I am sure I will get corrected for this loose history but the way I saw it was that Knox-Henderson had been a solid residential neighborhood since the 70s (really before then). Oak Lawn went back just as far. State-Thomas started happening in the 80s and went from vacant lots to a solid apartment neighborhood in just a few years. So the nascent Uptown was basically framed by high rent residential neighborhoods on three sides and downtown on the fourth. Then West Village came along and validated Uptown proper and the rest is history. The neighborhoods grew inward as an office and residential mix with M&O finally filling the final hole in the doughnut.I45Tex wrote:I'm curious when you consider those times of success happened. Photos I've seen of the Rolex Building and the Crescent under construction make it look like nothing too far south of Turtle Creek or southwest of State-Thomas was going places residentially (or in any other way than office buildings) until relatively late in the redevelopment arc of the Uptown area, but that's just my past impression...
Crescent and Rolex were once outliers that have now been shown to have been ahead of their time. Rolex was pure office with no surrounding residential to interact with, and the initial retail at the Crescent was a dismal failure that would be hard to imagine today. Now they are solidly in Uptown, but when they were constructed they were considered outposts and seen as “outside of downtown.”
So the analogous question raised by the DMN article is might the same phenomenon occur if the old CBD becomes mostly residential? Might that make new office and residential more attractive to the north to link up with Ross Ave or to the West to link up with DE?