Envy Apartment

CLOSE The Americana Lodge in downtown Redding , California, closed in January after hundreds of alleged code and safety violations , and now The Hignell Companies hopes to repurpose the building. Wochit Architectural renderings of the proposed remodeling project to turn the closed Americana Lodge into The Lofts. (Photo: Russell Studio) Plans to convert the shuttered Americana Lodge in downtown Redding to apartments come before the city Wednesday afternoon . The project has been hailed as a catalyst for the area since The Hignell Companies of Chico announced it was purchasing the former motel late last year. Hignell would transform the property between Pine and Market streets into 24 one-bedroom and 20 studio apartment units that would average between 400 and 500 square feet of floor space. At least four of the apartments would be set aside for very-low and low-income renters. The Redding Board of Administrative Review will consider Hignell’s site development permit application ...

September 11, 2010 at 12:00 pm news By Kevin Plummer Every Saturday at noon, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today. One Sunday evening in 1959, after a screening of the Toronto Film Society , architect Gerald Robinson and engineer/builder Irwin Burns chatted over coffee. The two shared a common viewpoint that the city’s urban core was in decline. The same was happening in cities across Canada as municipal governments were more interested in improving traffic and encouraging sprawl rather than revitalizing their downtown districts. The very next day, Burns heard from real estate developer Murray Webber that a lot with Bloor Street West frontage was going to become available for a hundred-year lease from Victoria University. “There,” Burns told Robinson , as he recalled in the Globe and Mail of October 18, 1963, “is the place to demonstra...