Update on the New Development at Piedmont and Cheshire Bridge

Years ago planning began to redevelop the retail strips between the thrift store and the taco place on Piedmont, across the street from the gorilla car wash and the BP station and The Pagoda and bar/tattoo parlor, between East Rock Springs and Cheshire Bridge.  The two small strip malls in the area were vacated.  That's when Artlite moved to much smaller and (it seemed to me) relatively horrible space facing a gargantuan parking lot at the new development at Piedmont and Sidney Marcus (since that time they've moved into somewhat less horrible space in the same development, but it is still a much smaller store than it used to be, and they're a stone's throw from Office Depot, which seems like it can't be a good thing).  So the tenants got mostly cleared out but the recession hit and nothing happened.  Then businesses moved back into the spaces for a while but now the construction fences are up and demolition begins soon.  Even the taco place is going to go, although that area is not yet fenced off.

Wednesday night representatives of Mill Creek Residential. the Dallas-based company that is developing the site, spoke at a community meeting sponsored by the Piedmont Heights neighborhood association at Rock Springs Presbyterian Church.  As an aside, when I first saw the name "Mill Creek" on the fence, I was highly skeptical.  I didn't think there had been a mill on the site, and I didn't even think there was a creek there.  So this struck me has a highly inaccurate and even misleading name for the property.  But it's the name of the company.  The plan apparently is to name the development Morningside Park.  It is, technically, in Morningside but it will not be very park-like (more about that later).  You might be excused from thinking it would be, though, from their website, which features this nice view of Piedmont Park.

The only thing in the area that looks remote like a park is the cemetery at Rock Springs Presbyterian, catty-cornered across both Piedmont and Rock Springs.  

But I digress.  The two representatives from Mill Creek came and answered questions about the development for about an hour.  I didn't quite catch their names but I think the one on the left (who did most of the talking) is Oz and the one on the right is Chris.  The Fellowship Hall was packed with neighbors from Morningside and Piedmont Heights as well as at least one owner of a nearby business.

The plan is to build two buildings 65 feet tall with 44,000 square feet of retail at street level and 300 residential units.  Behind will be a 7-story parking deck which will be partially underground providing controlled access parking for residents (1.6 parking spots per unit) and open parking for retail customers (5 spaces per thousand feet of retail).  Some of that is surface parking I think because the number of parking spaces they gave for the deck was only 520. They have signed Sprouts Farmers Market, an Arizona-based grocery chain with a recipe for Quinoa Pear Muffins on its website, to occupy 27,000 square feet on the first floor of one of the two buildings.

There will be a delivery entrance that can access the loading dock on the south end of the property, between the grocery store and the thrift store, and the main entrance will be between the two buildings, roughly across from Saigon Basil.  There will be a new traffic light here.  There were lots of questions and concerns about the impact of the development on traffic flow.  Oz said that a traffic study was underway.  Would delivery trucks be making left turns from the southbound lanes on Piedmont?  No, they wouldn't, they would only be turning in from the northbound lanes.  The plan also calls for parallel parking in front of the grocery store that would be inset into the property but still seems like a terrifying thing to do, given the speed and volume of traffic on Piedmont.  Why couldn't they have their main entrance across from Wimbledon?  It just didn't work, on the site plan, with the grocery store at the south end of the development.

There were questions about bike lanes (Oz wasn't sure) and the pedestrian experience.  What features would make the development accessible for pedestrians?  There would be 10 foot sidewalks and crosswalks; that seemed to pretty much be it.  Could they match the new streetscape on Cheshire Bridge?  Maybe they could, they didn't really know, they could check into that.  Did they know about the Piedmont Heights master plan and the proposal to turn the Piedmont/Cheshire Bridge intersection into a roundabout?  They didn't and although they didn't say so they pretty clearly had no intention to re-engineer this intersection.  

There were questions about water and trees.  Is there a creek in that valley?  No.  What about runoff?  There is water retention built into this, somehow, although where it is isn't so clear to me.  Did they know that their notice about trees (planned tree removals, I assume, but I'm not sure) was behind the construction fence and wasn't visible from the street?  Okay, thanks, noted.

The most uncomfortable moment of the evening was towards the end when a woman pointed out that lots of issues that weren't resolved had been raised and she wasn't confident that any of them were going to be addressed because she hadn't seen either Oz or Chris taking any notes.  Oz replied that he'd certainly made some mental notes.  

Iain and I were there and we took lots of notes.  If the guys from Mill Creek would like a copy, I'm sure we'll both be happy to share.