{"id":19179,"date":"2017-01-14T00:02:05","date_gmt":"2017-01-14T00:02:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=19179"},"modified":"2017-01-14T00:02:37","modified_gmt":"2017-01-14T00:02:37","slug":"downtown-dining-district-taking-shape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=19179","title":{"rendered":"Downtown dining district taking shape"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Some interesting news is coming forth about downtown Amarillo’s future … which coincides nicely with the City Council’s decision to hire a new city manager.<\/p>\n

The two things aren’t necessarily related directly, but City Hall’s new\u00a0top hand — Jared Miller — is going to oversee a development that holds tremendous potential for the city he is about to manage.<\/p>\n

They’ve broken ground on a new restaurant at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Polk Street. An established eatery, Crush, is moving across the street.<\/p>\n

What does this mean? From what I understand, it moves forward the development of what’s been called in recent days a new “dining district” for the city’s downtown area.<\/p>\n

We’ve got that brew pub being developed nearby. We’ll see another new structure going in with a couple of other dining establishments also in the immediate area. Napoli’s does business at the corner of Seventh and Taylor.<\/p>\n

All the while, work on the Embassy Suites hotel is ongoing next to the parking garage.<\/p>\n

What appears to be taking shape, as I see it, is a fundamental remaking of Amarillo’s downtown personality.<\/p>\n

My wife and I arrived here in early 1995. To be candid, the downtown district didn’t have any<\/em> kind of identity that either of us could recognize. Polk Street was in a moribund state. The Santa Fe Building sat empty at the corner of Ninth and Polk; that structure’s fortunes changed dramatically later that year when Potter County purchased it for a song and rehabbed it into a first-class office complex.<\/p>\n

Now, though, the city is going through an extreme makeover.<\/p>\n

Think of it: Embassy Suites will open soon; Xcel Energy is finishing work on its new office complex; that parking garage will open as well; West Texas A&M University is tearing the daylights out of the old Commerce Building to transform it into a new downtown Amarillo campus; this new dining district is now beginning to take some form.<\/p>\n

Oh, and we’ve also cleared out the former Coca-Cola distribution center to make room for a ballpark that many of us want to see built eventually.<\/p>\n

It’s not all entirely peachy. Many floors in the 31-story Chase Tower are going dark when Xcel and WT vacate the skyscraper. But I understand that the leasing agents working to re-fill those floors remain highly optimistic that the building will get new life.<\/p>\n

The pace of change is a bit mind-boggling. I am prepared to keep watching — and waiting — for it all to bear fruit for the city.<\/p>\n\n

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Some interesting news is coming forth about downtown Amarillo’s future … which coincides nicely with the City Council’s decision to hire a new city manager. The two things aren’t necessarily related directly, but City Hall’s new\u00a0top hand — Jared Miller — is going to oversee a development that holds tremendous potential for the city he … Continue reading Downtown dining district taking shape<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,9],"tags":[288,290,292,1436,3153,3677,4113],"class_list":["post-19179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-news","category-local-news","tag-amarillo-city-council","tag-amarillo-city-hall","tag-amarillo-city-manager","tag-downtown-amarillo","tag-mpev","tag-potter-county","tag-santa-fe-building"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19179"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19182,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19179\/revisions\/19182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}