Downtown Fargo : "The Front", Part II

A couple of items that I failed to mention in that plan included many items that tend to also appear alongside this type of development. Let's go over some of what I think would be appropriate here.

Retail
With the addition of several new towers that I proposed in the diagram below (one of them being 30-40 stories), it would be easy to incorporate retail on the first few floors of those buildings. Since they are all linked together through the common skyway system, you could have, in essence, a miniature mall, possibly approaching 40-50 shops. Of course, another possibility I can think of off the top of my head is using the area next to the Laskowitz Highrise, which I’ve specified to hold several high-rise residential towers, to have a base foot print of the entire lot, covered by a 2-3 storey shopping colonnade. Having that, plus the other retail on the first floors of many of the buildings, all connected by the skyway, would be something that could compete with West Acres.

Restaurants
While you could put several restaurants in with the retail establishments, you’d want to make sure that you also have 2-3 key or destination restaurants. It’s been suggested that a Planet Hollywood be one of those. I’m not quite sure, as it’s been mentioned before; it seems to have lost its charm over the last decade. I would think this should be local restaurants with top notch chefs and menus. It could be a little more high-end, but not outrageous. I’d even be happy if one of them served a 7 or 10 course meal for $65-$100 dollars, prepared by a chef of the liking and continually approaching the level of talent of Bobby Flay, Gordon Ramsey, etc…

I think if you were to combine these two principles, with the suggestions in the last post, you would have a winning combination, in a city with 400,000-500,000 people.