Brooklyn: Riverside Park Development Announced

[cgaskins]

What happened to people building nice row houses?
Thin, single family homes or two family homes would work well in this area.  The inside of the block would be the backyard for the ground floor and the roof is the yard for the upper-level family.


You can even build garages on street level:


Jackson St, Park St, and Riverside Ave should be thought of as "high streets" and the ground level of all buildings on those streets should be commercial space, with residential above.

One of the great things about a densely populated area is that you aren't reliant on your own car.  You're able to walk a block or two to get to restaurants, shops, and entertainment, and the more people the greater the use of public transit that can take you to other parts of town.

Making a large portion of these blocks parking lots defeats the purpose of creating a dense residential area.  Street parking works for a lot of cities when there are smartly designed parking garages near heavily populated areas.  If a developer wants to build a parking garage there should be some city law making them put commercial on the ground floor.  There are so many parking garages in North Bank that take up an entire city block and are giant eyesores and take up very valuable space.  Walking through Manhattan it's easy to ignore how many parking garages there are because the majority of them are on blocks lined with commercial space on the ground level and there will be an entry to the garage between two shops.  MetroJax does a great job showing smart moves by other cities and Jacksonville REALLY needs to look at what other cities do!  Majority of Florida is spread out and set up in a very suburban way.  Jacksonville has so much empty land in the core that they're able to, kind of, start from scratch and build an area comparable to cities like Chicago and San Francisco.

Jacksonville used to be the Bold New City of the South and it needs to go back to that.  When people visit Brooklyn they should see beautiful homes and feel like what they are seeing only exists in a few places on Earth.  Every section of the urban core should bring something special.  Brooklyn could remind people of walking through London or Paris, while the area of LaVilla around Ritz Theatre could look like New Orleans, and Oakland could be a dense and bustling area like New York's Lower East Side.  Springfield could easily be Jacksonville's version of
San Francisco's Castro because of the great buildings already there.

OK, I'm rambling because I'm bored at work.

[Captain Zissou]

^ Oakland??  Where is that??  Do you mean Oklahoma??  I really want to move there in the next year.  i think that will be one of the next big areas in town.

[thelakelander]

I like your rambling.  I wanted a rowhouse or something similar when I moved to town but the building type wasn't available locally.  I believe Brooklyn, LaVilla, and the Cathedral district would be great areas for this urban residential building type.

[cgaskins]

I thought the area North of Mathews Express Way, along A Philip Randolph, was called Oakland.

[thelakelander]

It originally was.  Now it's commonly referred to as the Eastside.

[Captain Zissou]

Ohhh, It very well could be.

Oklahoma is the area south of 95 in San Marco between Hendricks Ave and San Marco Blvd.  The southern and northern borders may be Landon and Lasalle, respectively.

[tufsu1]

I own a 3-story townhome that fronts on the street in the heart of downtown....its the closest thing to a rowhome or brownstone I could find in Jax.

[Tacachale]

It originally was.  Now it's commonly referred to as the Eastside.

And incidentally, the original East Jacksonville was considerably smaller than the area now called East Jacksonville or the Eastside. Toponymy lives!

[cgaskins]

I'm still trying to convince my wife we should buy the old fire station at Adams and Ocean. I don't think I'll ever be able to get her to move away from NYC.  Especially since we own our apartment here.

[thelakelander]

I own a 3-story townhome that fronts on the street in the heart of downtown....its the closest thing to a rowhome or brownstone I could find in Jax.

Its about the only thing.  52 urban core townhouse units built after 2000 in a city the size of Jacksonville is pretty pathetic.

[tufsu1]

51 to be exact   

[fsujax]

what about the townhomes at Berkman?

[thelakelander]

I guess.  When I came to town, those things were listed at over $500k.  If I could afford to pay that much, it wouldn't be to stay in downtown Jacksonville.  The neighborhood is going to already have to be walkable and vibrant 24/7.  I was looking for something market rate (say $100k-$200k).

[fsujax]

you can pick one up now for about $100k!

[thelakelander]

No thanks.  I'm in the process of doing my own in Springfield now.