$20 Million Garage: Update

Tomorrow is the date that Robert Moylan "confidently predicted" this parking garage would be completed, as quoted in this T&G article from the day before Christmas.

It does look like it's pretty close to complete from the outside, though, and at street level it does look quite nice.

As I was taking my pictures today, a big guy in a big pickup truck with the Gilbane logo on the door asked me, "Would you mind telling me what you're doing?"

"Just taking pictures," I answered, amiably adding, "It looks pretty nice, now!"

Maybe he thought I was an insurance inspector, or maybe a private investigator, or even worse... maybe even a hostile reporter. I was somewhat of the opinion that he wouldn't know what a blogger was, so I offered no real indication about why I was taking pictures. He seemed satisfied with it.

Looking towards Grafton Street, the street level appearance here is very nice.

I have to admit, it looks a lot nicer than I thought it would look, up close like that.

The whole thing seems to somehow come together in a weird sort of way, as if planting a parking garage in the middle of a four lane street isn't such a crazy idea, after all.

Well, maybe the Water Department has been unsuccessful in filtering out large volumes of disposed psychotropic medications...

Either way, it still looks like a giant concrete riverboat from a distance, and (oddly enough) it looks kinda nice close up.

On the Grafton Street side, the big gold lettering ought to be easy to see, even if you're from out of town and just jumped off the expressway in Posner Square. Of course, the current signs indicate that people should get off at E. Central Street to go to the train station, ...but I've already commented at length about that.

I'm still wondering if there's going to be two way traffic on that section of Franklin Street. It looks like there will probably be enough room for it, and traffic does have to go onto that section to get into the garage... I just hope it doesn't turn out to be a big mess as the result of some unforeseen consequence...

I mean, there's just no way to anticipate what might make sense to a traffic engineer.