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You're correct; the owner of the Skysox killed the stadium idea. It wasn't that he didn't want to move it; he wanted to sell the team way overpriced.
In my opinion, the convention center was killed by voters because of how it was presented. The Broadmoor was against it (obviously because they almost have a monopoly on that type of business), and they weighed in very heavily on City Council and public opinion.
The Olympic Center was the next idea after the convention center, and although the OTC liked the idea Mayor Rivera and company not only didn't but they just about lost the OTC to another city completely. It was salvaged last minute with free office space in a re-do building on the corner of Tejon and Colorado.
From what I know, Hammons was firm that he wants an anchor to build his hotel on. I'd love to see something progress downtown, but another hotel by itself is not going to bring crowds downtown. Besides if we're going to move everything to the north there is no need for more hotel rooms downtown. Maybe one of those other projects you mentioned will come to fruition
We have a terrific NCAA football program right here in town, and can't sellout that stadium. We have a AAA baseball team that draws fewer fans than teams in much smaller markets.
For reasons I've never been able to understand, Colorado Springs is NOT a sports town.
I agree with your first paragraph Mike, but you start to lose me after that.
Blame for high traffic in metro areas should be placed on suburbia, not downtown. If people lived in the city instead of sprawling suburbs 20 miles away, we wouldn't have the traffic issues.
I fully support more density downtown, but only if great care and thought is put into the planning process. For starters, the idea should be for people to live and work downtown, minimizing the transportation issue and increasing the demand for services. Lets face it, the only things that thrive downtown right now are bars, restaurants, and hotels... its a constant struggle for retail. If you bring a convention center, a sports stadium, and other cultural attractions downtown, that makes downtown a destination. It gives people a reason to want to live and work there. Its the old idea of businesses following roof tops. If you get a certain population density, the stores will come back to downtown, and you could theoretically live, work, shop, eat, and play downtown and never have to drive if you didn't want to. Walkability is an extremely important piece of the puzzle here, downtown would have to remain pedestrian friendly for this to work. Affordability is also key, downtown needs to be a place where people at all income levels can make a home. The town is already enough of a sprawling mess that we should have been investing in mass transit a long time ago. I'm okay with height restrictions... tall buildings aren't really my goal here. I think we have an opportunity to take the old concept of what an urban core is and re-define it.
This probably all sounds a little pie in the sky, but I do believe it could work and provide a little slice of the city for those of us who love Colorado Springs and love a more urban life style to make a home in. The suburban market is well served here. What about the rest of us?
I agree that people working downtown should have affordable space to live there as well. I think that's fairly true, at this time.
Sorry if I lost you, I'll try again, here goes.
My experience in the DC area is that the commuting problem is due to a hub & spoke pattern. Hordes of people commute each morning from "affordable" suburbs to a densely packed urban core that is almost totally office space, not living space. Most of our big cities are like that. In DC, some drive 100 miles each way, most less, but a few even more. I drove 65 miles round trip each day in that crap, five days a week, for years. It sucks. DC rush hour is 4:30 - 10:00 AM and 2:30 - 8:00 PM. No lie.
On a map, we typically see a "beltway" type of interstate highway that rings these cities like a moat. Real estate inside the moat usually carries a whopping premium. We lived in Chantilly, VA, 25 miles from DC. Every mile closer to DC, the comparable home rose $10k in price. No joke. Our $500k home in Chantilly was $700k in close-in Arlington, VA. Denver's "beltway" is Hwy 470, Denver has a dense core, and Denver traffic is worse than COLO SPGS because lots of people commute from "way out" to the gleaming high rises of downtown Denver.
For most of those cities, denseness is concentrated in a bullseye center (visualize a dart board) where the closer the center, the higher the score. Dwelling units in these dense cores are so expensive that few can afford them. Downtown DC is block after block of 12 story office blocks, no dwellings to speak of. Most anything decent in DC is $1M; same for many big cities. No one can move to Manhattan unless wealthy to start with, so millions live out on Long Island or NJ and commute. The NYC commute is legendary, as is DC, Atlanta, L.A., etc.
That's what I was getting at in my earlier posting. By stringing out the office buildings along Hwy-83 and Voyager, we allow people to live up on the ridge nearby if they choose to, and thus have VERY short commutes as well as affordable living. The alternative, that I don't like, is to do what other big cities have done, which is to build huge skyscrapers in a dense downtown, as this drives up demand (and prices) for nearby homes, makes living there unaffordable, and forces people to commute from the suburbs to downtown.
Rail transit costs a fortune. Since we've already spent to build / maintain Hwy 83 and Voyager (and the Powers corridor), adding buses would be a great way to improve commuting efficiency.
Meanwhile, downtown, it seems feasible to have a ratio of how much office space we allow in our downtown relative to living space to be added within say 5 blocks. For example, if we allow 150,000 sq ft of new mid-rise office space, we need to match it with at least 900,000 sq ft of new mid-rise condo's, so that people can live and work downtown. Exact ratio is moot, though office space is usually 150 sq ft per employee (often less), while single people tend to want a condo of about 900 sq ft, and couples about 1500-1800 sq ft. This 1:6 ratio of office to dwelling space should prevent people having to live out in Falcon to find affordable living space.
FWIW: I refer to "beltways" as moats, because they are a barrier in every sense of the word. Only major roads cross or intersect a beltway. In the DC example, building I-495 around DC caused many local streets to be cut off and dead-ended. People then had to go find a major road that could carry them to the other side of the beltway to visit the other end of what used to be their own street. Every one of those major beltway crossings was a bottleneck in itself, with 2-3 minute traffic signal waits and very heavy traffic. Best thing we can do in COLO SPGS is to avoid building a moat around our city and avoid a high-rise / high-density downtown office core. Leave COLO SPGS linear, work on the cross streets to form a grid, and run buses along the major grid lines (essentially a rubber-tired above-ground subway).
Last edited by Mike from back east; 11-10-2008 at 05:46 PM..
We have a terrific NCAA football program right here in town, and can't sellout that stadium. We have a AAA baseball team that draws fewer fans than teams in much smaller markets.
For reasons I've never been able to understand, Colorado Springs is NOT a sports town.
Back in DC, you cannot get tix to the U-MD, and the Redskins a have 25-year wait for season tix. Game tix are like hitting a lotto - in reverse that is, you pay a fortune for them.
I like COLO SPGS for its affordable Skysox, USAF Falcons and CC Tigers, and have sung their praise often in these threads. I don't like what pro sports do to a city, mostly that many teams stick taxpayers for the cost of stadiums, the traffic mess they bring, and the drunk behavior of too many fans. I'd rather watch it on TV. The affordability of the COLO SPGS teams is fabulous, you CAN get tix to the games, and traffic is nothing like big city pro sports venues.
FWIW: I'm looking forward to the Madonna concert in Denver this week, but not the driving/parking around I-25 and Pepsi Center.
Interesting interpretation, Mike. I've never had the issue presented to me in that way before. I'll have to chew on it a while. I've spent the last 3 years posting on a forum filled with far left urbanists who have some pretty extreme views about how a city should function, and I've sort of picked up some of those views over the years.
Sure it is, but you have to think long-term. I think much of the perception of Colorado Springs by the nation as a whole is really more of a trailing indicator. I just today saw a great syndicated commentary piece by Cal Thomas (a conservative commentator) encouraging conservatives to deemphasize political activism and channel energies instead into acting locally to bring social justice and community transformation. It was a great article, and I think it's a trend in that community. The Falwell-Dobson-Robertson triumvirate of the 1980s I think has passed its prime If you talk to younger evangelicals, many of them actually voted for Obama due to a broadening of concerns of issues (to now include problems like poverty, the environment, etc). Most of them are less concerned about the inflammatory culture-war issues than they are about making the world a better place.
It will be a while, for sure, before Colorado Springs' bad reputation is forgotten, but slowly but surely, it will be rediscovered, and eventually people (at least those from outside Denver) will wonder why it ever had such a bad reputation in the first place.
Interesting interpretation, Mike. I've never had the issue presented to me in that way before. I'll have to chew on it a while. I've spent the last 3 years posting on a forum filled with far left urbanists who have some pretty extreme views about how a city should function, and I've sort of picked up some of those views over the years.
Sounds like you've been over on the skyscraper forum; it's been a while since I visited there.
I admit I was smitten by Manhattan when we spent Thanksgiving there in 2006. To me, that is what a great civilization is about; walk to everything or take a subway or grab a cab. Culture, arts, shows, divine food, museums, great hospitals, renown universities, a main library that would be the envy of any nation, and gems like Grand Central Terminal, Empire State Building, Macy's, the list is endless. The greatest city on earth.... that's why I play the power ball...
If Manhattan is how those far left urbanists see a city functioning, I like it, but it pains me to know that most of the people who make Manhattan go cannot afford to live there, mostly the service people.
I see a bit of Manhattan in downtown COLO SPGS, silly perhaps, for sure scaled down a LOT, but here goes:
- Acacia or Memorial Park is our Central Park
- Colorado College is our Columbia University
- Penrose main library is our NY Public Library
- Cascade and Tejon are our Broadway
- Manitou and Old Colorado City are our SoHo (arts district)
- City Auditorium is our Madison Square Garden
- Pikes Peak Center is our Carnegie Hall
The comparison is certainly silly, but with homes at 1/10 or 1/20 the price of Manhattan, I'm happy to call COLO SPGS home.
The Front Range defines COLO SPGS, i.e., a long linear line of a city that is now analogous to I-25. Denver fills a wide round bowl and thus gets defined by its circumferential beltway (Hwy 470). I actually think we're lucky to be linear, we avoid that hub/spoke nightmare that is large part of what most urban areas have to contend with. In a sense, we are shaped like Manhattan, a long linear shape, and I think we can do TONS with that format, efficiently.
I really like the way the city is right now so I don't want to see huge drastic changes. I would like to see the skyline improve though, it doesn't have to be Denver sized but a couple 200-500 feet buildings would be nice.
Sounds like you've been over on the skyscraper forum; it's been a while since I visited there.
I admit I was smitten by Manhattan when we spent Thanksgiving there in 2006. To me, that is what a great civilization is about; walk to everything or take a subway or grab a cab. Culture, arts, shows, divine food, museums, great hospitals, renown universities, a main library that would be the envy of any nation, and gems like Grand Central Terminal, Empire State Building, Macy's, the list is endless. The greatest city on earth.... that's why I play the power ball...
If Manhattan is how those far left urbanists see a city functioning, I like it, but it pains me to know that most of the people who make Manhattan go cannot afford to live there, mostly the service people.
I see a bit of Manhattan in downtown COLO SPGS, silly perhaps, for sure scaled down a LOT, but here goes:
- Acacia or Memorial Park is our Central Park
- Colorado College is our Columbia University
- Penrose main library is our NY Public Library
- Cascade and Tejon are our Broadway
- Manitou and Old Colorado City are our SoHo (arts district)
- City Auditorium is our Madison Square Garden
- Pikes Peak Center is our Carnegie Hall
The comparison is certainly silly, but with homes at 1/10 or 1/20 the price of Manhattan, I'm happy to call COLO SPGS home.
The Front Range defines COLO SPGS, i.e., a long linear line of a city that is now analogous to I-25. Denver fills a wide round bowl and thus gets defined by its circumferential beltway (Hwy 470). I actually think we're lucky to be linear, we avoid that hub/spoke nightmare that is large part of what most urban areas have to contend with. In a sense, we are shaped like Manhattan, a long linear shape, and I think we can do TONS with that format, efficiently.
Yes, the skyscraper page.
The Manhattan comparison is a *HUGE* stretch, but I see where your coming from. My only standard for comparison is Denver, and I find myself sort of doing the same thing... I think the area around ATB Park could be like the area around Riverfront Park, I think the area around the Pioneers Museum could be like Civic Center Park, and so on...
I also really like the neighborhoods between downtown and Knob Hill along Pikes Peak Avenue, and Knob Hill itself I find fascinating as a potential sort of artsy, hot spot in the future. Without question, The Black Sheep is the most successful music venue in this town, and its in Knob Hill. Like I said, all I see is potential.
Last edited by CSNative; 11-11-2008 at 11:14 AM..
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