I'm going to post this here in addition to Facebook, because the Riverfront is what got me into blogging, and it's very important to me to this day.

Don't stop reading if this starts out negative. It doesn't stay that way.

So I attended this event with a decent amount of skepticism. Not only was the meeting just announced yesterday, but over the last few years there's been quite a bit struggle getting the City, Downtown, Figge, Riverfront Improvement Commission, etc, in the same room, much less on the same page. Meanwhile I've been going to meetings about the riverfront for literally half my life.

The previous rendering from the city included a large building wrapping around the base of the SkyBridge, as many people seem to feel it needs more of a purpose than connecting the heart of the city to the Mississippi Riverfront. I hated that rendering, but I am so tired of the glacial pace of progress down there that I had resigned myself to supporting it now just to do my tiny part to move SOMETHING forward. Early in today's presentation they showed a slide saying that the council wanted the "commercial development" moved to the base of the SkyBridge. I knew a SkyBridge restaurant was coming.

Then they showed the renderings. They weren't bad. They almost seemed... good.

As I posted during the reveal, I felt that they were the best (or least bad?) effort on this front that I'd seen. As the presentation went on, I actually started to LIKE the design as shown. The amount of glass, and the fact that the "roof" of the restaurant/event space was more like additional park acreage than private reception area, have pretty much sold me. There are practical considerations that need to be ironed out, like how they'll hide the kitchen, utility, restrooms, storage and other unsightly infrastructure in their glass edifice, or whether it will need to be slightly larger than shown to be feasible. But those feel like details that can be worked out. The crowd reaction was quite positive, to the point that there were hardly any comments or questions at the end.

It seems like we may have a pretty solid plan for the showpiece that our riverfront deserves. Now the question is whether we have the bravery to build it.