New Digs for the Bureau

GSA inks contract to build FBI office

Efforts to revitalize downtown Birmingham got a boost Wednesday when a federal agency said it had signed a $34.4 million contract for construction of a new FBI headquarters near the convention complex.

The 86,000-square-foot building will be constructed on land owned by the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex and will allow the FBI to move out of cramped quarters in the 2121 Building.

"We think this is a great shot in the arm for the city center and the new urban office park being pursued west of the BJCC," said Michael Calvert, head of Operation of New Birmingham, an agency advancing downtown redevelopment.

The General Services Administration said Wednesday the new FBI headquarters should open in April 2005. The building will house nearly 200 employees and accommodate a radio maintenance facility to be constructed later.

Cheaper site

The GSA, which handles real-estate site searches for federal agencies, said in April it would build the FBI building on property between 17th and 18th streets North and 10th and 11th avenues. The GSA picked the BJCC site over one near Kelly Ingram Park initially favored by the FBI.

The BJCC site was cheaper $800,000 vs. $5.5 million for the Kelly Ingram Park site and had the backing of U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, Mayor Bernard Kincaid and Operation New Birmingham. [...]

Well, that's pretty good. This project has been bouncing around downtown for years now--I've even done some sketches for it. The problem has always been trying to find enough open space to satisfy the requirements for a great big building and parking deck along with the wide security perimeter of open space around the building--stuff that usually makes moving out to the 'burbs attractive for high-value targets like the FBI, or the Federal Reserve Bank, which moved out to Liberty Park.

Downtowns are more interesting when the buildings are able to address the street and offer some interest to passers-by, and hopefully some effort will be made to do that on the chosen site. One thing going for it is that it's more off the normal pedestrian pathways, so if it doesn't have rows of twee shops and cafes, it won't be quite so bad as it would have been on the site closer to Kelly Ingram Park, which IS intensively used, both by everyday folks and by tourists visiting the Civil Rights District.

This is a link to a MapQuest photo of the site (Ack! Stupid MapQuest is about like Stupid Blogger--you may have to go to the zoom button and go to the highest magnification if it shows up as a photo of the entire downtown area.) Probably the most interesting nearby feature to the site is Oak Hill Cemetery (the green area at the top of the photo), which was Birmingham's first large burial place. Most of the early founding fathers and local dignitaries are buried there, along with Louise Wooster.

Miss Wooster was an interesting person--if any of you have a local library that does inter-library loans, you might be interested in her autobiography.
posted by Terry at 9:36:00 AM