Brooklyn173

Pleasantly surprised that the walls will be mostly glass.

I think this is a great idea with one (significant) concern. Many people park in the Smith Lands lot and ride the Light Rail to their jobs in the heart of the TMC. Move the station and those people - a large number - will have to be accommodated.

My thought - without any real engineering - is an autonomous bus that would connect your new light rail station to the parking lot and maybe even some of the other medical facilities along OST.

Just dreaming here.

Looking north. Seems the bottom will be that aluminum wall and then open above and than a retractible roof.

I'd love to be wrong.

Using Google Streetview, the east side is all overgrown. But I got this view from the west "on" Elysian Street with Google. The building seems a little too substantial for a typical tower but I'm sticking with Tower 89.  Why not, it's a much better story.

http://txrrhistory.com/towers/139/139.htm

You may have stumbled onto a sort of ghost railroad tower - Tower 89.

It's all very confusing to me, but according to the link above, there were two railroad towers, 89 and 139. Tower 89 was built first but it is unclear if it was ever used as a proper railroad tower. Tower 139 came a few years later, south and east of 89,  and was in use until the rail service stopped on that section of line. The two towers seemed to have been confused back and forth in official correspondence over the years. But it is possible that your red building is the abandoned tower 89.

Befitting a ghost, all of the pictures on the site are of Tower 139. There are no pictures of Tower 89 there. [Cue the spooky music]

Or maybe I am completely wrong. But it was fun searching. Thanks

On 4/29/2020 at 10:52 PM, Naviguessor said:

The problem with senior living in high rises...fire alarms and actual fires. 

There are lots of senior housing facilities that are high rise. I'm from NYC which has a bunch, but they exist in many smaller cities. Here's one just down the road a ways.

https://thetowersonparklane.com/

Though I am of the opinion that the current building will need to start completely failing so as to reduce the price, and then be knocked down for a new development. Though maybe the owners will want to dump it quickly in a post COVID world and someone will be willing to take the gamble. A very long shot at best.

I was sort of hoping for a stairway down to St Arnold's...

But the colors are fun.

From last week

I always liked the idea of a senior independent living situation, for many of the same reasons you liked student housing. Near transit and the theaters and the restaurants of downtown. But I fear that the structure itself may be the question now, especially after the reported contract fell through last year. And tearing it down and building something new is unlikely considering all of the available parking lots / development sites nearby.

The timing is curious.