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
On Tuesday evening a most strange and wonderful event occurred on the west side. A developer called a meeting of neighbours and area residents, and then listened. And listened hard. Mizrahi Developments builds luxury custom homes in Toronto. Some of these homes are in a mid-rise condo format. They have bought the Joe’s Audio and Bella Restaurant site on Richmond Road at Island Park Drive. The site is zoned for six stories, with planning direction to go up to 9 at the corner to make a gateway statement. The planning therefore envisions a nine storey building right at the corner, with a six storey … Continue reading News Headline: Developer listens first …
The City deserves congratulations and praise for its construction of the OTrain MUP running from the Ottawa River to Bayview Station to Somerset Street to Gladstone to Young. The path is wide and straight and well-landscaped. Alas, it may be months more before it is opened. At its south end, Young Street, the new OTrain multi-user path joins the 1963 stone dust path that runs to Carling and then to the Prince of Wales. Here’s the joining point, looking from Young Street southwards: Until a few years ago the stonedust pathway was very usable, and attractive in the summer: … Continue reading OTrain MUP’s muddy cousin
The City is making admirable progress on the renewal and rebuilding of the OTrain corridor. The Bayview Station CDP is pretty good, overall.( Of course it has flaws, after all they didn’t adopt all of my suggestions.) The Preston-Carling CDP has many good elements, tempered by a few underplayed opportunities and few retrograde car-dominant ideas that are downright mistakes. But the biggest problem with both CDP’s was they were designed after the land stampede was well under way. Spot rezonings and ad hoc decisions forced the area planners to make the plan fit the evolving reality, rather than shaping it from … Continue reading Reinstating the obsolete is not planning for the future, but it is deja vu all over again
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 ?
While the City is undertaking a “consultation process review” another example comes to my attention where the practice is strongly at odds with the dream. Recall that the Centretown plan went before Planning Committee last week with last-second “compromise” provisions worked out between (some of the)developers, represented by Fotenn, and the Centretown Community Assocation (CCA). Alas, there wasn’t time to circulate these before they appeared at Committee, which left some members of the public feeling left out. And the Councillor too. This comes on top of the fabled managed consultation session for the Big Gambling Casino Cash Cow. To say nothing … Continue reading More public consultation problems at the City
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
OK, so the title of this story is rather extreme. But read on. I always say NO to beggars. My reasoning is as follows: if I give them money, I am increasing the demand for begging services. Soon, there will be more beggars because it is worth their effort to do so. If I don’t give them money, I am signalling a lack of demand for their begging services, which should decrease the supply. And what do begging services do? Let someone who feels guilty “buy off” their guilt by giving money to someone else? I am sure there are better ways … Continue reading Street beggars & city staff: separated at birth?
Will cars some day be so rare they are like coin-op riding dinosaurs found in the mall? Ottawa has very few KFC’s in operation, and they were of the past-their-best-before date design: gaudy stripes, the rotating bucket … I certainly don’t recall seeing ones branded quite so nicely as this one. And, BTW, it is Kitchen Fresh Chicken, fried being a concept that has gone a bit rancid. We are at the blissful, idealistic, utopian stage of encouraging food trucks and street vendors. Later, what’cha get are hamburger stands enlivened with wide-screen outdoor TV’s. Given Ottawa’s generally dull architecture and … Continue reading Post peak-auto drive-in, and other misc.
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
Did you get the clue in yesterday’s (and today’s) story titles? It’s all about the houses at Tradition. Here is the back patio of a home being built by a local builder. Notice the large shaded patio, plus some un-roofed patio area. The utility plugs in the wall to the right are for an outdoor wall-mounted TV. The ceilings in these houses tend to be nine or ten feet high, and the patio sliders are equally oversize, which fills the rooms with light. In this new area, wild life was still around, and curious: Moving on around the … Continue reading A Tradition of inspired design
Tradition has long “parkway like” access roads to the housing clusters, as shown here: There is a bicycle lane marked on the right, and a sidewalk visible on the far left. These roads could have been designed by the NCC – they are circuitous, scenic, manipulate vistas, and thoroughly boring to try to walk or ride along. Adjacent subdivisions back onto the road right of way. Think Jeanne d’Arc in Orleans or Spratt Road in Riverside south, but on steroids. Periodically, there are side roads into housing clusters. Each is announced by a large “gatehouse”, none of which appeared … Continue reading Inspired Design at Tradition
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
The City’s (in)famous Bayview-Carling CDP process has been sputtering along for a very long time. In January, the City cut it into three segments, each their own CDP. Rather like the myths about worms, does each section have a heart and ability to keep on wiggling? Interested observers can trot off to Tom Brown Arena this Tuesday evening to see the purported “final” draft of the Bayview Station area plan. You can send your doppleganger to the Albert Street reconstruction open house being held the same night at the Dalhousie Community Centre. Since the two projects overlap planning areas, it … Continue reading Suddenly, Bayview Station CDP doesn’t look so bad
above: elderly gent attempts to give directions to city engineers who will shortly zoom off – but in what direction? The section of Albert Street that runs through LeBreton Flats is up for reconstruction starting this year. Total reconstruction, as in deep sewers, new watermains, new pavement and curbs. But the wiring won’t be buried that is a cost imposed on suburban areas not in central Ottawa. What will be the changes? Well, we don’t know for sure. The contract is being given to the Rideau Transit Group while the project is in the design stage, with more unknowns … Continue reading Albert Street reconstruction – Back to the Future?
Here are the last 27 of my comments on the Carling-Preston CDP draft plan originated by George Dark and put forward by the City of Ottawa. 45. Proposed mini-parks or squares at Preston-Carling, Beech-Rochester, Adeline-MUP, Dow Motors site, need not be assumed by the city but can be mandated as green space (not vehicular zones) and left in the ownership and maintenance of the adjacent buildings, with appropriate legal provisions, similar to the Hudson building on Kent. Never underestimate the susceptibility of this city to arguments to turn such miniparks or plazas into loading zones or stack lanes. 46. … Continue reading Carling-Preston CDP: 72 ways to offend, concluded, part iv
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
Height Map 14. The Sherwood Drive intersection is not well enough handled. The triangular block (now a mini-mall) offers opportunity for a higher building with distinction and possibly good landscaping. Then allow low zoning for a long, linear building(s) along Carling east of Sherwood, creating a noise buffer, lower-rise gateway to the Civic Hospital area, with a courtyard between it and Domicile’s towers, creating a variety of heights in this composition rather than just a collection of towers that obstruct each other’s views. I am pleased to see some mention of sight lines in this report, a planning issue … Continue reading Carling-Preston CDP: 72 ways to offend (part ii)
