Point Village

So what’s word on the street. I recently read in the indo that property might be back on the up. I wonder what crosbie is thinkin at the min regarding the tower

Planned ‘civic space’ made of 40ft containers.

Doesn’t look too promising.

Here’s a rough transcript of an interview with Marian Finucance & H Crosbie about why he cancelled the Watchtower (from last week).

Finucane: There are a couple of things that you’ve decided to say no. You were going to do the two towers on either side of the port so to speak, U2 doing one, you doing the other and then there was the man you could walk into.

Crosbie: Yeah, it was just too risky, because you know when we were doing that the thing was still at the very, very top but anyone who was smart and intelligent would know this doesn’t feel right. You know the way you just, reading in the papers, mad stuff, was happening and I said it’s too -, I’m not doing that. we needed to sell those apartments for a million plus each – every single one of them – with no safety net. we pulled it. But that doesn’t mean- now we’ve the foundations in – we spent 15 million on the foundations. It might all come again.

Finucane: Will your planning permission hold?

Crosbie: Ah, I don’t think there’ll be much problem with getting it again because it was a lovely design and the Point is called the Point because it used to be where the land met the sea and it’s the absolute ideal place to have two of those pillars and the idea was we were replicating the pillars of Hercules, the original classical statue and at some stage maybe not in my lifetime but it certainly will happen again because it would have been the absolute ideal place for a sky scraper and one of the regrets is that I didn’t get to build the first skyscraper and that would have been it and it would have been fabulous. Imagine coming in from the sea and seeing those two 40 storey towers from 20 miles out at sea – it would have been gorgeous and then you come in through them and you come into a low rise 18th century georgian city – beautiful.

so we put to rest the myth that it height objections is why we don’t have any tall buildings!

@Frank Taylor wrote:

Crosbie said he needed to sell all apartments for 1m each to break even. There were 150 apartments planned plus 500 sqm of offices plus rooftop restaurant plus presumably retail at ground level. So does that mean he expected that it would cost 150m to build the 120m tower? Is that about right?

😮 that’s like €1.25m per metre height of the building(not including foundations) and it is fairly slender in design, I’d imagine that’s a fairly hefty price tag, especially given the recent fall in construction costs. Although of course he’d want to be making a profit.

I wonder if the price of steel beams has declined recently also.

Is it likely we’ll ever see this rising out of the ground?http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=53.348225,-6.227789&spn=0.000775,0.002368&t=h&z=19

it’s over a year old anyway. But just as well because the foundations have been covered over. Surely they’ll be dug up in the future?

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/point-village-sets-wheels-in-motion-for-its-big-attractions-2061797.html

In this article, Crosbie seems to indicate that Point Village will be complete in 2014

no, it doesn’t include liffey man, I’d imagine it includes the watchtower and the district centre, but now the foundations are under concrete, so digging them back up again might a bit of a task.

@EIA340600 wrote:

I don’t know where in that article you got “point village ready for 2014”

It simply says that the “Parlor” will stay there ’till 2014.

That means the chance of the watchtower springing up in the next 4 years are low, unless they’ve devised some system to build through occupied space.

Someday though….we’ll have a shiny building that’s taller than anything you could see in Cork…..Someday…..

ok, so maybe construction will resume in 2014 but they can chose to occupy the space on front of the tower with the market. Maybe the market + some builders on site may bring a bit of a daytime buzz to the area.