South Lamar Plaza getting ready for teardown (Austin, Spring: 2013, apartments)

[Jennibc]

End is near for Lamar Plaza | www.statesman.com

One of Austin's strip malls about to get revamped. As much as I dislike strip malls, it's a little bit sad.

[Komeht]

What's going in is very cool. Having a ton more screens and Alamo is going to be great and the architecture is outstanding.

[Jennibc]

Oh, I know. And at first, I thought that strip mall was ugly as all get out. But you get used to something and then you feel a little bit sad that time is marching on and things are changing.

I'm just letting people know that it's time to go soak in your last bit of 1950's Austin strip mall nostalgia because it's all going to be gone soon and also that South Lamar location of Alamo is going to be closed for the greater part of 2013.

[OpenD]

Granted the place is ugly, but...

It has also been the longtime home to an iconic music store, and one of the top pro guitar stores around, and the electric bicycle store, and the New Age bookstore... Ommmmmmm.

I'm a fan of good architecture, and I know time marches on, but I definitely have mixed feelings about this one...

[10scoachrick]

How about this?...
They clear the lot, decide to hold off on developing it and the SoCo food truck 'park' can move over there for a while? Just a thought.

[AustinGuy]

The mock ups of the new architecture don't do much for me. Sort of reminds me of City Walk at Universal Studios or some such, but I'm all for adding more screens to the Alamo. I figure they'll be changing the table layout in all the theaters to match the new style a la the Slaughter location.

I'm curious about how bad the traffic on South Lamar is going to get after all the additional apartments and condos planned are added. Plus when you add the Trader Joes & additional shopping at Seaholm, it is bound to create more of a mess between Barton Springs and Sixth along Lamar especially.

[Komeht]

Originally Posted by AustinGuy

The mock ups of the new architecture don't do much for me. Sort of reminds me of City Walk at Universal Studios or some such, but I'm all for adding more screens to the Alamo. I figure they'll be changing the table layout in all the theaters to match the new style a la the Slaughter location.

I'm curious about how bad the traffic on South Lamar is going to get after all the additional apartments and condos planned are added. Plus when you add the Trader Joes & additional shopping at Seaholm, it is bound to create more of a mess between Barton Springs and Sixth along Lamar especially.

Ok, you don't like the architecture...I guess a strip mall which is 75% parking lot between the shops and the street is better...

Infill, locating shops, restaurants, office and residential and creating walkable areas and short car trips is the solution to traffic woes, not the problem. The problem is sprawl.

[passionatearts]

How exactly is this new development going to handle the huge increase in traffic that it will generate? That corner of South Lamar was already a really bad traffic area.

[Komeht]

You have this exactly wrong. Having businesses in close proximity to where people live produces opportunities to walk, increases likelihood of people not needing a car or a second car, and shortens car trips when needed. Infill is the solution, sprawl is what causes bad traffic.

Besides which, I'd rather create an urban scape where we have happy people, not happy cars. For too many decades we've listened to traffic engineers as they've destroyed our cities piece by piece in an effort to make traffic flow. And it's futile, you'll never solve traffic problems by building bigger roads, but the more infill like this we have the less dependent we become on cars.

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by Komeht

You have this exactly wrong. Having businesses in close proximity to where people live produces opportunities to walk, increases likelihood of people not needing a car or a second car, and shortens car trips when needed. Infill is the solution, sprawl is what causes bad traffic.

Sounds nice, but I don't see how replacing one set of businesses with another set of businesses accomplishes any of that. As a matter of fact, it's predictable this new development will increase the amount of auto traffic because it is displacing businesses that might typically have a couple of customers each and increasing the capacity of the Alamo cinema by several hundred seats. Since each of the Alamo theaters draws patrons from a wide enough area that most of them drive... just look at the parking lot at any of them, it's obvious... on that factor alone I'd say this is more "inward sprawl" than anything.