Saturday, April 19, 2008
Provost says CMU has no set plans for Craig Street - News
Pitt News: "With its interesting melange of restaurants and shops, South Craig Street is an ideal place for Carnegie Mellon University to expand. But Pitt students need not worry - a full-fledged takeover of the business district by the university is far from definite."
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12 comments:
It's great that they are thinking about these options. And I think CMU can always use some more parking space in particular. CMU is a small school with 50000 undergrad students. But I feel like expanding would distance many of the buildings and the students, but we can always use more space.
Craig Street needs to be cleaned up. Campus housing choose for me to live on Craig Street which in my opinion was an awful decision. About once or twice every month there is an email sent out about a mugging on the corner of where CMU gave me housing. Walking home after 11pm on Craig Street is very sketchy however it is either being forced into interaction with hobos or taking the escort which wastes 30-45 minutes of time. CMU needs to do something about this. If they add buildings and make it safer that would be great. What really needs to be done is that store managers need to call the police whenever a hobo sits on their doorstep. About every other day my walk to campus includes a request for money which is really unfortunate.
I don't really care either way if CMU expands or not. All I know is, if I have a class down there, I'd better have more than 10 minutes to get there and I'd better be provided parking. Sometimes it's a little ridiculous how short a time there are between classes. I don't think it needs to be expanded, but I do think they should figure out their main group of students in classes and assign spaces on that basis. Foundations 3 in the Mellon Institute? come on...
I think that its rather strange that CMU wants to make Craig Street the main part of campus. I know that we have builds down there and that we would be expanding the campus, but its just not connected enough to other part of campus. The rest of the campus is very contained and in a small area making it very easy to move from class to class in a good amount of time. With classes down on Craig students will have to start planning their classes more carefully.
I don't really think there should be classes held on Craig street because honestly sometimes walking from Purnell to Porter in 10 minutes is not enough time. However, at Syracuse U in New York almost the entire downtown neighborhood is on the meal plan. Granted that Syracuse is a much smaller town than Pittsburgh, but I think CMU and Craig street shops would profit from being more friendly towards each other.
This would open up a large interest living on Craig Street, which would hopefully clean up the area. There is a lot of space for living which I know CMU is kind of short on at the current moment. Elize brings up a good point in having more restaurants on the meal plan. I would hope those businesses would be willing to comply with Campus requests, it would sure make them quite a bit of cash.
Though the idea of expansions seems nice, the travel down there does not. And parking could be a fun issue. I doubt any buildings added on Craig St. would involve drama much so I probably need not worry.
I wouldn't mind if CMU expanded closer to Craig St., although the travel times would be an issue as mentioned. The funny thing about this article was the possible objections from Pitt students...as though Craig St was central to Pitt's campus. They already dominate most of Forbes and Fifth in downtown Oakland, and so I fail to see why CMU having more of a presence on Craig St. would be such a problem for them.
I definitely do not see this happening in the near-future. Although there may be some lack of space on campus in terms of housing and classrooms, I still do not think the entire campus would shift its attention a block away. I think that housing around Craig Street may become a bit more commonplace, but in terms of classes, I do not expect this to happen while I'm still here, for sure.
Personally, I LIKE that our campus is its own little island in the city. I would hate to see the community's center of gravity shift toward oakland.
the MI is a bit more than a psychological distance from campus, it's a decent 10-15 minute walk, and if, for example, your 9AM foundations of drama class is there and you have a 1030am fencing class in skibo gym immediately after it, there's no way you can get out of one and to the other on time.
they should be running the shuttle on the :20 and :50 between these buildings, rather than just at night.
one day, there will be a monorail around campus and neville st. will be the new cut
Escort is quite a frustrating point for sure. It is such a time waster and Craig St. just isn't as safe as it would appear. However, I think it is reassuring to hear that the article from last week on this expansion was not true in its entirety. It seems like it is more like a vague possibility, and I am glad that much more consideration and planning will be going into this process than it originally seemed.
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