Originally Posted by
sirrealone
I think GM did quite a bit.
They moved in and renovated the entire complex. I think they tried to draw the public in by initially putting prototype cars in the atrium space, before dumbing it down with plain old showroom cars, presumably if it affected their draw at the auto show.
They got rid of the berms, and put actual front doors to open up the street side. They built the Wintergarden and opened it up to the riverfront side. I always seemed to remember these things being applauded for making it more welcome to the public. Yes, the place was still a maze, but that was still a byproduct of the initial design. I'll be curious if the next effort will be able to fix this.
The renovations created quite a bit of retail space. For quite some time, a lot of it was occupied. But, yeah, things eventually started closing, especially when they started laying off thousands of workers and the overall economy began to crater.
After the initial outlay to re-do the building and get themselves settled, they had plans to work with developers to do a lot with the surrounding land. If I recall, they had plans to build condos, retail and more office space, but outside of the failed Asian Village project, it all went to crap when the company and the city both went bankrupt.
The place was always on kind of an island Having the nearby Rivertown area killed off right around the time when they bought the building probably didn't help things out at all.
Just saying, I think they did an awful lot, but there was quite a bit that simply was out of their control.