Council Watch: Trouble in Gotham
The Gotham condominium project that terrorized the South Shore of Town Lake last year is gone, site planners say, but the specifics of its replacement are still being sketched out.
“The old design has been totally scrapped,” says Sarah Crocker of Sarah Crocker Consultants, the company working with Hixo Company, the site owner, to develop the building plan. “I basically have a new client.” No new design for the building, to be located at the southwest corner of Congress Avenue, has been released, but designers are hoping the new specifications will smooth over the storm of complaints that the original design for the Gotham project stirred up.
The building has been shortened from 120 to 108 feet, for example, to appease South Austin residents concerned that the condominiums would impede their view of the Capitol and the downtown skyline. “We are very concerned about preserving the view of downtown, and we have been working with the neighborhood,” says Crocker. In addition, the condominiums will no longer loom directly over South Congress Avenue; the roofline of the building has been stair-stepped to set it back from the street. Crocker says the site will also provide access to the hike-and-bike trail along Town Lake.
Moreover, Crocker says, the Greek revival style that critics sneered would be more appropriate in Las Vegas than South Austin has been ditched, though Austin architecture firm PageSoutherlandPage, the original architects for the Gotham, are still contracted to design the building. Even the name has changed, from Gotham to Mirabeau.
Still, it all seems oddly familiar. As they did last September, the City Council hearings Thursday bogged down in confusion over exactly what is and is not permitted under the Waterfront Overlay that limits the development of land along Town Lake. Council members eventually approved the project on second reading, with Beverly Griffith and Daryl Slusher voting against, but approval on third reading won’t happen until council members have a look at something resembling a final design. And final approval may depend on whether the Mirabeau developers agree to a list of changes and stipulations keeping the project at a height and mass appropriate for the Town Lake corridor.
Complicating matters is a set of recommendations made by the Roma Design Group, a San Francisco-based consulting firm hired by the city to compile new development guidelines for the Town Lake corridor. While Roma’s recommendations have yet to come before the council, they have met with unofficial approval. Council members say that because Mirabeau strays so far outside those guidelines, it’s unlikely to be approved in its current form: At a proposed 100,000 square feet, the project is twice as large as Roma’s recommended development limit of 50,000 square feet.
Though Smart Growth calls for more residential space downtown, council members are reluctant to set a precedent by ignoring Roma’s guidelines in an area where development is likely to boom. “If we let it pass this time, what are we going to tell the next applicant, and the one after that, and the one after that?” says Griffith. “It’s going to be a tough sell.”
In the Zone
Rezoning for the Chestnut Neighborhood Plan passed on first reading Thursday night, making it the first neighborhood to take its plan all the way through to council approval. A similar vote on the more controversial East Cesar Chavez plan had been postponed on August 17. In fact, the ease with which the Chestnut rezoning passed might surprise anyone familiar with the thorny progress of the ECC plan, which covers an area just a few miles to the south of Chestnut.
Of course, the area covered by the Chestnut plan is much smaller and the plan itself less ambitious — mainly reinforcing building uses already in place to create commercial corridors along the periphery of the neighborhood. An overlay was adopted which would limit the uses of commercial zoning in the corridors, keeping businesses such as car washes and liquor stores outside.
Eastside activists have protested that rezoning in the East Cesar Chavez plan would bring expensive apartments and chain stores to the area, marginalizing the neighborhood’s working class residents. Planning Commissioner Susana Almanza — a vehement opponent of the East Cesar Chavez plan — suggested that similar problems would arise with the rezoning of the Chestnut area, but so far no one has joined her in protest. “Honestly, I don’t think this is going to change the face of the neighborhood that much,” said Steve Barney, who worked on the plan for the city’s Planning Environmental and Conservation Services Dept.
While some Chestnut residents did speak against the plan, most were not opposed to the rezoning itself. Some said they were left out of the planning process, weren’t consulted or were consulted too late, or didn’t understand the ballots distributed to vote on the plan in January. (Only about 100 of 700 ballots were returned.)
Other residents who were involved in the planning process countered that they had tried to reach the entire neighborhood, but many had been indifferent to the plan.
If the city learns anything from the first successful rezoning of one of its cherished neighborhood plans, it might be this: The more similar neighborhoods already are to the kind of communities the city is trying to promote — communities with a diversity of uses and individuals — the less likely they are to surrender themselves to ready-made, clean-sweep legislation.
This article appears in September 1 • 2000.