There is a paywall
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Now they’re saying they’ll finish building the new parking garage at the railway station by the end of the summer.
But this photo from April 20, 2023 shows that the pylons that will connect the garage to the station (carrying the pedestrian skywalk) still don’t have anything on top of them:
How is this pedestrian connection going to be realistically completed within the next four months? Regretfully the Connecticut Department of Transportation is not interested in explaining why it continues to deceive the public as to the timelines for major projects at the state’s busiest train station.
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70 Seaview Avenue office-to-residential conversion has been approved.
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This was featured on the front page of the local newspaper today:
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America is doomed if it doesn’t figure out how to build beautiful places to live. With remote work becoming a thing I can see a great brain drain happening where the worlds top talent flocks to Europe.
Simply because they didn’t tear down their old charming buildings.
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Europe has been ravaged by multiple world wars, and is full of commieblocks and ghastly suburban new towns. I don’t know how anyone with a straight face could claim that they “didn’t tear down their old charming cities”. Even gorgeous Paris was mass-cleared in the late 19th century, with medieval-era housing destruction that would make Moses blush. European cities generally don’t have older housing stock than the older cities in the Northeast, BTW. German cities are actually newer. Almost everything you see in the major German cities is built post-1950.
And why would their be a “brain drain” as if techies in Sunnyvale are gonna flee to Florence bc it’s pretty?
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589 Bedford Street
21 studio apartments
https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/local/article/stamford-bedford-victorian-apartment-wfh-18142665.php
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74 Broad Street
It’s time to talk about the Caldor lot. From about the mid-1960s to when Caldor went bankrupt in 1999, there was a Caldor discount store at Broad & Summer, one of the main corners in downtown Stamford. In 2004, a Burlington Coat Factory moved into the space.
The space includes a parking garage (including on the roof) and loading docks, as can be seen in this photo:
The building is roughly square, with the loading dock in an appendage (panhandle) extending to the northeast.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1926186120878053&set=pcb.1926186160878049
Now a report has come out that Burlington will open a store at the old Bed Bath & Beyond space in Ridgeway Shopping Center, about a mile north of downtown.
I hope this means Burlington will vacate its space at 74 Broad Street. This would be a great opportunity to demolish the old largely windowless retail building and replace it with something that fits better into this prominent corner, such as high-density residential with ground-level retail.
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Development planned for Pacific St
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I was in this area the other day. The photo included in the Connecticut Examiner article is misleading. It only shows the small Cape Cod house on the left and not the larger two-story structure on the right. The roofline of the new house actually appears to be the same height as that of the structure on its right.
The neighbours make it seems as if there is an evil developer here. This is what zoning allows - no one was exploiting loopholes or doing anything untoward. It’s not out-of-scale, and it is a huge improvement over what was there before.
The article suggests the new development made a grown man cry. Give me a break!
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That’s easily the best-looking building on the block. I hope all those nasty homes to the left get bought out and redeveloped.
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In the post immediately above, the first photo on its left shows the bunkerlike structure that houses Macy’s, part of Stamford’s dying mall, which opened in 1982 and has been in decline for at least the past decade or so.
The sooner the mall dies the better. The nearly impenetrable windowless citadel is a stain on Stamford’s downtown, and its inevitable death, demolition and replacement will be sure to add vibrancy and accelerate growth in the central business district.
Stopgap solutions like indoor pickleball (who plays pickleball under a low ceiling?) will not save the mall.
It’s time to admit that nothing lasts forever, not even Forever 21.
The demolition of the mall and its associated high-rise parking garage (with its various aerial ramps and loops) will open up a huge area for redevelopment and may allow Stamford to restore walkable streets that were discontinued when the mall and Landmark Square were built (such as Main Street between Atlantic Street and Greyrock Place).
As we have written before, the partially vacant Landmark Square office complex that occupies the same block is planning to demolish some of its office buildings to make way for high-rise housing. Let’s hope the same happens to the Stamford mall:
Another largely windowless retail bunker is the Burlington Coat Factory at 74 Broad Street, down the street from the dying mall. As I wrote before, this used to be Caldor, and it is inevitable that Burlington will eventually close here in favor of another location in Stamford. This is a great site for redevelopment. An ideal future owner is University of Connecticut, whose Stamford campus is just a block away. This site could easily house classrooms, student housing or a mix of both. That said, the likelihood of UConn buying this property is somewhat low, as they already own a piece of underdeveloped land, the riverfront parking lot at the NW corner of Washington Blvd and Broad Street, and UConn hasn’t yet figured out how the parking lot fits into their long-term plans for the Stamford campus.
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This one (589 Bedford Street) is on the same block as the Walton Place high-rise development. So we could be seeing lots of changes to this corner of downtown Stamford in the near future:
The old house at 589 Bedford Street burned down more than seven years ago. It has taken a very long time to redevelop.
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