A community wide effort to protect the Fargo-Moorhead from possible record flooding is in full effect. The Red River of the North is now expected to crest at 39-41 feet as early as Friday, about a foot higher than 1997. A number of bridges have been closed and temporary clay dikes are being built along the riverbank. North Dakota State University has cancelled classes until further notice so students can help with sandbagging and Metro Area Transit buses have suspended normal service to provide transportation for flood volunteers. (Image above: Sandbag Express)
Latest info available from the Fargo Forum and NDSU.
Last week FEMA officially decided the City of Cedar Rapids, not the Veterans Memorial Commission, will be the recipient of $20 million plus in federal funds to repair the flood damaged Veterans Memorial Building on Mays Island, which housed City Hall since its construction in 1927. Since I worked with the Veterans Memorial Commission at the building the past three summers and through the flooding, I’ve heard the argument from both sides. The Veterans Memorial Commission acts as the building’s landlord, which City Hall occupied “free of charge” without paying rent, but the Commission itself is a city department.
The building was constructed as a memorial to veterans and to house offices and meeting space for veterans groups, the Coliseum, Armory in the basement, and one floor for City Hall temporarily. According to veterans, City Hall was only intended to be in the building for the first five years before finding a new permanent location. That never happened, and since then, city offices expanded to most floors in the building.
Recently the City began a six to nine month public input process regarding a possible new shared facility with the public school district, currently operating out of a trailer village by Kingston Stadium. The original thought of a co-location included Linn County as well, but they declined to participate in order to move forward with repairing the County Administrative Office Building. To me, it seems silly for the City to be spending this amount of time to study a co-location with only the school district.
Since the Veterans Memorial Building is historical, it is required to be repaired, so the City might as well use space they already have available. Moving mechanical and electric equipment to space on the second floor would minimize damage from possible future flooding, and the basement levels could remain essentially unfinished as they are now gutted. City Hall, Veterans Memorial Building, where it stands is significant to the city’s history and identity. Centrally located, it is symbolic of the compromise between the east and west and unites all four quadrants of the city.
I stopped by the building this week to see the guys from the summer. Clean up work is finished and nothing but bare structure remains in the basement. Interior walls were removed on the mezzanine level so it is open to the basement from one side of the building to the other. The building is essential sitting empty now until work begins on it’s renovation, now one step closer with FEMA’s decision on funding.
> Hundreds of photos, which I helped take, of damage to the building immediately after the flood
Downtown Progress
Most of downtown is pretty much cleaned up now and many major buildings and businesses are back up and running. Plenty of first floor spaces remain unfinished, likely waiting for new tenants to refinish to their needs. Sidewalk damage is still apparent on many streets. Large areas of sidewalk brick that were washed out on 2nd Street SE, have been patched temporarily with concrete.
On the south end of downtown and in the New Bohemia area, damage from the flood is still much more visible. A few buildings in New Bohemia – CSPS, the Cedar Rapids Peace Center, and a group of storefronts (photo) at 3rd St. and 12th Ave – are being worked on, but many remain unfixed. A few open lots are visible where some houses have already been demolished. See all downtown photos from this week here.
Downtown Parking
The most noticeable change downtown is back-in angle parking (photo) on many streets, instituted after the flood. I believe most of these on street spaces were permit spaces only, as most of the parking meters are still absent. On Monday evening, Dennis Burns of Carl Walker parking consultants, presented, free of charge, strategies to improve downtown parking to support downtown economic development, at a public meeting at the Crowne Plaza. I attended with about 50 others, mostly downtown businessmen and women.
Dennis discussed two successful systems in Boise and Boulder and explained how their parking facilities and policies support economic development and help finance downtown improvements. Overall he stressed the importance of aligning the city parking operations with downtown economic development organizations. He pointed out that adding on street angle parking is an inexpensive and easy way to instantly increase parking capacity.
New downtown library likely
FEMA declared this week the flooded CR Public Library hit the 50 percent threshold meaning FEMA would help fund total replacement of the current building instead of repairing it. This is critical to the library that desires to return to downtown but without future flood risk at the current site, located less than a block from the Cedar River. A special request will need to be made for FEMA funding to build the new library at a different location. According to the Gazette report, cost to repairing the library is estimated at $17 million compared to $24 million for a new library at a different site in downtown.
It’s unclear how long off the new library could be, considering no officially decisions have been made, but another opportunity for new development and improvement downtown. I’m interested in the redevelopment potential of the current library site – especially with the new courthouse going up and proposal for Great America Building 2 across the street. I always felt the low, plain library building would hold this area back from its urban potential.
Since the flood the CR Public Library has been operating out of its Westdale Mall branch location. Last month a new, larger temp location called “The Bridge” opened in the former Osco Drug store at the mall. Gazette city government reporter Rick Smith reports on his blog, the library intends to open a temporary location in downtown this summer at 221 Third Street SE.
Federal Courthouse
Ground breaking has yet to take place for the new federal courthouse on the south end of downtown but that day is approaching. First Street was closed at the beginning of March between 7th and 8th avenues. The new courthouse will span two blocks from the river to 2nd Street SE. The site (photo), formerly property of Mid American Energy has been cleared and sits vacant waiting for construction to begin.
Today I participated in the second of three community workshops for the Cedar Rapids Neighborhood Planning Process for the River Corridor Redevelopment Plan. The focus of today’s workshop was on transportation and connectivity, and land use in the redevelopment plan. Individuals from Sasaki Associates, the Boston design firm selected last year (pre-flood) to develop a riverfront redevelopment plan, were there to present different scenarios and facilitate discussion.
The first breakout session was to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of three scenarios presented on transportation, connectivity and open space. All scenarios were based off a tentative plan for a greenway / flood protection system. The second breakout session considered land use and locations to focus housing and business revitalization. My table was fairly diverse – one older man, a retired woman formerly a planning consultant, two women from Time Check, one of their daughters; and our table leader, a planner with the City Community Development Department.
Turn out looked pretty good, maybe 150-250, but I could be way off. I saw a lot of familiar faces from City Hall and in the business community. I thoroughly enjoyed the sessions and hearing what other citizens had to say about the schemes, as well as offer my own input. Despite being six hours long, it seemed to go by pretty quickly and was actually really pretty fun for me. I look forward to participating in the next meetings I’m able to make it, as I’ll be returning to Ames tomorrow for school.
The next meeting will be Tuesday, March 31, from 6pm – 9pm, at the Crowne Plaza, for scenario evaluation and determining a preferred scenario. The last of three workshops will be April 25. An action plan will be confirmed at a May 5 meeting and will be presented to the City Council on May 13. I encourage anyone and everyone from Cedar Rapids to get involved in this process.
> Cedar Rapids River Corridor Redevelopment Plan
> Cedar Rapids Neighborhood Planning Process
> Sasaki Associates: Cedar Rapids River Corridor Redevelopment Plan
CR Transit maintains its presence at Lot 44 at 12th Ave SE and 2nd Street SE, for transfers and now dispatch. Trailers have been set up to provide an indoor waiting area with vending, public restrooms, and office for dispatchers.
Eight used 1992 TMC RTS buses were acquired in December and put in to service earlier this year – replacing buses lost in the flood. These buses debut the new green livery design and CR Transit branding. Older buses have not changed except the “CR Transit” lettering has been added to some of the newer Thomas Dennis SLF’s (but not all of them…?).
A few of the new RTS’s had bike racks installed, which was a previous plan to add bike racks to most of the bus fleet.
Four brand new 35 foot Gillig Lowfloor buses are due to arrive in April, an order unrelated to the floods. Additionally, CR Transit will be getting four new large buses and one medium duty bus with funding from the economic stimulus package.
See all new photos on Flickr.
About five weeks ago, now, I went to New York City for a third year arch studio field trip. Now that it’s spring break I believe I have some time to write about it in more detail. The trip was Thursday, February 5 – Monday, Feb 9th.
We flew out of Des Moines at 6am, Thursday with a quick layover at O’Hare, arriving at LaGuardia in NYC shortly after 11am Eastern. Flying in over the city was amazing. Once on the ground we went outside on the frigid, but sunny day and waited for our shuttle buses to the Westside YMCA – our quality lodging for the trip. The ride took probably around a half an hour and was a sensory overload – so many little buildings, big buildings, different people, hundreds of side streets to peer down. I ended up dozing off briefly once we arrived in Manhattan as I got very little sleep that night before.
After the charade of checking in and assigning rooms to sixty plus arch students and profs we headed down to our project site in SoHo at the corner of Broome and Crosby streets, just east of Broadway. This project, that we are currently working on now in studio, is for a 24-unit residential development with a public / community / commercial component at ground level. The site is currently a double stacked auto park operation in an open lot about 110 by 70 feet. As individual studios we took about an hour to document the site and surroundings through observation and photos (later turned into photo stitches used to size and build four separate 1/8″ scale physical site models – one for each studio). Unfortunately it was extremely cold this first day, despite the sun, so I don’t believe the site visit was as effective as it could’ve been.
Following documentation we broke into studios and went on a walking tour of the area with our respective profs. This area was near the convergence of Little Italy and Chinatown. Along Broadway there are trendy retailers at the ground floor of older buildings with upper floors generally residential.
That evening after finally regrouping, some friends and I walked down Broadway from the Y (only about 15 blocks from Times Square) to find something for supper. We went through Rockefeller Center on our way and ended up eating at a pizza joint nearby that I had eaten at previously when Spencer and I went for a day two spring breaks ago. Big slices for cheap, can’t argue with that. After we ate we kept on toward Times Square – pretty sterile, predictable, not much to say. One thing to make note of, however, the recently opened red tkts stairs held up by structural glass. I was very tired so I ended up calling it a night by around 10, which I felt was a little unfortunate for my first night in New York, but was glad I did the next day.
Day 2, Friday, I went on an option tour / trip to New Haven, Connecticut, to see some significant buildings at Yale University. We took the Metro North commuter line from Grand Central – an enjoyable hour and a half ride, passing through upper Manhattan and New York and various stops in Connecticut. I really enjoyed New Haven, the first smaller, established city I’ve visited on the east coast (all the others have been large – DC, New York, etc.). I will go in more detail about New Haven and Yale in an addition post.
We arrived back in NYC sometime around 7pm – our train was absolutely packed due to the train ahead of us breaking down so we had to make room for all of its passengers. For dinner a group of friends and I went to the Heidelberg restaurant where we enjoyed some Wiener Schnitzel, German beer, and a charming old man in lederhosen playing the keyboard and singing along. We requested “Roll Out the Barrel” and he continued with some more good ones: “Sweet Caroline” (an ISU favorite), and appropriately “YMCA.” Good times had by all.
Saturday started out with prof-lead walking tour around Midtown Manhattan and a visit to the Folk Art Museum. We walked by Paley Park, which was closed for maintenance, and the Lever House, among other recognizable buildings. After lunch we regrouped around Greenwich Village to see some residential high rise precedents. We walked past the new Gansevoort Plaza in the Meatpacking District, which I recognized from PPS, and the High Line, a new public park / greenway being developed on a 1.5 mile long elevated railway. The High Line influenced one of my 2nd year studio projects in Hyde Park in Chicago.
That evening I met up with my friend Spencer and some people he was in town visiting at a Sushi bar near Astor Place. Later that night I met back up with a bunch of people from studio at Dive 75 on 75th Street.
Sunday, two others and I went over to Brooklyn to visit the New York Transit Museum, underground in a former subway station. It included an extensive exhibit on the subway system’s history and day to day operations of the nation’s largest transit agency. At track level were a number of retired subway cars. Definitely a fun afternoon for me. That evening after regrouping with some others we went to see STOMP – quite the show.
Monday morning I got up early so I had about an hour to walk in Central Park. Even though we were staying a block away, I had yet to go inside the park on this trip. As I walked out of the Y, I could tell the city was bustling; the work week had begun. Around the corner was a school. I passed parents dropping off their children, some in SUVs, some in taxis. I saw other children walking. I thought to myself how profoundly different those kid’s lives are from mine as a kid.
I didn’t have a lot of time to go deep in to the park but walked over to the Mall and made it to the Bethesda Fountain. I stopped and sketched a moment along the Mall. A lot of people were out with their dogs. Soon enough it was time to head back and go to the airport. I got some breakfast at the terminal while we had about an hour to wait for departure. Our layover in Chicago was much longer this time, nearly three hours, so I walked through most of terminals – no small feat. We arrived back in Des Moines around 7pm, and carpooled back to Ames.
New York was a great trip. I got to do and see a lot, but missed a lot too. Certainly a city that warrants multiple return visits, but I have no desire to reside there. See all my photos on Flickr.
Looks like Fargo, ND, and vicinity could be facing major flood issues this year…
> WDAY: Forecasters project major Red River flooding
> City of Fargo – Flood 09 Info
