One of the biggest complaints about the proposed 22-story building on the northwest corner of Ninth and P streets is that it's a bad location for a tall building.
Former City Council member Jon Camp, who owns several nearby buildings, said it will stand out "like a sore thumb."
Others on social media have called the 255-foot-tall building "completely out of place," "ill-conceived" and a "monstrosity."
The mixed-use building would rise 254 feet and include 36,000 square feet of office space on floors 2-5, 70 luxury apartment units on floors 7-15 and 33 condo units on floors 16-21.
However odd it seems to put up the city's tallest residential building on the doorstep to the Historic Haymarket, developers have the right to build a high-rise on the lot because of a quirk in the city's zoning code.
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The lot where the building is proposed, the neighboring Graduate Lincoln and another lot to the south have the city's most liberal height limit of 275 feet. What's odd about that is they are the only lots west of Ninth Street with that designation.
A large swath of downtown, stretching from 14th Street to the east side of Ninth Street and from K to Q streets, allows buildings to be 275 feet tall.
But on the west side of Ninth Street, heights are only 75 feet on nearly all buildings except for Pinnacle Bank Arena and some of the surrounding development.
In fact, a footnote in the 1979 update to the city's zoning code says, "west of 9th Street, the maximum height shall be seventy-five (75) feet."
No one seems to know why the Melichar's lot where the Lincoln Bold project would rise 22 stories and the others south of it have the 275-foot height limit.
"I don't know exactly how we got to that point," said Planning Director David Cary.
Cary said most of the downtown building height limits are set based on Federal Aviation Administration regulations regarding flight paths into the Lincoln Airport, and when those parameters were set, those lots were likely in the area that was deemed able to have the highest limit.
Camp, who helped develop the Haymarket, said he doesn't know why the lot housing a service station was set to 275 feet, but he does know why it still has that limit when other buildings around it don't.
Camp said that when he and his partners were seeking a historic district designation for the area in the early 1980s, they left certain lots out because they didn't contain historic properties.
"We carved out Melichar's because it was a gas station," Camp said.
A few years ago, the city appeared to reconsider the wisdom of having tall buildings as the front door to the Haymarket.
In January 2017, a proposal came before the Lincoln-Lancaster County Planning Commission seeking to reduce the building heights on the Melichar's lot and the others along Ninth Street to 75 feet.
According to minutes of the meeting, the Planning Department's rationale in seeking the change was because it believed the 75-foot limit made sense for the block.
However, property owners who were going to be affected by the change testified in opposition to it, arguing that the lots were in an area ripe for development and reducing their allowed height by more than two-thirds would greatly reduce the value of their properties.
In the end, the Planning Commission agreed, voting unanimously in opposition to the plan. The City Council followed suit with a unanimous vote, including votes from then-Council members Camp and current Lincoln Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird.
For his part, Camp said he supports the Lincoln Bold project, just not at its proposed location.
He called it a "neat project" and said he has suggested other sites in downtown where it could work, including the city-owned lot at 10th and M streets that once housed the downtown police station.
But he doesn't believe a 22-story high-rise belongs at Ninth and P.
"This just is not in the right place."