No, not pot holes. We’ve got lots of those on the streets. But I hear nasty stories, surely untrue, that some employees somewhere were a bit potted. No doubt when the smoke clears, all will be clear driving again. Move on, folks. Nothing to see here, lots of people have house plants at work. Continue reading City signal & sign facility going to pot
Richcraft purchased the Dow Motors site, shown below. The Dark CDP calls for two towers on the site; Richcraft is proposing three. Or more accurately, two and half. They are proposing 3 buildings for the site, one facing Carling, the second in the middle of site, which would also include a new OTrain Station, and the third at the north end of the site, facing Adeline. The first two towers would be very tall, in the 48 storey range, but with the recent addition of height to the Claridge Icon tower at 505 Preston (corner of Carling), and the … Continue reading 845 Carling site plan: two and half condos
The Dark CDP plan for Sydney Street is as follows. Sydney, a short, dead-end street on the east side of the OTrain track, immediately north of Carling, would be extended westwards, then turned north to join Adeline, turning both when combined into a sort of suburban “crescent” that would facilitate motoring, people running through residential streets looking for parking spaces, access to high rises that would be otherwise impossible to build on the dead ends, etc. Sydney is the L-shaped gray arrow shown below. Right now, only half of the horizontal part of the L is actually a street: Going … Continue reading Sydney Street: whose vision will prevail ?
This picture of a sign sure offers a distinctive welcome to the Rochester Street area: Continue reading Welcome to Rochester Street
Yesterday, Planning Committee had an over-full agenda of contentious items. This meant huge waits for the assembled throngs. All seats were taken, and there were over 70 standees / folding chairs / sitting on the floor. For a 8+ hour meeting. The final votes were to approve various high rise developments, leading to the predictable reaction of citizen attendees that the process was unfair, rigged, or otherwise unsatisfactory. I agree the process is unsatisfactory and might dedicate a subsequent post to suggestions to fix it. And incidentally save us all buckets of money. But a large part of the dissatisfaction yesterday … Continue reading Making the wrong arguments to planning committee doesn’t help
With Old Ottawa South apparently up in arms about the horror of students moving into an enlarged house, and the Councillor uttering sympathetic concerns, I thought it time to do a little case study of a house in Dalhousie. It was a semi-detached for its first century. It’s on a corner lot, the front facing a busy street, the side door facing a quieter street. It’s on one of those funny corner lots that is tiny from the get go, maybe 50′ deep, so the back of the house is maybe 10′ from the rear lot line, leaving just enough space … Continue reading On converting family housing to student housing
Not unexpectedly, some people read yesterday’s post about Demolition by Neglect as an attack on the City, and a defence of bad landlords. It struck me as more than hypocritical that the City decides to enforce property standards strictly only when a certain property owner gets uppity. It still has sinister overtones of political payback and games playing that shouldn’t be going on. Nonetheless, the story prompted three emails from residents in the Bell-Eccles area who have longstanding complaints about unsanitary conditions around Chinatown businesses * and certain very low-income / low-quality housing providers. They provided these pictures, all taken a … Continue reading Bad Landlords, the City, both rubbishing property standards
There’s been a lot of mainstream media coverage in the last week about demolition by neglect. Has the issue become a big pile on? Demolition by neglect is when a property gets so run down it becomes necessary or desirable to demolish it rather than fix it. Heritage advocates feel this is how bad developers get around restoring / renovating older structures. Others might feel this is how the city gets rid of buildings it doesn’t want, by frustrating renovation / restoration. See, for example, the former Lockmaster Tavern building at Bank Street at Somerset. Wasn’t that the architect complaining … Continue reading Demolition by neglect … or rendered undevelopable?
An interesting demonstration of evolving design came to west siders this week courtesy of our high rise developers. Better design is everywhere these days. For that we can credit the popularity of industrial design schools, increased awareness of graphic design elements, and the popularity of design-centric programs on TV and the ‘net. Now we can see it on our skyline by craning our necks. Up on Cathedral Hill, Windmill developments installed their crane for their new condo tower. It is the conventional design. Dare we call it the ‘old fashioned’ design? Notice the complicated support wires, the heavy concrete block … Continue reading Spring Craning
Just a very short distance from the Tradition village centre with its new urbanist nostalgia-infused vibe, we discovered the real reason for its high vacancy rate. A big box mall. Straight out of Nepean or Gloucester or Kanata, but with more landscaping in the parking lots: There was the obligatory big box pet store, a large supermarket, department store, home furnishings store, etc. [remember now it is pronounced Tar-jay, in faux French to mock the higher design pretensions of Target]. Now to be fair it is rather difficult to fit these large format businesses into a walkable village centre. Loblaws in Westboro … Continue reading Tradition, cont’d
On a recent Florida vacation-with-a-urbanist-theme, I made a point of visiting some “famous” examples of planned towns. Some were from the early 1900’s (eg Winter Park City, covered previously; and Coral Gables, maybe to be covered in the future) and two were new towns launched in the last decades specifically to provide an alternative to conventional lollipop cul-de-sacs of garage-fronted car-dependent suburbia. Celebration I liked. It actually seemed to have “launched” itself into a growth pattern and developed a genuine sense of place. Definitely a better suburb. The second new urbanist townsite was Tradition, near Port St Lucie, near the Atlantic coast of Florida … Continue reading Tradition new town
While driving out of country recently, I came across a number of signalized intersections on major collector roads that had an illuminated blue light facing the opposite direction of the main signals. Here’s a picture, taken a night so the blue light shows up: this is a multiple lane major road crossing another at signalized intersection, much like say Hunt Club Road at Merivale or Woodroffe at Baseline. The signal heads in the above pic are for the opposing direction of traffic, but some heads have a bright blue LED light shining the opposite way. I am guessing here, that they … Continue reading Traffic light mystery – reader help wanted
41. Adeline should be extended east via bold planning arrow, as a concept, as a pedestrian-cyclist street (a real “mews”). See points 26,27 (above). 42. Adeline active frontage should extend to at least Rochester, only on new buildings, using flex zoning permitting a variety of short term uses such as residential and work-live lofts eventually converting to commercial uses as the market develops (if ever). I would not like to see high rises on the south side that consist only of front doors/lobbies/garage doors facing the street or semi-dead uses like “party rooms”. 43. What is the ground floor usage of … Continue reading Carling-Preston CDP: 72 ways to offend, continued, part iii
Celebration is a well-known new-urbanist town near Orlando, Florida. In January 2013 I spent about two days there, and came away very impressed. Like other new urbanist towns it takes it architectural and layout cues from pre-1940 successful American towns. It is an attempt to build today neighbourhoods similar to successful walkable areas like the Glebe, Hintonburg, Westboro, Dalhousie … rather than the overtly car-centric suburban model that has dominated our cities since the mid-20th century. Does it succeed? Can we recreate the successful neighbourhoods of the past? I must say I visited with a sceptical mind. I had been there about a decade ago and … Continue reading Celebration in Florida
Ottawa has many defining characteristics. Some nice, some not so nice. This site has railed before on the abundance of signs festooning our streets. Even if there is just one parking spot in a bay, our fair city puts a sign up at each end, sometimes one in the middle, and puts up not one, but two bollards just in case the parked motorist mistakes the parking bay for a through lane. When redoing Somerset Street, each block has upwards of sixty signs ! Here’s a single-bay parking space on Somerset with X’s painted for the signs at each end, … Continue reading Winter Park, the city that doesn’t nag
I was curious about the residential “neighborhoods” that abut the thriving Winter park main street, so I spent a few hours walking up and down the residential streets. There were a lot of apartments, but not in highrises. Many were condos in the four to six storey range. Prices for waterfront condos start in the $200,000’s and go up. A three bedroom waterfront condo in a newish building was $350,000. There are numerous lakes in Winter Park, and the really big houses face the lake. ( The lake was really rough, which accounts for the angle of the picture) But … Continue reading Infill in Winter Park
In January, I escaped the Ottawa winter for two weeks in Florida. Theme of the trip: new and old urbanism. I set my sights on two old “planned” cities — Winter Park, near Orlando; and Coral Gables, now a suburb of Miami. And two new urbanism places, Celebration and Tradition. Winter Park is old urbanism that still works today. Winter Park is a part of the Orlando metropolis. It’s much like Dalhousie or Hintonburg, but more up scale with a higher proportion of apartments. And a downtown university campus also helps create pedestrian traffic. Over the next few days, let’s let … Continue reading Winter Park City, Florida
Today a new website focussed on the history of Dalhousie Ward was launched: www.HistoricDalhousieWard.wordpress.com. And yes, there is a Historic Dalhousie committee keeners can participate in. If interested, email me EricDarwin1@gmail.com. It will focus on the built history, the people who built it, and how we celebrate it, mourn it, or live it today. History is not old dead stuff. Or just about disappearing (or disappeared) buildings. It’s about people, what they built, and how that influences how the neighbourhood works and functions today. And much of the history in Dalhousie Ward is not that old. In the coming stories we will … Continue reading New Dalhousie website launched
Our streetcorners are frequently habitat to brightly coloured metal boxes dispensing a variety of advertising media and sometimes even purchased media. Sometimes I think the colour splat enlivens the city, particularly our spectacularly dull downtown. From time to time, someone tries to impose some order on the jumble of boxes by requiring users to rent box space from a standardized dispenser. This three pack doesn’t take up much room, but I question its architectural style (although the hoods may serve to make robbing the coin box more difficult): Or this super-sized mono-box I saw in Toronto last year, which manages to … Continue reading Newspaper boxes
For sale signs proliferate in our residential areas. Typically, we think nothing of the signs. But they are big, blocky advertising signs helping to clutter our streets. I wonder if Ottawa regulates their size or placement? above: Does Chad Clost really need his name up there twice, and in different fonts? Are Ottawa home buyers so dumb they can’t recognize a bungalow from the street? I was surprised to find these, ah, more discreet signs while out of town: And no, that pic has not been photo-shopped. The sign really is that small. And it wasn’t just in one locality. I … Continue reading For Sale Signs
The Bayview-Carling CDP has been going on for six years now. Or is it seven? It lurches forward just enough to permit some significant upzonings, then subsides back into limbo. The latest attempt by the city to resolve its indecision at the Carling-Preston end of the study zone saw them import their favourite big gun Toronto planner George Dark, and divide the study zone into 3 smaller study zones (the Bayview end, the Gladstone middle, and the Carling end). Gerrymandering, as mentioned in the title of this story, is the political art of redrawing boundaries so as to achieve a … Continue reading Why Gerrymander a CDP?
There is a development application for the vacant lot / parking lot at the corner of Somerset (in Chinatown) and LeBreton Street, opposite the Dalhousie Community Centre and beside St Luke’s Church and its associated social housing building: On initial inspection, I think there’s a lot to like about it. The proponent, DCR Phoenix, who also built the mixed use building at Rochester and Somerset, and who are proposing the twin tower office building at Bayview Station, are asking for the usual reduced setbacks and increased height to build a nine storey building (nine when viewed from Somerset; it will … Continue reading Proposed multi-use building 770 Somerset St W.
Hole digging for a pedestrian tunnel entrance is well under way as shown in the above picture. A large excavator has an extended arm on it to reach deep into the hole for the subterranean pedestrian passage. Notice the heavy steel pilings used to buttress the side walls of the hole, and cross braces so the sides won’t collapse inward onto the construction workers. This tunnel will be 800′ long, and costs 82 million dollars. All of which will be recovered by a user charge levied on passengers. Payback may be as short as three years. The private consortium is building and … Continue reading Tunnel Construction well underway this week
Last month I expressed some concern about the change from the “as requested” design of the downtown stations to the “per the winning bid” design. See the post here: https://www.westsideaction.ca/confederation-matters-i/ I won’t repeat the pictures or the story here, as you can briefly review the previous post. What prompts this review are some pictures taken last week at the Park Street MBTA station in Boston. This is on the red line (hint: red train, red wall tiles and décor . They have renovated the station to add a glass window-enclosed elevator, and a similar-style guard station just out of the picture view, … Continue reading Confederation Matters – v
Being computer illiterate, I do have some problems sometimes getting maps or illustrations out of reports to paste into these stories. So, here are some larger, hopefully clearer and more detailed illustrations of what George Dark and our planning dept (and developers) want to see in the west side Preston-Carling Little Italy neighbourhood. Alas, I cannot make “live” links to outside websites or previous posts (somehow, the blue letters that make links live don’t work for me…) and for these maps the key is a separate picture from the actual map. Here goes: __________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ … Continue reading Bayview Carling report, better maps
