The planned building will house a first floor reserved for commercial use, two parking lots, a fitness center and four floors for residential apartments.

A proposal to transform the middle of College Avenue into a highly trafficked “pedestrian arcade,” filled with street-level storefronts that would connect College and Linden Avenues, hinges on a Board of Zoning Appeals variance.

We’ve just rubbed our bodies down with aloe to sooth our burns after soaking in the HEROIC sun all day on the slope. It feels so, so good to be burned to a crisp after months in VILLAINOUS hibernation. Now, in light of the Sun, we couldn’t be happier to say that we’re done for the semester with rocking fake tans and unnecessary sunglasses. The Sun’s shining and we’re crossing our fingers that it’s here to stay. Nothing makes us happier here at HEROES & VILLAINS than sunshine and sangria and we’re proud to say that we’re ready for more.

Tonight, the Ithaca Common Council will hear a debate on the Collegetown Urban Plan and Design Guidelines that consulting team Goody Clancy developed last fall. We applaud the student-lead effort to lobby Common Council and implore students to head downtown tonight to ensure that the student voice be heard.

However, up until this point, we feel this student voice has been misinformed.

The contentious debate over plans for Milstein Hall finally reached an end yesterday evening when the City of Ithaca’s Planning and Development Board unanimously approved the final site plan resolution.

The Milstein Hall discussion at yesterday’s meeting was largely procedural. Kim Michaels, senior landscape architect for Trowbridge & Wolf, LLP, and Andrew Magre ’90 presented samples of the project’s building materials to the board. No members of the public addressed the board.

Ten years and four sets of architects later, Cornell has moved one step closer to building Milstein Hall after gaining a Certificate of Appropriateness from the Ithaca Landmarks Preservation Commission last night.

With the City of Ithaca Planning and Development Board’s preliminary site plan approval of Milstein Hall on Jan. 6, Cornell now only needs final site plan approval from the planning board. A meeting to consider the approval is scheduled for later this month.

This 59,000 square-foot extension to the College of Architecture, Art and Planning will connect Rand and Sibley halls, “knit[ting] disparate programs of our college together,” said Prof. Kevin Pratt, architecture, at the meeting.