can332
New Member
Anyone know what year the covered walkway over Front St between the old north and south St Lawrence Markets was demolished?
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- Thread starter hawc
- Start date
adma
Superstar
1954 or so.
nfitz
Superstar
Are they still there now? I remember my grandfather pointing out vacant lots in London in the mid-1970s that had been bombed out.
Urban Shocker
Doyenne
Gosh, I hope not.
Last fall, at the Victoria College sale, I bought a copy of the Hanslip Fletcher's 1947 book Bombed London - reproductions of pen and ink drawings he'd made in the early 1940s showing Wren churches and other landmarks standing alone amidst the rubble and destruction. My home town, really, where I was born in 1953.
Last fall, at the Victoria College sale, I bought a copy of the Hanslip Fletcher's 1947 book Bombed London - reproductions of pen and ink drawings he'd made in the early 1940s showing Wren churches and other landmarks standing alone amidst the rubble and destruction. My home town, really, where I was born in 1953.
condovo
Senior Member
There's a thread with downtown parking maps of major North American cities on skyscraperpage.com. The wholesale destruction of some/most NA city centres in the last century is absolutely mind-boggling. Houston, for example, was a lovely city pre-WWII. To this day, even Portland is plastered with surface parking. Toronto's in remarkably good shape comparatively, on par with Manhattan. We've come a long way, baby!
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=191539
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=191539
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hawc
Senior Member
Interesting thread on skyscraperpage. One has to ask however if parking lots are just the symptom, rather than the cause of an unhealthy city.
Oliver Tweed
Active Member
This post makes no sense.
Mongo
Senior Member
How so? Is it simply that you are unable to follow anything more complicated than "Me Tarzan"?
hawc
Senior Member
When did this forum get so rude? Sheesh.
neubilder
Banned
Parking lots were a symptom of the decline of cities across N.A. starting in the post-war period as wealthier urban populations fled to the suburbs leaving downtowns to wither and decay. Google: "White flight". Thanks in part to Woody Allen this trend began to reverse in the 60's and 70's.
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andrewpmk
Senior Member
Looks like Mississauga Centre today with all the parking lots around Square One. These will be gone in 20 years.
unimaginative2
Senior Member
That's actually not quite accurate. Most of those surface parking lots were built in the 1940s and 1950s when downtowns were outwardly quite healthy. The massive influx of cars into downtowns at that time made it more profitable in many cases to operate a surface parking lot than to maintain aging turn-of-the-century commercial buildings. These surface parking lots were often a symptom of a fairly healthy downtown. A lot of those parking lots in that image were likely used by workers in the new high-rise office buildings developed during the postwar boom.
As for the effects of the reform council, don't forget the blanket height limit across downtown.
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W. K. Lis
Superstar
Many of the big box stores with their vast parking lots are designed to have a life expectancy of about 20 years. The building can be altered or reconfigured or even torn down for newer buildings. Same with the parking lots. They all can be bulldozed cheaply.
W. K. Lis
Superstar
Unfortunately, there are developers who still think with a suburban mindset when designing shopping centres, office buildings, or condos for the more inner-city environments. The developers (and politicians) continue to think that any new buildings require vast acreage of parking lots, even though they will only be used on a very rare occasion and there is good public transit or walking available. Accessing those buildings become difficult for transit users or pedestrians. The following article from streetsblog.com is one example:
East River Plaza Parking Still Really, Really Empty, New Research Shows
East River Plaza, the big box mall designed for Massapequa and placed in East Harlem, still has a thousand-space parking garage. And given its location in one of the lowest car-ownership neighborhoods in the country, the garage is still as empty as when it opened, despite big subsidies for parkers.
Thanks to new research from Rutgers urban planning student Kyle Gebhart, whose paper on East River Plaza [PDF] won first prize from the American Planning Association’s Transportation Planning Division, we now know just how badly the project’s developers whiffed when building that massive garage.
East River Plaza's 1,100 space garage still looks like this, according to new research by a Rutgers planning student. Less than five percent of spaces on the upper floors of the garage are full, even at peak shopping times. Photo: Noah Kazis
To find out how the garage was being used, Gebhart went down to East River Plaza at two peak shopping times, the early evening of the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and the afternoon of the first Saturday in December. On the Tuesday, only 33.6 percent of the 1,103 spaces in the garage were occupied. On Saturday that figure had only crept up lightly, to 38.6 percent.
The top floors of the garage were essentially empty. Between 0.6 and 5.8 percent of the spaces on the upper levels were filled, according to Gebhart’s survey. One section of the third floor of the garage had been fenced off and converted into storage space rather than parking.
In contrast, the developers predicted that the garage would hold a whopping 1,190 cars on an average Saturday afternoon in the environmental impact statement for the project.
How did they get it so wrong? As East River Plaza developer David Blumenfeld explained to Streetsblog after the mall’s opening, he built his calculations around data from suburban big box stores. In the early 1990s, when the project was first conceived, there weren’t any big box stores in more urban settings. “There was no model to go off of,†said Blumenfeld. “There was only the suburban model.â€
Gebhart’s research reveals just how braindead those planning documents were. The environmental impact statement drew its numbers from Home Depots in places like Pelham Bay Park, Glendale, Staten Island, and even Port Chester, where the store is off a highway interchange on the Connecticut border. Rather than assume a Manhattan location would have fewer drivers than those sites, they simply averaged the numbers from those suburban locations together.
Even with a subsidized 1,100 space garage, only a quarter of shoppers at East River Plaza drive (shown in blue). Most walk (shown in green). Image: Kyle Gebhart
“It is odd to somehow presume that a Manhattan Home Depot would generate an average number of trips from these locations,†wrote Gebhart, with a fair bit of understatement.
To estimate the parking needs of the East River Plaza Costco, the EIS looked at a single site in Staten Island, again without any sort of adjustment. “This is therefore measuring the amount of parking in the most car-dependent borough and applying it to the most car-free borough,†Gebhart wrote.
The results, needless to say, weren’t a good fit for Manhattan shoppers. Over half of East River Plaza’s customers live in the three closest ZIP codes, and by and large, they get to the mall on foot. Just under half of all shoppers Gebhart surveyed as they entered the Target on the Tuesday afternoon had walked there. Only 27 percent had driven.
Because the designers of East River Plaza had assumed most shoppers would be entering from the garage, not the street, the pedestrian environment is terrible for those entering on foot. Gebhart found that sidewalks on E. 117th Street had been narrowed near the entrance to the mall to make room for a wider street.
The moral, seemingly intuitive but not grasped at East River Plaza, is that you can’t treat Manhattan like it’s the suburbs. “If big box stores would like to locate in urban environments, it is important that they do not bring all of the elements of suburban sprawl with them,†concluded Gebhart. “Otherwise, by continually increasing the supply of parking and creating dead spaces, the city will only become ore auto-dependent and sprawled as well.â€
