Tuesday November 14, 2006

Glimpse of Midtown

Midtown

I stopped by the Midtown Miami development the other day. It’s still a big construction zone, with only a couple of stores open, but the overall shape is very apparent. This is only a brief look; I got there too late to really check it out.

I have aesthetic quibbles with some of the style decisions, but in terms of substance, this is development done right: mixing retail, office, and several styles of residential buildings in a dense and walkable little mini-district.

midtown miami map

The map. From here, it looks like a regular mall. The residential developments aren’t on this map; they’re to the east. The Target, Linens ‘n Things, and West Elm are a godsend. Petsmart and some of the other stuff I could give or take. Marshalls, there’s one downtown, so I don’t see the point of that really. Plus, who shops at Marshalls, anyway? I have no idea what Loehmanns is.

Midtown Miami residences

Here are the towers going up. Taken from the parking lot of the Target. Some of this stuff has a loooooong way to go before it’s done.

Midtown Miami Target

Target (my camera was set incorrectly; it didn’t really look Satanic). No pictures of the inside — it looks exactly like every other Target in the world, except for the customers, who were maybe slightly hipper looking. It’s not a “super” target (in the parlance of large discount retailers, “super”=“has a big food section”), but there is a sizable food area; just no produce.

Midtown Miami facade

This is a bit of the facade. It’s all still getting finished up, but it looks good. The brick finish I guess is supposed to put the “town” in “Midtown.” Just behind those storefronts across the street is a working-class neighborhood with lots of small old single-family houses. Someone should do a comprehensive photo project on the neighborhood, which is now going to be undergoing some fast and drastic transformation.

Midtown Miami West Elm

Some of the rest of the development, looking quite a bit more generic, though it’s unfair to say that when it’s not finished. This is the West Elm store, which I’m looking forward to. After the target, the only other thing open is Circuit City, which I have zero interest in.

One other interesting note: unlike most malls, the parking garages charge. The rates are weird, too: free for the first hour with Target ticket validation (a pain in the ass), $1 per hour for the next four hours, and then $10 per hour after that. I have no idea what the logic behind those rates is. Someone obviously did some deep thinking about how to maximize their profits, logic and sense be damned. I’ll be surprised if they don’t get so many complaints that they have to change this soon.

Update: Oldswish points out that they got $170 million from the city to build this thing and paying for parking was always part of the plan.

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  1. travis    Tue Nov 14, 10:31 AM #  

    do they not build book stores anymore? thats all i friggin’ asked for…



  2. alesh    Tue Nov 14, 10:40 AM #  

    i KNOW, right!? I’d take three of those crappy clothing stores for a Borders .



  3. Omni resident    Tue Nov 14, 10:47 AM #  

    Paying to Park? At a Targets? That was a scheme created by Manny Diaz and Linda Haskins. The Diaz/Haskins duo provided $169 Mil in taxpayer funded incentives to the developers of Midtown Miami and the new Targets. So the taxpayers are paying for the parking platform. Then when the taxpayers show up to shop, charge them again.

    Marc Sarnoff, the independent candidate is running against tax and spend Haskins in a Nov 21st Runoff. Tell your friends to show up and vote.



  4. mkh    Tue Nov 14, 11:05 AM #  

    The $10/hour long-term is to discourage people from leaving their cars there for $24/day. It’s not an uncommon practice in mixed environments without a movie theater, particularly in areas where parking is at (or will be at) a premium. I’ve run into the dramatically-escalating charges in the past.



  5. mkh    Tue Nov 14, 12:25 PM #  

    Oh, and as always, nice photos.



  6. edgewater ed    Tue Nov 14, 04:52 PM #  

    But why should we have to pay to park when we paid for the garage?

    Linda Haskins promised us the parking would be free “...just like at Aventura Mall or Dolphin Mall…”

    $24 per day?



  7. NicFitKid    Tue Nov 14, 05:04 PM #  

    Hmm, lemme see.. Twenty-four dollars a day times thirty days a month, that’s… seven twenty with no deposit or security. Not too shabby, a little cheaper than my current rent. If they condo convert my building ahead of schedule, I’ll just trade in my hatchback for a used cargo van, throw in a mattress, rig up a sink and a chem toilet and voila! The most affordable unit in Midtown, available now!

    If I disappear from teh internets, you’ll know what happened.



  8. j-j    Tue Nov 14, 05:08 PM #  

    I’m in Brooklyn for the week, our midtown thing looks just like a new “mall”, that’s here, around Dean Street… It’s all fine and dandy, but wasn’t this supposed to be a midtown that would reflect the arts and culture championed by the galleries in and around Wynwood? WTF??? Where’s the Borders or B&B? I hate to sound negative, but this looks just like Sunset Place-minus the movie theaters and sans the books store… I really think that we got screwed again…and the parking paying thing , well that’s a really a big problem for me.

    I hate to hate, and I’m glad for the Target and the C.City but this could have,and should have been, so much more…:-(



  9. disn'dat    Tue Nov 14, 06:02 PM #  

    alesh & travis:
    neither one of you reads…come on!
    the first, taking all those photos has no time to read, while the other growing that moustache has not time for anything but looking into the mirror. (not, of course, if this is another travis “tho!”)



  10. madeindade    Tue Nov 14, 11:36 PM #  

    You all are spoiled! No one expects to go to the beach or downtown and park for free do they? You want free parking go to Kendall or Pembroke Pines – there’s plenty of free parking out there. Also, Midtown is a ‘CDD’ – Community Development District. The CDD takes a portion of the property taxes paid within the district and is used to fund the infrastructure (streets, sidewalks parking) within the district – hardly a giveaway it seems to me.
    As far as the retail mix, blame it on Developers Diversified as they specialize in suburban big-box crap – I expect that more interesting retail will arrive with the ground-floor retail spaces in the high rises on the east side of Midtown.



  11. Omni resident    Wed Nov 15, 12:06 AM #  

    So in the meantime, we have to keep paying to park? There is no beach here. This is Wynwood.
    Seems like a slick developer conned Manny Diaz and Linda Haskins into giving away the store…



  12. Dayngr    Wed Nov 15, 12:15 AM #  

    I won’t drive down there if I have to pay that much for parking.



  13. Harlan Erskine    Wed Nov 15, 02:34 AM #  

    fyi there is free and metered parking all over there-just park and walk a half a block and your sorted…

    By the way the first photo in the article is stellar. I snuck up there one night a few weeks ago with the Mamiya but i didn’t venture far enough and i had to use the railing as a tripod anyways. The first photo was so great what happened to the colors in the Target sign photo? aren’t you shooting in RAW mode? you could fit that sort of thing in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) is you were.



  14. alesh    Wed Nov 15, 07:14 AM #  

    Harlan~

    Sure, you can park on any of the side-streets for free. In fact, that’s probably what I’ll do next time I go down there. But mark my word — the near future will bring a prolife