I'm eyeing the Boyle Street footprint in particular (which I know is just an example and not an actual plan). It might look like it's all parking lots, but It takes out the Koermann Block, one of two remaining Chinese restaurant in Chinatown East, and four different community agencies important...

Hell, the city is full of people who are mad that where my new house is isn't still an airport and they can't take a PWA 737-200 to Calgary and smoke on the plane. I run across demands online that they actually tear it down and re-open the airport. On the other hand, there's a CERTAIN builder in...

Perhaps, but it's never going to surprise me when they mysteriously dial a project wayyyy back in scope, or end up doing something like using a crane which covers too much of the neighbours property and then try pretend the neighbour agreed to it, or they run up against project delays because...

Everything I ever dealt with Westrich over gave me the feeling that I was dealing with an extremely fly-by-night outfit. Everything was alarm bells. The guy in charge especially just gave off this "trying very hard to play a successful businessman" vibe.

It looks like they're having to bring in a different crane on account of the drama.

I was a bit puzzled as to what aspect of the view was compelling, but I suppose that people watching is absolutely a thing.

Hmm.

People do drive downtown, but there's not a huge difference in experience between a downtown Boston Pizza and the Boston Pizza at Kingsway Mall. Or any number of the other 16 or so spread around the city. It probably makes an okay overflow for the Ice District one on game nights, but you're...

I remember going over it when I was first learning to drive and it was just a miserable experience, especially in winter. God forbid you wanted to use the pedestrian walkway with the death stairs. It's so weird to me that people get nostalgic for downtown of the 1980s, because after the oil bust...

Well, yeah. They came in colours. On the other hand, I can practically taste the lead from their exhaust looking at these pictures.

Ah yes. This is the one being built over the old house that I rented a suite in before I moved to Boyle Street. It was a lovely old place, but had definitely seen better days and it would've been a very spectacular project to actually fix the place up. Moved out after Westrich bought it, because...

Thinking back to the time I was biking home across the High Level in early November of 2016. The bridge was lit up red for Remembrance Day. Towards the north side of the west path, my brain detected something red hiding in the red of the lights, and it turned out to be some kind of mid-century...

I have good news for you then. MacLab's The Parks is going to plug directly into Corona LRT, apparently where the entrance just to the west of Audrey's Books is. I'd be kind of surprised if that Boston Pizza is still here in a few years. It seems to have gotten pretty desolate compared to what...

Well, there's still a couple left and I'm okay with that. I'm just thinking back to how it wasn't that long ago that EVERYTHING was Starbucks and Second Cup with no real space in the market for this kind of thing to take hold. The whole mass extinction event that they went through is a key part...

30 years ago we had a shooting range in actual downtown. 30 years ago we were grunting out the cheapest possible strip malls right in and around downtown and calling it revitalization. 30 years ago our violent crime rate in the core was at its historic peak, and walking 104 street after dark was...

Unfortunately, displacement has been most of our approach to "improving" things in the past.

I'm all about Second Cup and Starbucks being all but purged from downtown and all of the independent cafes that have sprung up in their place.

Oof. Other half and I went to them a bunch because they had good outdoor seating and actually monitored their internal air quality instead of just reverting to COVID complacency. But also they had an EPS cruiser plough through their outdoor seating because of course they just do that.

Grew up in Sturgeon and ended up getting dragged in there a bunch, especially when my Wile E Coyote moments led me to getting taken in to the hospital. Their farmers' market is interesting but... they have a very weird mix of YOU MUST WEAR A HELMET IF YOU ARE GOING TO BICYCLE and LOL GOOD LUCK...

And I stand by being truly, dreadfully sorry that Little Lord Fauntleroy can't enshittify my neighbourhood in the manner that he desires. I will absolutely fetch him the rustiest, sharpest fainting couch of all time.