It’s been a perfectly dreadful week, today was the first time I’ve been out of the house in a week – apart from two trips to the doctor’s office.
As I mentioned earlier, I woke up Sunday with Conjunctivitis (or “Pink†eye, although mine was fiery red) and by Monday was could barely keep it open. Despite being put on ophthalmological antibiotics Monday, it had spread to both eyes by Tuesday night and by Thursday morning had become a very painful sinus infection complete with high fever. So, it was back to the doctor for more general antibiotics and the wost of the fever broke Friday afternoon.
Today, although I still feel awful, I thought, “I could go for some fish & chips.†Which is, I suppose a good sign that my appetite is slowly returning.
On our way back from the chippy, we stopped at Costco to pick up some supplies and I finally have all the missing pieces as to what’s happening up at Rectum… er… Spectrum Mall.
In the meantime, it also gave me the opportunity to play around with Skitch, a new beta program for the Mac. Skitch is on an invitation-based beta program right now, and I have a couple if anyone is interested.
Skitch is one of those programs that, on the surface, doesn’t really float my boat – it’s basically a screen capture, photo annotation, web posting application. Of course, it’s fully integrated with your iPhoto library and tied to your iSight. It also has hooks to work with myskitch.com, flickr, .mac, FTP and SFTP sites (and others).
Nonetheless, it seems very good at what it does and it makes it very easy to illustrate something visually and share it. It’s absolutely painless to snap, annotate, resize and share via web, IM, e-mail.
For part of my evaluation of Skitch, I decided to mock up what’s happening at the mall.
For those not immediately impacted by it (like I have been, everyday for the last year or two) Phoenix is constructing a long-overdue mass transit system based on light rail. While the system under construction is probably woefully inadequate, I try to be a bit forgiving. Phoenix is not an optimally laid-out city for a rail network. With an urban area (including the surrounding cities that are really part of Phoenix, but would scream and stamp their little feet if you tell them that.) I estimate at least 500 square miles of city, and no clearly defined center of commerce, it’s hard to imagine anything other than a massive gridwork of trains accomplishing the task of reducing auto traffic.
Nonethess, I’ve ridden the buses in the areas that are being replaced by the rail and they are the ones I’ve noticed the heaviest use of. I’m sure the planners have all the statistics of all the bus routes and took that into account.
As it happens, I live near the north-western terminus of the initial rail system and am right in the heart of the construction, which continues until December 2008.
The rail comes no closer than one mile to my house and 2.5 miles from my office, which, when it is 114º makes it less than optimal for my commute, but I’m more interested in the growth anticipated around the route. While my area is not depressed, it isn’t new and all the interesting businesses and restaurants tend to concentrate of the outskirts of the metropolis.
There’s certainly lots of expensive condominium construction happening all along the route. I’m in hopes that the businesses will follow for these people who obviously have too much disposable income.
Spectrum Mall, one of, if not the oldest remaining mail in Phoenix could hardly be called “upscale†but, as it happens to be at the terminal station, has been seeing a lot of investment and new construction. They’ve been tearing it down and rebuilding parts of it for a long time, but the names of the new businesses have not been well-publicized. Today I finally filled in all the pieces and have used Skitch to annotate this (months old) satellite image.
JC Penney (a store I never shop at) abandoned this mall first 10 or more years ago and their old location was torn down to make room for the Costco that went in. Montgomery Ward went completely out of business and the store remained empty for years. Walmart built into the east side and then, in a move that surprised me, it was expanded into what was once the largest WalMart Supercentre on earth. Both those events were several years ago and the mall was nearly dead when they moved in. They did not revitalize it all and the rest of the mall (especially the parts not directly in a line between Costco and WalMart) became an empty wasteland.
Once the light rail got going, someone obviously decided that this was viable commercial property and started tearing the dead areas down and rebuilding them again.
In a bit of irony, JC Penny is the first to move back in, with a new location at the front of the mall which opens August 3. The Harkins theatre which has been there for as long as I’ve been in Phoenix (25 years) sat immediately in front of the rail station was torn down, but a newer, bigger one, which just opened this weekend was constructed on the backside.
Meanwhile something large and unnamed has been under construction on the west side of the mall. Today I learned it is some form of Target Supercentre. Are they insane? How can they support two virtually identical stores in one mall? WalMart is so well established in that area, I find it hard to believe Target can thrive.
I just hope the whole thing drives some good restaurants into that area. There isn’t even a food court left in the mall as it was demolished for the new theatres. Right now all there is a KFC and Taco Bell on the perimeter. Yuck.
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