The Official Grand Opening of the SL Hiroba was today!! Jump for joy! No more Ekimae posts! Ekimae is finished!! It was worth getting off the train for a better look, but not worth actually going down there and making me late for work. The ceremony looks quite elaborate, doesn’t it? There’s supposed to be some live concert but I doubt any celebrities showed up. Nothing about it on the evening news though, probably because the Yamanote Line and a bunch of other trains were stopped all day and also there was more news about negligence involved in the Osaka derailment (today was the 1st anniversary of that accident). Not a good day for JR. More photos here. And an interesting FAQ of the construction here. It seems that that big sponge-like thing spotted early in the construction was indeed a big sponge. It will be used to absorb rain water and cool the concrete from underneath in summer to help prevent the heat-island-phenomena which is plaguing that whole Toranomon-Shinbashi-Shiodome area.
(1) These people are not waiting for the train, they saw my posts about the Ekimae and came to watch the ceremonies (2) Is this me in 20 years?
(1) A bunch of JR bureaucrats (or maybe they are Shinbashi land owners?) getting their commemorative photo taken. They should be in Shinjuku trying to get the Yamanote Line working again (2) And this is the official mascot of Shinbashi, the Shinbashi Robo. It’s a robot salaryman because salarymen are like robots, get it? I’m going to download the screensaver and put it on my PC at work to make a statement. I’m such a troublemaker.
This is what Ekimae looked like last november before the construction. Tokyo is an ever changing city. I can’t keep up **sigh**
To have picked up on that from the beginning seems like a good call on your part. From what I could gather, this “water-storage block” cooling by evaporation of SL Plaza is an “epoch-making” first of such a system in Japan.
But I wonder about continual under-ground pooling of water. One thinks of mold, fungus, bacteria, and such things as Legionnaires’ disease arising from standing water in building air-conditioning systems, or the fragrance, rather the horrendous stench, in the canals of Bangkok
I just can’t help feeling that a few trees would have done the same thing in nature-revering Japan; plus they would add a bit of oxygen in oxygen-depleted Tokyo.
I’ll definitely miss this post.
Ah, the last of the Ekimae posts… That sponge is really something, I wonder if it’ll work as planned.