Investors Beware? The latest CentrePointe design images aren’t terrible but what are they?

[For more on CentrePointe, read Tom Eblen's review.]

The latest CentrePointe meeting was well-attended but briefer than the Gang meetings. Taking a cue from the Rupp Area public meetings, it was a quick slideshow covering the basics and then opened up to a general milling about with teams of architects available to field questions and explore specifics.

First things first, the design team is open to feedback. You can send thoughts to: centrepointe@eopa.com.

The latest version of CentrePointe (or “The Dud” or whatever they want to call it now) owes much to Jeanne Gang’s work. Rather than the entire block being eaten up by one gargantuan building with its back to Main Street, the EOP et al. plan follows Gang’s, planting the hotel tower on one corner, filling in two other corners with “signature” buildings and placing retail, restaurants and residential (designed to scale with the city) along Main Street.

During the Gang-era, Dudley Webb (and Woodford) said the project could be done in installments. That doesn’t appear to be the case here. Essentially this is one giant block wide building that is built together but with different elements to differentiate it’s feel. This is a welcome change to the original CentrePointe design(s).

I asked one of the architects why they were going for full growth rather than splitting it into plots. One reason may be an effort to not endanger the TIF (is that even still applicable four years later? do they need to reapply?) but the architect had a perfectly good reason which is that then there is no replication of work. If adjoining walls are built together, along with plumbing, electricity, gas lines, etc, it decreases the overall work to design everything in one “shape.”

It’s kinda like the Meijer brand facade we all know and love:

Look! We’re in a small village!

But in the case of CentrePointe, it is fancier.

Speaking with the architects, that does come across. These are local firms with an investment in the community. They are working together, and with certain parameters (both from the developer and from the Court House Area Design Review Board), but they each seem genuinely passionate about their individual designs. They aren’t phoning it in and they’re not trying to build a Meijer brand prefabrication that could be plopped down any old where.

As far as timeline goes — since that’s the biggest question — one person close to the project told me the plans are close to being ready to go and that they are being told to work on an accelerated timeline. It is possible, they said, that ground will be broken by the end of the year if all goes as well as expected.

I’ve asked my old friend Woodford for an official Webb unit but have not yet heard back. Still, “by the end of the year” sounds genuinely Webb-like and assuming the project ever gets funding, at some point it will be true if it keeps being said. With the project as laid out, all things considered, this plan at least offers the city around it something to behold so funding enthusiasm is bullish. (The TIF however…)

Let’s do some images (You can click on them to make ‘em bigger):

They did solar studies of the new block. That’s the Winter Solstice. That’s the Gang influence again. The tower casts a long shadow (it’s 28 stories tall) but it’s not the freakish beast of yesteryear dreamed up by the Webb-mind.

The condos on the upper levels are sizeableish and all come equpped with a grand piano!

The Main Street first floor has three retail spots and a restaurant. The Restaurant is large. There is currently no tenant (Saul and Jack Ruby are on Vine and are “committed”). There was a local interest in the space but that may have passed. There is a Louisville restaurant interested in filling the space, even to the point of wanting to possibly include not just the large bottom floor of the Pohl building (aka, Buster’s and the Dame) but also the Dick Levine/CSC building next to it. That’s a large restaurant. Hopefully by Louisville we’re not talking about a KFC.

Here’s the mighty pedway!

It’s coming out of a fire stairwell/hallway between the Pohl building on the corner of Main and Upper. That fiery hell you see behind it is the hotel ballroom. Below that are the loading docks. The Design Review Board didn’t like how the design was so closed off to Upper. You are looking at the closed off section. On the corner there would be windows along the first floor looking into/out of the restaurant (you know, like Buster’s had) and down the block after the loading docks you get hotel entrances in glass and on the corner a street level cafe (an un-Webb version of what they tried at the Radisson). So it’s not terribly blocked off, and the biggest losers here would be McCarthy’s, as that’s their view.

But wait… the pedway!

I asked Graham Pohl how he got stuck with the pedway coming out of his building. He was good natured, and a real trooper. He didn’t have anything bad to say about the pedway and stuck to the facts. He got the pedway on his building because it’s coming out of a hallway. That hallway runs behind the residences in his designed building and connects both to the Hotel and to the “galleria” shops (we’ll get to that). So Pohl got to design a pedway. He allowed 1) that the pedway was not totally thought out at this point, and 2) that the Design Review Board had really disliked it so there was a good chance it wouldn’t happen.

This is a shame. The people demand pedways. Our women are not safe. The Pedway Capital of the World is nothing if it does not have pedways.

[The Streetsweeper suggested to me that the pedway has another purpose. It stretches across Upper over the Harvey's swoon deck and into the Big Blue Building's dark parking structure. The Streetsweeper tweeted at me that the pedway "abuts the old Melodean Hall building which needs another access besides the interior stairway." He said, "I believe that one of the Lexington arts groups wants to use the western two thirds and will need access for public." Ponder away.]

Go-Kart race track.

Let’s see. What can top that?

Let’s look at Main Street:

Small, Different.

And one by one…

EOP

Biagi

CSC

Pohl Rosa Pohl

Each one has its distinct feel, just as Jeanne Gang prescribed. Each one, thus, meshes with the Main Street buildings.

Are any of them The Dame or Busters? No. Are they “bougie”? Sure. Fine. Is that bad?

There is nothing there. The buildings are gone. Something must be there, as nice as that field of blue is. What restaurants and retail will go in there? High class, probably. Does downtown Lexington need more Bellini’s? More Metropols? More Deauvilles? More Dudleys?

That’s actually not a bad question, as rhetorical as it may feel.

On the one hand, more fancy restaurants downtown threaten the established ones. On the other hand, they threaten the Malones, Harry’s, Drake’s franchise that exists in the Old Country.

In reality, bringing more people inside the circle and making them understand that what is great about Lexington isn’t defined by the soulless expanse of hub road exurbia achieves an end. If it works, it gets more people closer to an awareness that there is value in Sidebar, that there is something special at Al’s, that Stella’s and the Green Lantern have life to offer them, that Suggins is just a place and no offense to it because Romany is as nice as Chevy or Southland, but a city is defined as much by its neighborhoods in which people live as it is by the place that holds its center. It gets people to realize that there are great stores along Limestone, along Maxwell, at the Woodland Triangle, on Euclid between Ashland and Tates Creek, on Lime from Short up to Third and Loudon and out past to the Circle.

Lexington’s best neighborhoods — the ones that have the actual feel of place — are few. Meadowthorpe, Chevy Chase, Southland, the burgeoning arts corridor of North Lime. Each one is within the circle and each one is made stronger by a growing awareness that there is something at that center.

Does that mean anyone is going to live in these Main Street addresses? No.

Does it mean that anyone is going to frequent the bars, restaurants and retail — or, as they are now popularly called as if it might increase business, “boutiques” — of this Webb development? No.

But it might.

It might. And that’s the grey area between realistic cynicism and business-minded optimism.

Downtown needs many things. One of them is real jobs. Another is people. There are already plenty of places to live. If you drive around the downtown core, be it Kenwick or Ashland, Chevy, Lime down through Loudon, the Western Suburb or out Leestown, there are great homes to buy.

This isn’t an argument in favor of CentrePointe. It’s not like a (still) massive luxury hotel in a town that can’t fill the two fancy hotels it already houses at already (and cheaper than CentrePointe) egregious cost is going to be the thing that transforms Lexington into some fantastical version of Austin (that ignores the livability issues of Austin) or Portland (that ignores the employability issues of Portland) or Madison (which ignores the cultural differences of Madison).

But it would be wrong to, out of a justified distrust of the Webbs’ instincts, simply discount this idea.

On the one hand, one could view this latest version of CentrePointe as transitive, like, yes, it will fail and what’s next?

On the other, one could view it as a “Festival Market” writ large, a “Victorian Square” of more failed business, a “Radisson” of a concrete block, a new slate of condos and “urban residential” in a sea of unused, unwanted, unwarrented and economically out-of-whack “homes.”

But you could also look at it a different way. Not that you have to. And not that it makes more sense or is somehow worth more. Like: these residences along Main St. make more sense than the failed ones which surround them.

The condos at Main and Rose seem reasonably filled (give or take). The ones along Limestone seem saddish. The ones along MLK between Maxwell and Upper are deteriorating in embarrassing fashion. The ones next to Victorian Square have aged worse than that failed complex.

That man at “The Lex” has been trying to walk away from that lease for about three years and, sadly, he’s locked in.

Do people want a downtown address at egregious cost?

Apparently not.

Is that an argument against the multi-story residences along Main Street?

I’m not sure it is. In sum it’s an argument against building sh*t condos at low cost and selling them for high cost to people who would rather live in Hamburg with no backyard and no windows on the sides of their homes in houses made out of plywood and plastic.

These “condos” along Main Street… they might be different. They are designed in ones and twos and threes. They aren’t mass created and they are designed with architectural vision.

Talking with these individual firms, you get the sense that they want to make a statement in a project that never wanted to. They want to represent Lexington, they are honored to try, even if the entire idea of the project, its genesis, never wanted any such thing.

These Main Street homes are, even if mandatorily part of some giant construction project, conceived with an idea of individuality. That’s something lacking at The Lex, at Main + Rose, at the “500s” and at most of the other “condos” and “lofts” that have mistakenly gone up around town.

That’s not an endorsement. It’s just a recognition that these addresses make more sense than the others and it’s worth taking the time to separate them.

That said…

Master Bedroom < Hers

Let’s go back and look at those condos.

As mentioned before and as seen above, each one comes with a grand piano.

How quaint.

The upper floors (see below) of “The Dud” are occupied by condos.

Selling these condos has a) advantages over the more grounded ones along Main, b) advantages over the soulless ones ringing the central downtown core.

In comparison to the Main Street residences, these have height. That’s about all you can say for them. They lack the personality of the limited Main Street ones. There are many more of them.

Regarding the second — Why would I spend a million on this rather than several hundred thousand on that? – the advantage again is height.

Height makes sense in a big city.

In a big city you can look out your window and see a sea of sparkling lights.

In Lexington, if you go up high enough, you look out over some dim lights and a sea of darkness. The city really is pretty and green and if you look at it from some heighth all you see, mostly, is trees and at night that just means you don’t see anything.

Is Lexington ready to clearly handle the number of upper level condos the Webbs are selling?

Looking around at the, let’s call them, more grounded condos, clearly not.

Perhaps, using Webb logic, those other ones didn’t sell because they didn’t cost enough.

Or, perhaps, the people who live in and love Lexington appreciate the hospitableness of Lexington.

High rise living has it’s place, but, you know, largely it happens in places with a paucity of land. In Lexington, we have plenty of that and plenty of homes with yards and neighborhoods and other more earthly amenities.

Not that people don’t want to move on up.

But people understand the value of a dollar. And getting back to that floor plan above… that ain’t worth a million dollars.

If you look at it, you’ll see the living room is the largest room (with grand piano) and then there’s a “master” bedroom which is also adorned with a “His” bathroom and a “Hers” bathroom which, taken together with what appears to be a walk-in closet, makes up the second biggest room in the house.

Let’s look at it again, but bigger this time:

I don’t doubt there are some people who want to spend a million dollars on that lay out.

But are there enough of them? In Lexington?

I get it, sure. The Webbs are convinced that really rich women have to have that much space. And really rich men only need a little tiny place.

Putting aside the heteronormative layout my college degree demands that I acknowledge, the question begging like a resident of Phoenix Park asks is, How many Imelda Marcoses live in Lexington, Kentucky?

The condos at CentrePointe never made sense and they still don’t.

To any potential investor: Beware.

While much can be said for this version of the CentrePointe project, I will personally bet one bottle of Woodford Reserve that Woodford and The Dud can’t fill these all these spots within a year of construction.

It’s like their pedway dream. I’m all in favor of them building another pedway. The last time I took a pedway through the Big Blue Building, it took me down a hallway past a room that was literally filled with Herbie Curbies.

That’s what the Webbs want to sell Lexington as. That is their architectural vision. Prime office space filled to the brim with trash cans.

Granted, that was in 2007 before the economy collapsed so maybe they’ve since filled that prime office space just as they’ll fill these prime condos with their grand pianos and grand layouts in which the “His” is miniscule and the “Hers” is the second biggest room in the house.

Shirley that will make up for that grand view of a midnight town full of beautiful old trees and houses with backyards waiting to be bought for a third, fourth, or fifth of the price.

Let’s look at the breakdown:

Oh la la!

Half of the building is condos and penthouses. There’s a layer of pied-a-terres — which literally means “foot on ground” and, pardon my french, that ain’t a g-ddamn pedway.

The bottom third is comprised of hotel rooms.

And that, friends, is another opportunity to congratulate the Webbs on their new-found realism.

The J.W. Marriott chain demands an occupancy rate above what Lexington currently achieves at a significantly higher price than what Lexington currently bears.

Limiting the number of hotel rooms at exponential cost reduces the ratio of room to occupant and thus increases the rate, making it more realistic that one might achieve the J.W. Marriott goal.

Does that make the investment more sound?

Or does that mean the building could be about a third shorter?

I’d let Imelda Marcos decide but she’s indisposed and, sadly, there’s only one of her and not 100 and the 100 not-hers don’t live in the Bluegrass so… does the Webb financial plan for this new CentrePointe, as good as it is by comparison to the previous, actually hold?

Is this a sound investment or just a CentreBubble?

But let’s remember…

A person close to the project said that if all goes well, the project will be funded soon and ground will be broken before the end of the year.

Let’s not lose ourselves in disbelief. Let us have faith and let us trust. Let’s look at some more pictures.

Two Pools? Too Cool!

The J.W. Marriott (which won’t return my emails about their commitment to make Lexington the smallest of their small handful of American markets for the latest extension of their brand) has certain demands about how a hotel must be constructed.

One of those, apparently, is that the hotel must have its own fitness club even if a giant Urban Active is situated next door. Another may be that they need an indoor pool and, as you see here, an outdoor one as well. But that’s not just any outdoor pool, it’s an “infinity pool” whose border disappears into the horizon across Vine Street into an empty parking lot.

Still, roof top pools are always nice so that is, to more aptly borrow a phrase from the French, an accoutrement.

But why waste an entire floor of a hotel structure that’s being abused to sell very possibly unwanted condos for a “fitness center” when there’s a giant and nationally recognized chain moving in next door?

Jack Ruby was Saul Good.

That’s the first floor. There’s a “galleria.” It cuts through the middle, allows pedestrian transport from Main to Vine with internal retail browsing like a tiny mall or Festival Market and Victorian Square. There is a Jeff Ruby’s restaurant right next to a Saul Good’s and a series of retail ringing the heart of our downtown. If you count ‘em, that’s four new restaurant bars in one block, each of ‘em livin’ large.

Getting back to that rooftop “infinity pool” we find ourselves back in one of the strengths of the Webbs’ current version of the project.

That pool on the roof you see there isn’t as “open” as it looks. It belongs to the hotel and will be more cordoned off than it appears in the pictures.

Still.. there’s more to behold.

There’s a rooftop bar/cafe in the lower right, above the Jack Ruby’s. And then there are the trees and open space behind it.

During the official presentation, this was described as “a tree house concept” and “a vertical park” (which seemed a sly wink to the “vertical Lexington Mall” of earlier versions).

It’s an open space for office workers, condo-billionaires, hotel-stayers and, yes, the general public.

Will there be hours of availability? I asked one of the architect team and he seemed unsure but he did assure me that the idea was that it was open to the public. This isn’t supposed to be an exclusive hideaway.

If you’ve been to New York in the past couple years and ventured to the High Line, it could be like that — beautiful, an oasis, public but monitored, closed after dark — if it wants to be.

And that’s a good thing.

Let’s end on that high note.

There is plenty to distrust in this latest version (Fool me once, the former President reminds us), and there is plenty to dislike (Grand pianos and pedways for everyone!).

But there’s also a lot of good here, all things considered.

The best scenario for the block might be that the individual parcels are sold off one by one but, right now, that seems unlikely. Comparing the current plan to ones from the past, this one isn’t terrible.

Is that a good thing? That it’s not terrible?

It’s an improvement.

Will it be built the way it is currently being sold? Certainly not. Architectural designs for large public (whether you like it or not, this is public and not just because of the questionable TIF) projects are sold in one image and almost always turn into another.

This one has strengths. The office space. The restaurants. The retail.

It has weaknesses. The condos. The condos. The condos. The hotel. The number of restaurants. The “galleria.” The culture of Lexington.

The last is a big one.

Lexington isn’t Greenville. It’s not Charleston. It’s not Austin or Portland or Madison. It’s not Indianapolis or Columbus.

It’s Lexington.

Building a luxury hotel, allowing a giant casino, building a “campus-style” convention center — none of those things will define our city.

That’s up to us. We define our city. Currently it’s defined by a downtown core, a series of wonderful neighborhoods, and sprawl of population who could live anywhere.

Getting them downtown, getting them involved in the city, is important. Parts of CentrePointe will do that. Parts of it serve other purposes. Parts of it seem pure pipe dream.

But groundbreaking will begin by the end of the year, for the forth year in a row, so it may be something to consider.