Downtown Construction

[bust]

Trolley and Millender, now Detroit City Apartments and Renaissance City Apartments, were not built by VG. Both are precast tinker-toyed structures that, I swear, must have been designed by laid-off Soviet apartment block architects. Any lipstick VG may have put on the exterior of those pigs can do little to overcome their near-brutalist designs.

In defense of brutalist architects, even they incorporated ground floor retail and other social amenities into their designs. Witness one of the archetypical examples of the idiom: Neimeyer's Copan building in Sao Paulo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edif%C3%ADcio_Copan. He incorporated a full first floor of retail and an internal pedestrian walkway. Today it is home to several great restaurants, a cafe, and many other convenient services for the neighborhood.

Whoever were the hacks that designed the Millender Center and Trolley Plaza imagined a dystopian car-centric future where no one walked. Witness how they destroyed what was otherwise a pedestrian-friendly human-scaled block: https://goo.gl/maps/bvd7xw6AZ6F2.

And having been multiple times inside both the Millender Center and the Copan, I can attest the Copan is not just much more interesting, but comparatively very kind.

That said, I'm very encouraged to hear Village Green are much better stewards then the original developers seem to have been. Thanks, Lowell, for your first-hand insight.