The District at Prairie Trail Ankeny
- Thread starter JP4CY
- Start date
My biggest complaint, and what I see as a missed opportunity, in prairie trail, is that these buildings in the district should have been a bit more mixed-use. Having a couple floors of condos\apartments on top would add some life to the area. With how fast apartments have gone up in ankeny, have to think they would have rented well too
Don't know what to tell you. I think their goal was a commercial space to serve those residents of Prairie Trail. I'm not sure they wanted to have a bunch of mixed-use property involved with the commercial spaces, but as I said, I worked on this over a decade ago and didn't participate in any of the planning aspects. Development civil design mainly.
Not your end but I think it was dumb to put more parking around the pond than actual restaurants.
Yeah, i get it. A lot of moving parts and Ankeny itself was a different city when they were drawing all this up. Its a shame some of the newer buildings aren't adapting though. Its an area that is like a faux-downtown, without any of the life of an actual downtown area.
Fongs is cool, the rest of the area doesn't excite me very much. I'd rather go fishing for crappies in that pond down below than hang out at any of those bars or eat at Jerhros.
As a Beaverdale resident, I like the District at Prairie Trail. There are several events there in warmer weather months, a lot of which are free, including free concerts with pretty decent talent.
IMO this is a common issue with areas like Prairie Trail or places that try to gentrify a downtown area (e.g warehouse districts). Commercial & retail space is great, but they only seem to create limited foot traffic. But include condos and/or apartments it creates a more vibrate area since people actually live 24/7 around those retail/commercial business.
Flavory Bistro is really good. Whiskey River is a fun place to hang out and catch a clone game. Wasabi is decent for sushi.
Actually agree with this a lot. Original designs showed restaurants on the pond and parking near the street. Usually, the restaurant developer has total control of this though. I actually got to design this pond and the outlet control structure (I'm ambivalent about this structure now knowing a lot more than I did 10+ years ago), but I always thought eating on a patio around the pond would have been a neat setup.
How deep is that pond? It seems like it's silted in the last few years I've fished there.
Oh jeez, I'd have to look and see if I have the original design plans for it somewhere in my files. It wasn't super deep, to begin with, but I could easily see it silting in over time, especially if the city hasn't kept up on the pre-treatment upstream of it.
Just looked, don't have the plans anymore. Looking at that outlet structure makes me cringe looking back at it.
That's OK, I was jsut curious, you don't have to go digging up plans. The part by the spillway seems like maybe 7 or 8 feet. The big tunnel on the other side it looks like you could walk across it on that end.
