So much for Main Street
Over at Rise and Sprawl, the most learned proprietor bears witness to the removal of the iconic "Starland" sign from the long derelict cinema on Winnipeg's also iconic North Main Street, in preparation for demolition. Also to be flattened in the name of ... something ... is the old Rex Theatre, which was one of the very first purpose-built cinemas in the country. This CBC report shows the suburban office-park building that is going to replace all this history and, like a hundred equally ill-conceived projects before it, Save Downtown (from itself). The NDP gave us Waverley West, a vast urbanity-destroying suburban tract housing development; maybe this project could be called Waverley North, given what it's transforming Main Street into.
1 comments:
Unfortunate. I don't know about the specifics of this situation but governments can be the worst developers. Government offices tend to add very little vitality to wherever it is they're built. The other big problem is that they don't tend to evolve like commercial properties and aren't built to maximize the economic potential of their site. The buildings are given a budget and then they're for all intents and purposes "free" for bureaucrats to manage as they like.
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