As Dan Gilbert looks to turn Downtown Detroit's image into a mixture of Silicon Valley and a McDonalds Playplace, Grand Circus Park may be the next target of the Quicken rebrand-o-matic. In a recent interview, Bedrock head honcho Jim Ketai dropped the name Grand Circuit Park in a reference to Gilbert's real estate "target area" along Woodward...sorry, Webward Avenue. That wasn't the only interesting tidbit: Ketai also mentions plans for the Hudson's site involving two residential towers.
On the what might be built on the Hudson's Site:
"We're looking at potentially doing something on the site of the former Hudson warehouse. It's currently an underground parking deck and then two residential towers. Everything we do has ground-floor retail."
On the light rail going farther:
"Eventually the rail will get north to Royal Oak, Birmingham, Pontiac, and that will spur more economic development as transit-oriented development always does."
On expanding Bedrock's turf:
"We're going to expand our target area, which is Jefferson up to Grand Circuit Park, and it's probably going to lean east."
On helping Detroit as a whole, not just Downtown::
"You've got to start somewhere. You can't do a bunch of little pockets. Our theory is, start down in the central business district (CBD), and it will spread in every direction. It will help out not just the urban core in Detroit, but the neighborhoods and the suburbs, as well."
· Q+A>Jim Ketai [The Architect's Newspaper]
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