen exhaust included. Adding a 2 hour shaft that goes up through the building is a big expense, so if they want an actual restaurant I doubt they will take anything else, unless it sits empty for a year or two.
 
A permanent sidewalk widening into the parking lane on 10 Ave and 1 Street would go a long way here to address the issues. Or if the building is set back from the street farther than the current building. Ideally both. Or most ideally - keep the existing retail frontage and small format, bolt the fancy new tower on the top and widen the sidewalk by 1 lane on all sides.

Broken record alert for all my other sidewalk complaining posts - if this development does anything good, my number one priority would be to fix this abomination and anti-pedestrian disgrace of 1 Street:

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Again, on what must be the narrowest sidewalk, on one of the busiest pedestrian streets in the city:
  • Why use 1 pole when you can use 2?
  • It's okay if a signal pole's gravity base takes up over half the right-of-way, right?
  • Hey, turns out we actually do have a bit of extra room in the right-of-way - perfect, lets add some pointless decorative poles with banners and a median!
From the city's own access design standard's guide below. Do we think that distance between the first pole and the building is 1.5 metres? Remembering that 1.5m is the bare minimum recommended width.

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It's just really weird that we need a $50M+ tower development to trigger fixing an obvious sidewalk barrier to accessibility and pedestrian mobility on the busiest pedestrian streets. We didn't seem to need $50M+ of development to create the barrier and install these poles with these designs in the first place.
 
CCF said:
It's also frustrating because it wasn't that many years ago that they re-did the sidewalks, boulevards, etc of 1st street. That was the moment reallocate more space to pedestrians. Missed opportunity (as we are now seeing again with 17th Ave).
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There's just no transportation need for more than 1 lane each way on what is a local road that terminates at 17th Avenue. The street should have a road diet all the way to the Bow River.
 
I still like the arched podium. I agree that it looks/feels a bit “corporate” and isn’t perhaps the most human scale, but I think that’s ok for this location.

This is a challenging site to create that ideal pedestrian experience. It’s a small envelope on a busy street (given it’s a rail crossing location) with a VERY narrow sidewalk. As nice as it would be to have room for patio space, it’s not something that can be achieved everywhere, and I think what this podium design does achieve is provide an inviting view into the space so passersby want to come inside.

It’s the City’s responsibility to either widen the pedestrian realm by creating/enforcing setbacks or recapturing space from the road surface. The developer’s role is to maximize their developable area.

I do think the building design is disjointed with the three very distinct sections, but I’d rather see the middle and upper portions redesigned than the podium because the podium is the only thing distinct or unique about the building.
 
Seems like a really great, high density site for Truman. A lot of the parking lots along 10-Ave are right along the train tracks, so I assume are (1) less desirable from a condo sales perspective; (2) more expensive to construct; and, (3) there are restrictions on building condo suites facing the tracks for the first few storeys. In a similar vein, comparing this site to others on 11 Ave or 12 Ave, this is higher value retail space and its also less busy for vehicle traffic (which helps with condo sales). Just a super desirable location.

I think there was probably a win-win outcome where Truman could have been properly incentivized to incorporate the historical facade into their podium. Unfortunately, the Beltline doesn't have its incentives quite right yet. But maybe one day.
 
I'm assuming it's a brick veneer on a wooden structure opposed to a brick masonry wall. It can't be retained while the rest is demo'd. The site is too narrow to provide a needed buffer between the tower and a replicated Western Block facade. It would just look silly.
 
It's not structural masonry for sure, I don't think we have any of those buildings in this city. If they chose to reuse the brick, they would disassemble the building keeping all the brick, then just use them as cladding on the new structure set a couple meters back. Wouldn't be hard. The question is whether the brick is even worth keeping, hard to tell under the many layers of paint.
 
It's not hard. Very time consuming and expensive. New brick allows the facade to be adjusted to the floor heights of the new structure
 
MichaelS said:
I think legal council cannot take this into consideration when considering the land use redesgnation needed for this project. There is a strict "use" not "user" rule.
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It’s sad to see the back lot, go, but I have to agree. The city can’t be in a situation where they are deciding what developments can and can’t go ahead based on who the current users are.
 
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