What to do with the Verizon Building?
Posted on | July 15, 2010 | 2 Comments
Carytown South resident Harry Kollatz provided me with this story and some commentary along with it. I’d love to hear your feedback as I think this story has legs and will be around for a while.
http://www2.timesdispatch.com/business/2010/jul/01/VERI01-ar-261132/
I gotta agree with most of the commenters: we don’t need a fourth grocery in Carytown. But I was alerted that there’d be zilch imagination employed with this effort with the phrase: “Maryland Financial Realty.” Come here, not from here. Still, there’ve been meetings with folks over in the Museum District (I’m over in WoBSoC, too fashionably scruffy or scruffily fashionable), and that’s to their credit, I suppose. But really. Do they want another grocery? It’s mentioned as one possibility in the article.
Some other uses:
• Boutique hotel with adjacent entertainment venue, like a jazz or acoustic performance venue. A Carytown/Fan/Museum/Scott’s Addition/ information center, and perhaps a museum-style exhibit about this section of the city’;s history.
* Local retail, that is, a Richmond home-grown department store. Not a bazaar with stalls, but several notches up, using Carytown retailers. Also with some kind of natural garden or water amenity to soften that ugly suburban parking lot. A kids playing lot. That whole end of Carytown resembles a hunk of outer burbia that landed on us.
* Live/work studio spaces and affordable apartments, with natural aspects as mentioned above. A New Media center, too.
• Any variation on the above. Or failing all this, an Old Hipster Retirement Home. They can sit out front on rockers and compare tattoos .
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2 Responses to “What to do with the Verizon Building?”
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July 15th, 2010 @ 2:42 pm
It will be a Whole Foods. And yes, it is utterly ridiculous to put a fourth grocery store in that area.
August 17th, 2010 @ 7:39 am
http://www2.timesdispatch.com/business/business/2010/aug/17/b-veri17-ar-456983/