Broken Spoke Getting New Neighbors

The owners of The Broken Spoke on South Lamar have reached an agreement with Ardent Residential (also developing the Four Seasons condos) and Direct Development (also developing the Fifth Street Commons project) to develop a residential/retail project on the lots surrounding The Broken Spoke. The Broken Spoke itself, including the dirt parking lot and oak tree out front, will remain intact. You may remember that Direct Development reached a similar agreement to include the Mean Eyed Cat in Fifth Street Commons.

According to the Statesman, the planned project includes 300 apartments and 45,000 sqft of retail on seven acres near the Broken Spoke. Presumably this means the one-story 1970's warehouses on either side of the Spoke will soon be gone. The strip mall to the north and the sprawl-style apartments to the South and East will remain, at least until the next densification boom, as will South Lamar's lack of pedestrian friendly cross streets. Still, street level retail fronting Lamar with residential space above and behind it is an improvement. Baby steps.

We don't spend much time at the Broken Spoke (although apparently they play both kinds of music), but it is nice to see developers working with established businesses to increase density while maintaining local flavor. Turning Austin into a consommé, as opposed to some kind of factory made, mass produced soup.

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By Shawn Shillington in News on December 20, 2007 12:25 PM 0 Comments

Comments [rss]

smcdow

When you're walking back after drinking and dancing at the 'Spoke, it won't matter if there's sidewalks or not.

You're gonna be walking in the ditches no matter what. Unless, that is, you're crawling in the ditches.

mdahmus

Place sidewalk blame appropriately, please. Lamar south of Barton Springs or so is the responsibility of our friends at TXDOT, who view sidewalks as a marginally better outcome than the Ebola Virus these days. To their credit, as recently as five years ago, they'd have chosen the virus.

South Lamar is going to be impossible to retrofit with good sidewalks. We tried for years - even using city money - it's just not gonna happen.

gryph

Bets on how long the apartments will go before complaining about the Spoke? Two months? Two weeks?

kenneth1

A Blues Brothers reference is almost de rigeur when writing about the Broken Spoke.

Thanks for mentioning lack of pedestrian-friendly side streets, but you neglected to mention that S. Lamar itself is extremely pedestrian-hostile in that area. In several places you actually walk in a bar ditch, or along a muddy foot path blazed by peds from the 1970s.

I guess our fair city is too busy cashing all those property-tax checks from condo projects to bother with trivial things like sidewalks.