Tag: developments

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Arts & Entertainment News

Street Food Festival to Highlight Progress and Potential of Walnut Hills

1391627_499302080165916_699884893_nOne year ago city officials and community leaders stood at the intersection of McMillian Street and Park Avenue in Walnut Hills to celebrate an effort that was decades in the making, the conversion of McMillan and William Howard Taft from one way streets to two way streets. That same day, Walnut Hills also celebrated its first Street Food Festival along Gilbert Avenue. One year later, the festival has now moved to McMillan Avenue, this time to celebrate past achievements and future possibilities.

“The two-way conversion of McMillan allows us to move the festival to this location. It’s a neighborhood street again,” Kevin Wright, Executive Director of the Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation (WHRF) told UrbanCincy.

Food trucks and street carts provide popular dining options all over the country. While regarded early on as a trend, it seems now that these tough but successful business models are working hard and are here to stay. Cincinnati’s growing food truck fleet has been offering high quality eats across many of the Greater Cincinnati Area’s neighborhoods, providing everything from pizza and burgers to gelato and cookies.

Cincinnati food trucks are a sought after addition to any local event and many Cincinnatians have come to appreciate when a few of the area’s food trucks come together to serve the City Flea, the downtown or OTR lunch rush, the late night bar crowd, area breweries and many local festivals. This Saturday, however, the food trucks themselves will take center stage at the second Cincinnati Street Food Festival in Walnut Hills.

The Cincinnati Street Food Festival will be the largest gathering of food trucks in the area, with 17 food trucks and street vendors lining McMillan Street between Hemlock and Chatham. Hosted by the WHRF, this free event will also have live music from local bands, beer from Mt. Carmel Brewing Company, and fun for the whole family.

The Street Food Festival is just one piece of the WHRF’s focused efforts on the McMillan Street corridor. These efforts include events like the Five Points Beirgarten, strategic property acquisition, demolition, and stabilization as well as transportation and development initiatives like form-based code and last years two-way conversions of McMillan and Taft. Additionally, there are greater plans in the works with the successful stabilization of the Firehouse and the adjoining building completed earlier this year.

“This is the beginning of Phase One of the redevelopment of Peeble’s Corner. Over the next 12-18 months you will begin to see a focus by the WHRF in the Copelen to Gilbert section of McMillan.” Wright told UrbanCincy, “This small stretch will be our first real place making opportunity.”

Construction is slated to begin this week with completion of the buildings by February. Wright stated he has heard rumors of interest from one of the many food truck vendors in opening a brick and mortar store in one of the rehabbed buildings but no final plans have been disclosed regarding which one it will be.

The festival will give people a chance to appreciate Cincinnati’s many diverse food trucks, meet-up with friends and neighbors, rediscover one of Cincinnati’s historic neighborhoods and check out some of the initial changes happening in the area.

For a full list of the available food, beer and entertainment offerings, visit www.cincystreetfoodfest.com.

Or, if you really can’t wait, visit the Cincinnati Food Truck Association to find where your favorite food trucks are located on a day to day basis.

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Business Development News

$1.6 Million Home For Cats Opens in Madisonville

The Ohio Alleycat Resource & Spay/Neuter Clinic (OAR) expanded into its new adoption center in Madisonville last month thanks to a generous $1.6 million donation from the Joanie Bernard Foundation.

The facility, the Joanie Bernard Home for Cats, was named in honor of the life-long cat lover. OAR’s adoption center is located adjacent to the current spay/neuter clinic which still houses 75 of the rescue’s cats. The new building offers 4,800 square feet of feline housing, which is double the amount of the original spay/neuter clinic.

Joanie Bernard Home for Cats
The new $1.6M OAR Home for Cats in Madisonville opened last month. Photograph by Paige Malott for UrbanCincy.

Inviting glass windows, wood framed doors, and custom play equipment makes life comfortable for OAR’s cats that are in between homes. In addition, there are special rooms for kittens, elderly cats, and those with a medical condition. Each room features a screened porch, which allows cats to access a protected outdoor area on their own through the use of a pet-sized door.

Over 400 people stopped by the Joanie Bernard Home for Cats for its grand opening, with many families taking home a new feline friend. To help guests learn more about their cats, OAR includes the animal’s back story on each room. Experiences tug at the heartstrings from tales of lost kittens to an 11-year-old cat that was displaced when his elderly owner passed away.

Other details include the cat’s age, breed, name, and picture so that visitors may identify a cat that shares a communal room.

With a modern, clean atmosphere, the Joanie Bernard Home for Cats hopes to appeal to those considering pet adoption and make the meet-and-greet experience more interactive for both human and feline.

Currently, OAR finds homes for 300 cats annually. Charlotte E. White-Hull, Director of Development and Outreach for OAR, estimates that the updated facility will increase the number of cat adoptions by 25%. By expanding into the new facility, OAR’s spay/neuter clinic also looks to double its service to treat over 16,000 cats a year.

Categories
Development News Transportation

Construction Work Picking Up Steam on Streetcar’s $133M First Phase

Cobblestone Removal Along Elm Street

There has been a flurry of construction activity for the $133 million first phase of the Cincinnati Streetcar project including groundbreaking for the $11.9 million Maintenance & Operations Facility and the removal of cobblestones along Elm Street in preparation for the laying of new track in October.

It is important to note, however, that the existing cobblestones are being shipped off for storage and cleaning, and will be put back on Elm Street in a way to compliment the new streetcar track.

UrbanCincy technologist and contributing photographer, Travis Estell, has been out and about lately and has captured some of the recent work through his lens. The following 12 photos were taken over the past two weeks in Over-the-Rhine.

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Business Development News

VIDEO: Progress Continues at $120M Smale Riverfront Park

The progress at the $120 million Smale Riverfront Park continues on-schedule and on-budget, according to the latest update from project manager Dave Prather.

Once the ongoing work is completed, the 45-acre park will be roughly 50 percent complete by 2015. The progress is critical as local officials are scrambling to finish several large development projects prior to the 2015 Major League Baseball All-Star Game to be held at Great American Ball Park.

The two ongoing major phases of work at Smale Riverfront Park, Prather says, will be completed in time for the national spotlight in July 2015 when the MLB All-Star Game comes to Cincinnati.

Since the last project update the roundabout at the foot of the Roebling Suspension Bridge has been completed, allowing motorists to connect in all directions at the odd intersection. Foundation and sewer work has also progressed on the elements of the park now being built immediately west of the bridge.

“When we last left off we were just starting on the construction of our Vine Street carousel and fountain steps project,” Prather explained in the video. “Where before our project, phase one, related to Walnut Street, now we’re building the portion of the project that will complete the frame of the Roebling Suspension Bridge and connect with Vine Street.”

While Prather touts the continued success of the project, continued success may be difficult to achieve.

In March 2013 Prather told UrbanCincy that the ban on federal earmark spending has put future phases of work at the park in jeopardy. In order to make up for the lack of federal dollars, project officials have been relying heavily on state and local contributions. Private donations have also played an enormous role for the project as those dollar totals now exceed the projected totals for private contributions.

Further complicating the project is that it has proceeded along with development of The Banks. That mixed-use development is also running into schedule issues, due to the ban on federal earmarks, as funding has not yet been identified for garage and infrastructure work for future phases to be built adjacent to Paul Brown Stadium. Should that work be delayed past the intended schedule, it may also impact the construction schedule of the western portions of Smale Riverfront Park.

U.S. Congressman Bob Gibbs (R-OH), who is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment, will tour Smale Riverfront Park today at 4:30pm with Cincinnati Vice Mayor Roxanne Qualls (D) and park officials.

Local leaders are hopeful that the visit will help position the park to receive water infrastructure support from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers through the next Water Resources Development Act, which is expected to be introduced soon.

If all goes according to plan, however, officials believe that Smale Riverfront Park can be completed by mid-2017.

Categories
Business Development News

Final Designs Revealed for $125M Dunnhumby Centre Tower

5th Street Exterior - Image Provided by ImageFiction.

In March of 2015, 700 employees will move into the long-awaited $125 million headquarters of dunnhumbyUSA at Fifth and Race street in downtown Cincinnati. The building is the culmination of a fifteen-year effort to reinvent the area just one block from Fountain Square.

In 1999 the city purchased and demolished a fourteen-story office building and parking garage at the site in anticipation of locating a Nordstrom’s department store downtown. When plans for the store failed to materialize, the site was paved over as surface parking for over a decade.

Last year, dunnhumbyUSA and the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation (3CDC) partnered with the city to develop the block as the new headquarters for the company. Earlier this year, the project received approval on the interior design of the building, which includes open floor plans, and two light wells that will provide natural light during the day through to the bottom floors of the office structure.

Today dunnhumbyUSA presented its exterior designs to the city’s Urban Design Review Board, which makes advisory decisions on approval for landmark structures.

The designs for the new structure were put together by architecture firm Gensler.

The presentation is the culmination of over nine months worth of work on the exterior presentation of the building.

“We designed the building from the inside out. There was a lot of attention paid to the habits and needs of our employees,” Dave Palm, Senior Vice President of Operations with dunnhumbyUSA, told UrbanCincy.

The exterior façades of the building are meant to accentuate the data driven nature of the company and avoid the repetitiveness of patterns, and are made up of an arrangement of white and charcoal grey panel frames. The entrances on each street façade, meanwhile, are accentuated by a cascade of white paneling up the side of the building. This pattern called, “zippers” help break up the massing of the structure.

Other features of the building exterior include outdoor inset areas located on the building’s eighth floor. Further outdoor opportunities are located on the top floor where a significant portion of the floor will be dedicated to outside events.

Although only nine stories in height the floors of the building will be 14 feet high with 20-foot high ceilings for the street-level retail. The building will be the equivalent height of a more traditional 12-story building. Additionally, the three parking levels above the retail level will be convertible to office when the company needs to add room for expansion.

The first level retail section comes in at just under 30,000 square feet and features an all glass street-oriented façade. 3CDC is charged with attracting retail tenants.

“We would prefer to find a local business,” Adam Gelter, 3CDC’s Executive Vice President of Development told UrbanCincy. Gelter went on to say that the retail space can go to one tenant or be broken up into three or four separate retail spaces.

The building is slated to be completed in January 2015 with move-in set for March of the same year.

This project, along with the construction of a 30-story apartment tower and grocer and the continuing plans to construct up to 225 apartments above Macy’s at Fountain Place, is set to transform the long neglected corridors along Sixth Street and Race Street and could spur additional investments in development opportunities in the western portion of the central business district.