Saturday, February 09, 2008

It's a boy!

Well, now the balance of power shifts back to the male side in the Gottfried household. We recently found out we're having a boy! Now I'll have someone to do all those father-son things with. Let's see... what father-son things did my dad and I do? Well, we regularly went booze shopping, and bought a fair amount of smoked fish, and um, yeah... let's see....

So, I'll have to figure out some stuff to do, but it shouldn't be a problem. And who knows, maybe Audrey will also be into booze and smoked fish?

Anyway, I'll be sure to update this with some of the ultrasound pics, as soon as the DVD arrives.

On another totally different topic, there have been a bunch of interesting developments going on for Downtown Rochester. A couple months ago, it was announced that Midtown Plaza would be torn down, the site remediated, and a new $100 million, 25 story (or so) tall headquarters for Paetec Communications would be built on a portion of the site. Well, two more interesting things happened over the past week. The first thing is, they broke ground on the first major residential project in High Falls where the old Kodak Visitor's Parking Lot was - across from the old Empire Brewing Company site. There's also another good sized residential development going up in the East Ave area down by The Little Theatre. And someone is converting one of the last old vacant industrial buildings inside the inner loop into more residential space. (I may go out today and take some pictures to add to a post later today). And in theory, there's another downtown residential project happening where the parking garage helix came crashing down a couple years ago.

Yesterday, it was announced that ESL Federal Credit Bureau would build a new corporate headquarters in Downtown across the street from the Strong Museum of Play. It's a $50 million project, with a six story building and a new parking garage on just over 3 acres.

After this announcement, next year the City will actually look like a growing place! There'll be at least three major construction projects going on downtown, with the possibility of 2 or 3 more. Plus, the Western Gateway project will be moving onto the next stage, which is basically resurfacing the entire chunk of I-490 from the City out towards the canal overpass.

Very cool stuff. Assuming I get the chance to take some "before" pics, I'll try to post them tonight.