Month: December 2008

Chris Schooley, until recently a leader in Stonehaus’s Belvedere project off Rio Road East, has gone on the record saying that he would not recommend that other developers adopt the LEED certification program.

The Schooley interview is posted on a new blog by Brant Meyer, a local development consultant. During Schooley’s time at Stonehaus (he recently left to start his own business), he was a vocal proponent of the idea that Belvedere, a multi-hundred-unit development, would achieve sustainability with EarthCraft-certified housing and because, as a whole, it was part of the LEED Neighborhood Development Pilot Program. Not only

Belvedere ran into some troubles with LEED, former development manager Chris Schooley says.

would the houses sport no-VOC paint, but the whole thing, with its on-site organic farm and walkable layout, was supposed to make it easier for residents to leave a smaller footprint.

Now that Schooley is out on his own, he says that from a developer’s standpoint, LEED is tough to actually implement. Costs can get out of control, Schooley says, because people in the industry are still getting used to green building and have trouble estimating what things will cost. He also speaks about complications in the design process and says he was surprised that fewer buyers than he’d expected were seeking out green design.

Instead of signing on with LEED, Schooley says he’d advise other developers to simply adopt their own program of green goals and use those to advance PR, in the same way that Belvedere has made LEED a central part of its marketing.

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

For years, rumors have circulated among Westhaven residents that redevelopment was coming—whether they liked it or not. But now that redevelopment is imminent, residents of Westhaven and the rest of the city’s public housing sites have some assurances that they will not be merely pawns in the process, thanks to a Residents’ Bill of Rights for Redevelopment that has now been approved by the housing authority and City Council.

The Residents’ Bill of Rights, which was composed by the Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR), lays out eight points, among them that public housing residents will help guide the process, that units for low-income households will be replaced at least one-for-one, and that affected residents will have priority. According to PHAR Board member Joy Johnson, Holly Edwards originally suggested the idea.

“If patients have rights, it makes sense that public housing residents have rights,” says Edwards, a nurse as well as a city councilor.

Though the local public housing agency is officially called the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority (CRHA), it has done very little of late to earn the “redevelopment” in

“If patients have rights, it makes sense that public housing residents have rights,” says Holly Edwards.

its title. But this year, CRHA hired a director of redevelopment, Amy Kilroy, and has gotten $150,000 from the city to help master plan CRHA’s public housing sites, which currently have 376 units. Next month, it will interview consultants to conduct the master planning, and it hopes to have a master plan by the end of 2009.

Redevelopment will likely involve the mixed-income model, which has become accepted practice for new public housing and facilitated by a federal grant program called HOPE VI.

But the new model still raises old problems. Though it keeps poor people from being siloed into monolithic blocks, the quantity of market-rate housing has sometimes squeezed out low-income residents. As part of the redevelopment process, Kilroy will organize trips across the country for CRHA leaders and residents to learn lessons about redevelopment, including what not to do. In Chicago, for instance, the notorious Cabrini-Green high-rises were demolished starting in the mid-’90s to make room for mixed-income housing, but replacement units were slow to catch up, some residents were forced into substandard temporary housing, and a lawsuit ensued.

It’s just that sort of conflict PHAR is trying to head off. Though the document is not legally binding, as a resolution passed by CRHA, it still carries weight, establishing policy for redevelopment.

Though in the end the CRHA board unanimously approved the Bill of Rights, it did raise some tensions. “It was mildly contentious,” says CRHA Chair Jason Halbert, “but that’s the kind of thing we’re going to go through in the master planning process. Having people at the table discussing these things is really changing the way our community talks about public housing and the way we relate to each other, and that’s really one of the most important things that we’re going to do through master planning. Bottom line, it’s about building trust.”

In passing the resolution of support for the Bill of Rights, Mayor Dave Norris noted a conversation with one of the architects behind the Vinegar Hill “urban renewal” project of the 1960s.

“He said to me, ‘If we had had a PHAR back in those days, Vinegar Hill would not have happened the way that it happened.’”

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

Though the county Board of Supervisors voted to allocate $225,000 to replace natural grass on high school football fields with synthetic turf, questions remain about the safety of the turf. Supervisors David Slutzky and Ann Mallek opposed the measure, citing health and safety concerns.

Slutzky, who with Mallek was appointed to try to answer questions raised by the Board on the health concerns, remains skeptical about the toxicity of some of the turf materials and the issue of overheating. “I am not convinced that they are dangerous, but I am certainly not convinced that they are safe,” he says. “And that’s why I voted against it.”

Jason Bauman, UVA’s assistant AD for facilities, says, “Our [turf fields] are safe and consistently playable.”

Not that it mattered much: The county School Board already approved the replacement back in November 2007 and would have looked into raising private money if supervisors had decided to pull the funds.

Given that information, “I thought it was preposterous that the Board decided, in these difficult times, to go ahead and spend the money,” says Slutzky. “I believe I was the only one to object for the financial reason.”

The cost of installing synthetic turf is $600,000 per field, reduced from an earlier estimate of $800,000. Much of the financing comes from an anonymous donor who gave city and county high schools $1.5 million for the fields.

Slutzky says he pushed to have the Board allot more time for research before making the final decision. Even in the event that the Board decided against giving the money, he says, he would have liked to hold a public hearing on the health concerns in order to avoid a community backlash that would result in tearing up the turf and bringing back the natural grass. “I’d rather have a good, open and public dialogue first,” he says. “If the community has a strong desire to keep these fields in because of the benefits they represent, so be it.”

UVA has four fields with synthetic turf. Jason Bauman, associate athletics director for Facilities and Operations says the University did the appropriate research before deciding to install the turf. “Our priority is to make sure that we can consistently deliver safe, playable fields for our athletes and with the turf, the fields were able to do exactly that.”

To the question of overheating, Bauman says that UVA has installed an irrigation system to ensure the quick cooling of the fields in the hottest summer months. “We have practices on our fields starting early August, and it’s really hot sometimes, but we have not experienced any temperatures on the fields that would approach dangerous levels,” he says. “Ours are safe and consistently playable.”

Slutzky says he has accepted the decision and wants to move on. “I don’t want the public to feel that I am crying over spilled milk. We voted the way we did, and we’ll move on.”

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

Hey man, what’s up with that whole Downtown Mall rebricking deal? The Mall seems pretty sweet to me as it is.

Apparently, you haven’t been strolling down the Mall with a high-heeled woman on your arm. The materials used when the Mall was built in the 1970s were pretty darn good—except for the mortar in between and under the bricks. Because of deicing salts, freeze cycles, flash floods, and lots and lots of foot traffic, the mortar is wearing away in between the bricks, making a Saturday night dinner at C&O and stroll to the Paramount into a perilous journey fraught with danger at every step. Some people may enjoy the adrenaline rush of it all, but most folks probably get mad. And when the woman on your arm gets mad, you get mad too. Next thing you know, you have to head to Staunton for dinner and Short Pump for shopping. Many women who work on the Mall long ago banished heels from their wardrobes.

• Still not enough dirt on the bricks? Starting January 5, check c-ville.com for our latest blog, Brick Watch, a daily update on the Mall mauling.

So the city is going to replace all of the bricks on the seven blocks of the Mall from West Third Street to East Sixth Street. This time, they’re going to ditch the mortar, and instead set the bricks with sand so that they are closer together and will require less maintenance. That’s the way all the newer bricked walkways—at Court Square, at the Pavilion, at Third Street—have been set.

So this is just about ladies in high heels?

Not entirely, though whenever I ask why we’re doing this, high heels are mentioned. At a Board of Architectural Review meeting in October, a brazen young lady, Liza Sherman, dared to ask:

“Just tax-dollar-wise, why are you doing this? [The Mall] looks good to me. Maybe it’s just a stupid question.”

She was rebutted by a project designer who pointed to the High Heel Problem. “It’s the failure of the mortar joints and the mortar bedding underneath getting loose, and your heels fall in the joints.”

I found the answer a little condescending, but the more I’ve mulled it over, the less silly the High Heel Problem seems. Take “high heels” as metonymy for “rich people.” If rich people, or at least people willing to spend money, take their wealth to other shopping and

entertainment districts, then many of the Mall’s galleries, theaters, stationary shops and restaurants lose their best clients. The city doesn’t want that—it gets tax revenue from all of those tickets sold and products purchased and dinners consumed—and if you’re a city resident, you don’t want that either, since those taxes mitigate your property taxes.

That said, the city can’t back up its claim about the Mall’s revenue generation with any recent figures. When I inquired about it, I was told by Lee Richards, the city commissioner of revenue, that his office “couldn’t come up with the data” and had no prepared report. In other words, our city leaders have nothing but good guesses to go on when they talk about the economic vitality of the Mall. The city hasn’t run the numbers to prove that the Mall is more “vital” to our community than, say, Cherry Avenue.

So it is just about high heels.

There are a few other reasons for the replacement. The uneven bricks are a tripping hazard for all of us, particularly the elderly. It’s bad enough that an old person could get hurt, but if someone decided to sue, some hotshot personal injury lawyer could possibly prove the city was “grossly negligent” about maintenance.

The other argument is that the city is the property manager of the Mall, and after 32 years, it’s time for an update. Private property managers, like those that run Barracks Road or Fashion Square, refresh their properties. The city should do the same, some argue.

Bob Stroh, co-chairman of the Downtown Business Association, puts it this way: “It’s a lot more than a high heel problem. Otherwise we’d just issue flats when they came to the Mall. It’s a safety problem. It’s an aesthetic problem. It’s a matter of keeping the Mall looking as if someone cares about it, as you would your own home. You walk down the Mall and none of the fountains work—what does that say for the community’s commitment to their Mall?”

"Click on image for larger view"

“It’s way overdue,” says Jon Bright, owner of the Spectacle Shop, which he’s operated on the Mall since the 1980s. “The frustration part from the retail perspective is the people complaining about the cost of doing it. When the city decided to brick this over to create a commercial environment, they became a) the landlord, and b) they were doing it not for us, the shopkeepers, but for me, the citizen.”

So it’s about lawsuits, taxes…and high heels. All of which boil down to (what else?) money.

Whose idea was this anyway?

God knows who the individual was who first came up with it, but the idea has been around since 1989, a mere 13 years after the Mall was opened. The city commissioned a study by a local architecture firm, Wood, Sweet & Swofford, which concluded that “the Charlottesville Downtown Mall is beginning to reach the final stages of deterioration” and the bricks should be replaced.

That 1989 study recommended that replacement begin that year and continue gradually for the next seven years. But like anything else in this area, it took a lot more studies to finally do anything—reports on the Downtown Mall renovation were completed in 1999, in 2001, and in 2005. The ball really got rolling in October 2007, when the city started holding public meetings, created a website, and started to work designs through the Board of Architectural Review (BAR)—when you’re serious enough to tackle the BAR, you’re pretty darn serious.

One thing that finally drove the city to act seems to have been a fear of competition from private malls in the county—in particular, Albemarle Place. The renovation project was finally put in the capital improvement plan in 2005, back when Albemarle Place wasn’t the pipe dream it has become.

“I don’t know if it was particularly Albemarle Place,” says Jim Tolbert, director of Neighborhood Development Services and the chief city steward of the project. “But if you view this as an asset like a developer with a shopping center would view a shopping center, the successful ones are always adapting, updating, upgrading. If Fashion Square Mall sat there for 30 years with no major maintenance, it would be a dump and nobody would want to go to it. And so we’ve got to take the same approach with the Mall if it’s going to stay vibrant and current, if it’s going to be the economic hub of our community.”

How much is this going to cost?

We don’t know, but the city has budgeted $9.3 million. It has already spent $2 million in design costs, and has $7.2 million set aside for construction. But construction could cost $1 million less—the recession has been good for bid prices, and contracts have come in about 10 to 15 percent, according to Tolbert.

Nine million?!! Hell, for that much money, we’d better be getting streets of gold.

We’re getting new bricks on top of the same concrete slab on which the originals were laid. We’re getting Wi-Fi. The fountains are going to get fixed. The trees at Central Place are going to be replaced. The leaky old 2" water pipes underneath the Mall are getting new 1" pipes fit inside them. And we’re getting a new electrical system, so that restaurants can cash out customers at the cafés. The electrical system is supposedly so bad that plugging in a coffee maker outside could shut down the Mall.

The electric repairs are pretty expensive—$775,000—but the most expensive material is granite, which will be used to replace the existing decorative bands made of cement. Granite was originally part of the Mall design drawn up by Lawrence Halprin, but it was cut from the project by penny-pinching city leaders in the ’70s.

Granite is as close to gold as you’re going to get. By the way, the material costs alone for enough gold bars to cover the Mall would run about $126 billion, which would beat the heck out of the Big Dig as the most expensive public works project in the history of the world.

Why do we have to buy new brick anyway? Didn’t you say the current brick is in good shape?

It is in pretty good shape, but the city says it can’t reuse the brick because it takes too long to scrape off all the mortar on each brick. If you had a crew of two dudes working eight-hour days five days a week, and you assume that scraping mortar off a brick takes two minutes on average, that task alone would take those dudes almost two and a half years.

I’m not saying it’s impossible—I’m just saying it would take a lot more time (and money).

Oh, and just so we all know, Tolbert made sure that I knew they are technically pavers —not bricks. They’ll look like bricks to you and me, but as pavers, they’ll apparently hold up better under all those footsteps.

What are they doing with the old bricks? There’s got to be a million of them.

There are actually about 375,000 of them. The city originally thought that they would only be able to get rid of 8,000 to 10,000 bricks, but now the procurement office says that it’s putting them on eBay to see if someone wants to buy them. It’s also exploring selling 90,000 to a “downtown developer” who wants them for a new project. All the rest will be ground up at the city yard to line trails for Parks and Rec.

Well, how many years is this whole $9 million deal going to take?

Some of it is already underway—the plumbing stuff, for instance—but the city will start major demolition work January 5 and says it will be finished in May.

Four months?!! Shut up. We all saw how long Third Street took.

Indeed, the bricking over of one measly side street took the city nine months and $300,000. But that was different, says the city. For the Third Street NE project, which involved bricking over the side street next to the Paramount, the city had to tear up the pavement, pour a concrete slab, and then put bricks on top. To make matters worse, they messed up the utility plan, which created major delays.

For this rebricking project, they aren’t messing with the slab (well, for the most part they aren’t—this month, they messed with it to insert those pipes).

“I understand the fears that people have of the unknown,” says Tolbert. “I wish we hadn’t of done Third Street a year ago, because everybody saw Third Street, and that’s what’s in their mind.”

The old and the new: Mortar-laid bricks (left) will yield to sand-laid bricks.

Come on, this is city government we’re talking about. There’s no way they’re going to be done in four months.

The city points out that it’s not them managing the project, but Barton Malow, a construction management firm with offices from Michigan to Mexico that managed the John Paul Jones Arena and is also managing UVA’s South Lawn project.

“We realize we don’t have the management capability in house to do a project like this in this time frame,” says Tolbert. “We recognized that.” The contract with Barton Malow specifies that payment will stop in May. “So there is an incentive there for them built in to be finished by the date or they’re working for free, which, at their rates, is a hell of a lot of money.”

To keep things moving, work is going to be going on at multiple blocks at once. If a bricking crew stalls at one site because, say, the gutter work needs to be done, supposedly they’ll go down to another site and speed up work there.

I still don’t get why we can’t just hire a crew and remortar the bricks as they are now.

If you have a couple of guys toiling along the Mall, it’ll take a long time and might not even save very much money. The city points out that it gains efficiencies by doing it all at once—you have one crew tearing up the Mall, another crew fixing the gutters, another crew laying the brick, another crew doing the plumbing.

Plus, tearing up the bricks gives the city the chance to deal with drainage issues as well as the chance to lay the bricks in sand, which will require less maintenance down the road.

To get it done on time, they’re going to have to shut down the entire Mall, aren’t they?

Downtown Mall Phasing Rev 120108city View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: charlottesville virginia) Slideshow presentation: City of Charlottesville Downtown Pedestrian Mall Renovation Phasing Plan 12.01.08 — provided by the City of Charlottesville.

Tolbert assures both me and City Council that not only will the Mall remain open to pedestrians, but no businesses will have to close because of this project.

“If we have to be working right outside their front door, we’re going to find out when they’re open, and make sure that the crews are in there and out of the way,” says Tolbert. “Our goal is not to have any business have to close their doors for even an hour, and we feel confident that they’re going to be able to do that.” Work will be done some weekends, though the crews won’t work late at night because of Downtown residents.

The city even holds out hope that some people will be drawn to the Mall to see how work is coming along. Unlike the barriers for the Third Street project or those at the Landmark Hotel, these barriers will only be 4′ high, giving gawkers the chance to watch work in progress. It’ll be like a museum exhibit on, uh, the fine art of Mall rebricking or something.

So you’re telling me that the city will rebrick the entire Mall in four months without closing a single business for one hour. Whatever. But still, this has got to be horrible for businesses on the Mall.

If it’s not horrible, it’s at least not good for businesses on the Mall. Michael Rodi, owner at Rapture, has warned that this could be the straw that breaks some businesses, particularly if it lasts longer than May.

“I think it would still be catastrophic for some businesses,” says Rodi.

Moreover, the uncertainty about the project is enough to keep some businesses from opening on the Mall to begin with. The Masonic Corporation of Charlottesville, which owns the building that Order from Horder used to occupy, has met with two national chains about the 3,300 square foot space it has to lease. But the chains aren’t interested because of the rebricking.

“The Mall project is scaring people away,” Andy Keller, building manager for the Masonic Corporation, told C-VILLE in November. “We talked to two national chains, but we had to tell them what was going on. We couldn’t pull the wool over their eyes.”

But much of the reason for doing this is to benefit businesses—it’s the city as property manager sprucing up the retail district—and so supposedly they’ll be better off in the long run. Well, at least those that survive the recession.

I should also point out that some businesses will get an uptick. After all, the project is bringing a lot of hungry workers to the Mall every day.

Yeah. The country could be in the worst recession since FDR was in office. Why can’t they hold off on this whole thing for a year?

Well, there is the argument that if you’re going to keep people away from the Mall with the renovation, you might as well do it when people aren’t coming to the Mall anyway. Even in a normal year, January through March are the slowest months.

“If you’re going to lose 5 percent, are you better off losing 5 percent when things are down or when they’re up?” Stroh rhetorically asks. “You lose a lot more when they’re up.”

But there’s no question that the timing is pretty bad for Downtown businesses. The economic downturn is already hurting businesses significantly. Four, in fact, have recently closed or are closing on the east end of the Mall in addition to Order from Horder—Migration: A Gallery, Sage Moon Gallery, Innisfree, and L’Affiche. None of these businesses blame their troubles on the city rebricking project, mind you, but it’s entirely

“I don’t think there’s any question that everyone understands what’s at stake both in getting the job done and getting it done in a timely way,” says Bob Stroh, co-chairman of the Downtown Business Association.

conceivable that the project will be the giant spike that puts some struggling businesses out of their misery this winter.

“If they have to do it, they should reconsider the timing,” says Rodi. “Some of us are already off as much as 40 to 60 percent.”

“It’s a double-bladed sword,” admits Stroh. “If you do it now, you get the best deal from your contractors, so you do it on the cheap. The other side is, business is already down. You hate to see it decline further because of the construction project.” That’s why he says that the city is spending up to $50,000 on marketing the Mall, to make sure people know that it’s still open.

Surviving four months is one thing. But is there any contingency plan in case this thing lasts more than four months?

No. In unrelated news, I hear that rabbits feet, four-leaf clovers and rosary beads are popular gift ideas this year for the Downtown business person in your life.

Didn’t I hear the restaurants raising a ruckus? Could they put a stop to this mess?

For a while the restaurants did raise a ruckus—well, at least a high-pitched drone—particularly Michael Rodi at Rapture.

But he aimed his ire at the city’s ruling that restaurants can’t open their patio space until the entire project is done. The city made the ruling out of fairness concerns—i.e., Miller’s shouldn’t have to stay closed because they happen to be on the last block to be worked on. But restaurants made abundantly clear at a November meeting that they didn’t care about the fairness—i.e., what was good for the Mall was good for Miller’s—and so the city ditched that decree.

Briefly, there was another bone of contention about the city’s plans to institute limits of 700 square feet next year on café space, which would particularly affect Miller’s, Sal’s, Rapture, Zocalo and Blue Light. But when the cries arose, the city acquiesced, to the point that it won’t charge any fees for cafés next year, a loss of $50,000 in annual revenue.

Café space will be tweaked to make sure there’s an adequate fire lane. Additionally, the fountains at Sal’s and The Nook will be made accessible to the public, so you won’t have to buy lunch to have your conversation drowned out by the roar of rushing water.

I can’t believe it—an expensive city project in Charlottesville has no organized detractors? Did nobody ever lead a big campaign against this?

Well, someone did try to lead a big campaign against it—he was just a little too late. Brandon Collins, a local musician, heard other folks bitching and so he put together a petition. As tends to happen when a likeable guy puts out a petition to buck The Man, it got a lot of signatures.

But Collins couldn’t cobble together a posse to register his outrage at the requisite scale for City Council’s December 15 meeting. And though he at least showed up to the December 15 meeting, he made the tactical error of being completely civil and reasonable—rather than employing more effective actions, like howling with hyperbole about staff corruption or quoting selectively from FOIAed documents.

After complimenting the city for dropping the café restrictions, Collins asked that City Council instead do a maintenance project, and spend the extra money on poverty issues. “To me, what I see is that people are really struggling down here to pay rent. I know that I am,” Collins said. “I hope you’re not afraid—since you took a second look at the patio issues, I hope you’ll take a look at that.”

One of Collins’ requests was for the city to use more local workers, as Karen Waters of the Quality Community Council suggested in July. But Tolbert outlined that up to 20 percent of the workers will

Michael Rodi, owner of Rapture, is glad the city backed off on cafe space limitations, but he still thinks the project should be pushed back because of the bad economy.

be local—the demolition crew will all be local, and the contractors will work with CATEC to give students apprentice-level work. Collins was impressed with that, though he says he still thinks the project is a bad idea.

Weren’t people complaining about the size of the bricks or something?

People were—this summer. But they got the size of the bricks that they wanted, which is the size that they are now, 4"x12", and the aesthetic arguments have since dissipated.

Tolbert and consultants MMM Design Group originally proposed 5"x10" bricks, arguing that they were more stable and that they couldn’t find an affordable supplier for longer ones. But the BAR liked the longer bricks, as did Council, and the city miraculously found a supplier. The case was closed. Smaller bricks, 4" x 8", will be used only at the vehicular crossings.

Those who care about historic looking things still have some concern about the look of the rebricked Mall. Without the mortar, it might look like a giant clay monolith rather than a bricked street. The new bricks won’t have the worn edges of the existing bricks, taking away existing character. The biggest fear is that the renovation will be a Disneyfication of the Mall. But the fear isn’t big enough to stop it.

Is there no way to stop it? Is there no public hearing I can pack into at City Council to get them to stop this?

Unless a mass of indignant protestors emerge form the background to stage some daring act of civil disobedience, it’s going to happen.

I wonder if all the energy of opposition was cashed out by the aesthetic argument. The closest thing to a final meeting to move it forward was a July City Council meeting, but at that point, outrage was so focused on the size of the new bricks that few people talked publicly about whether there should be new bricks to begin with.

That said, Council has had numerous opportunities to quash the renovation, and if three of them wanted, the councilors could have. They did fight many of the flourishes concocted by MMM—new fountains, for instance, including an elaborate new entrance to the Mall where it begins at the Omni that would have cost a good deal more—but no councilor fought the concept of rebricking the Mall.

Cut to the chase: Is this going to be a total disaster?

Best case scenario: No. If the project doesn’t require any businesses to close to get work done, if all the cafés reopen in May, if no Pandora’s box is unearthed below the bricks, and if Mother Nature is judicious in her use of snow, then just about everyone is in good shape.

But notice all those ifs. The two biggest contingencies we can anticipate now are snow and the slab. A lot of snow could slow down

Brandon Collins was the lone opposition to the rebricking project at City Council’s final meeting before it starts.

the project significantly, though Tolbert tells me that Barton Malow is working out a plan. Most reports and work so far suggest that the slab is in good shape. But if there are structural deficiencies because of cracks and crumbling

below the surface, that could drastically slow down the project.

Other unforeseen problems could arise, and Murphy’s law suggests a long list—a gas leak ignited by a cigarette, a suicidal worker behind a front-end loader, an unearthed cave under Central Place full of Balrogs—but one of the big unknowns is what you people will do. Will you still come to a Mall pock-marked with construction sites? Will you still think of the Mall on a Friday night when you have the expanse of an evening before you and a little extra money to burn? When your Mom’s birthday rolls around, will you still come hunting for a knickknack at the Mole Hole?

You told me that it only took 13 years for the city to decide to redo the Mall. Will we have to do this all over again in 2022?

According to city officials, we shouldn’t have to have this conversation again for at least 50 years, baby—though I wonder if that’s also what they said in 1976.