Reader: All aboard for a Frasca food hall at Union Station!

• My assumption is that they are trying to put in a concept like Eataly in NYC.

• Doughboy - I so agree with you.  Besides all that, the Falcone, Smith, Frampton plan is well thought out and, if it's like all the other things they have developed, will make money and not need any bail outs, etc.  Witness the Riverfront area with good looking condo buildings, Zengo, Ink, McLaughlin's etc.

• Hey, I'm racking up Comment of the Day wins!  Send the check to ... ;)   I wanted to explain further why the Union Station hotel plan makes no economic sense.  From what I've read of the proposals, the Sage/Crawford hotel plan depends on the sale of historic tax credits of several million dollars.  It cannot close its funding gap without this financing and if Landmark preservation and the National Park Service don't approve the plans it will put the kibosh on the credits.  There's no chance that Landmark or the Park Service would approve the destructive aspects of the hotel plan.  The hotel needs to drop a ceiling into the hallways (in order to make space for a whole new floor of hotel rooms!), and they're proposing to add dormers that break up the roofline in order to punch in their elevator shafts. In my opinion, Tryba should have his architect license revoked for this god-awful design.I was involved tangentially in the development of Chicago Union Station and Washington Union Station early in my career, and I can tell you that it is unheard of that a public entity like RTD would even entertain something so silly as a hotel shoehorned into the rafters of the train station.  It shows how RTD is stuck in this 1990s mode of thinking of development rights like a casino -- letting highly leveraged developers toting pie-in-the-sky estimates of tax revenues trump common sense.   Mark my words, if the RTD is so stupid as to approve the hotel plan, five years from now we'll be reading in these pages about taxpayer-funded bailouts, rescue plans and write-downs for the Union Station hotel.     

• I'm still unclear on what a "food hall" is. Is it like a long skinny food court?

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