Beacon Municipal Center Groundbreaking Next Tuesday
Decatur Metro | May 1, 2013
The City of Decatur’s Linda Harris sends along this announcement from The Decatur Minute…
The community is invited to the groundbreaking of the Beacon Municipal Center on Tuesday, May 7 at 8:30 a.m. (Meet at the Atlanta Avenue construction entrance).
The Beacon Municipal Center will house a new police department building, the renovated Ebster gym and Active Living center and the Central Office for City Schools of Decatur. The $38 million budget also includes a new stormwater management facility under Ebster field.
The project is scheduled to be completed in late spring of 2014.
Demolition already seems to be underway. Patch has a couple of pics of the teardown of the old Police Department section of the Beacon Hill complex on its site today.
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Sad to see the old Neighborhood Playhouse space torn down. I spent many many hours there.
+1, ABM. But it was never the same after Sondra Nelson became ill. And a theatre would be so perfect in that space.
Re: pictures of the demolition: Glad Wreck-It Ralph is still finding work.
$38 million here, $58 million there. Big Deal. Spare change. Now the $500 million projects down the road, maybe a dome over the entire city that would protect us from global warming or conservatives moving in from suburbia, now that’s worth a discussion!
MONORAIL!
The hot air generated inside the Decatur dome would cook our collective goose faster than any global process ever could.
TESTIFY, sista!
Why can’t we put an indoor swim complex in,something the community can really use and it can generate income from parties and rentals ?
Another long, single-use block less than a quarter mile from MARTA?
parking?
School headquarters, a community center, a multi-purpose green and the police department constitutes single-use? That’s recreation, civic and municipal uses with independent and overlapping activity 24 hours a day. Yes, it’s a municipal project, but I think lumping it in with a static, single use oversimplifies the reality of how it will be used and contribute to the surrounding area.
Not to mention that it was previously announced that its plaza will become the official home of the larger, more frequent Decatur Farmer’s Market.
Certainly not (I did read the post), and it appears you know what I meant by single-use.
Are you counting 24 hours of activity because of the police station?
I guess I’m also a dummy because I don’t understand how you can refer to this as “single-use” either. But if it could somehow be defined as single-use, it seems like a damn fine single-use project to me. And if the location is the problem, where exactly would you prefer to see it?
Yep. The police station constitutes the “overnight” portion of the 24 hours, though I expect the recreation areas and green to have varying degrees of evening and weekend use when the school offices are closed. So, all around, a fair amount going on, which is really the point in terms of street activation.
I think it is a missed opportunity for two things that Decatur is short – tax revenue and density near the square. This is not a good location for retail and these municipal uses can easily become ground floor uses in multi-story buildings. A private developer could get financing based upon the permancy of the government leases, while the City could obtain tax revenues for apartments/condos in the upper floors. This project should have been taller since it is near the square (more rooftops for retail makes “the donuts fresher” according to Andres Duane) and the Marta station. This site is probably the biggest block of municipal property and we just put short buildings on it?