Rating of the development

  • 1 Really Good

    Votes: 12 23.5%
  • 2 Not Bad

    Votes: 11 21.6%
  • 3 So So

    Votes: 16 31.4%
  • 4 Not Good

    Votes: 9 17.6%
  • 5 Terrible

    Votes: 3 5.9%

  • Total voters
    51
I think the conclusion is, by both the developer and the city, the market concept was a failure. When it first opened, their were name brand retailers as well as 'market-type' offering. Now it has 'no name' retailers and some remnants of a market.
With all the foot traffic that area of Eau Claire draws, for at least 6 months of the year, you would think the market could have survived. Any new renderings I have seen, retail is in the podiums of either the office or residential buildings.
 
A market theme could still work but the building would have to be cool or very useful. Something that would make people want to go there, like a building that has a built in LRT stop. My preference would be to decide on the location of the train stop, and build a single market building with an integrated train station, and surround it with smaller individual developments (condos or whatever).
 
Even with the delay in the underground portion of the Green line, the location of the station will probably be decided on and built before the market gets redeveloped. Definitely a location decided upon, and any new market redev will have to incorporate the new station.
 
Calgary is larger, more walkable city and millennials are nostalgic for things like markets . I don't think it is absolutely necessary to be directly connected to transit for a market to succeed. The important thing is to keep it simple and authentic. Another mall with brand retailers and a market component will just fail again. That's dated.
 
I think this is emblematic of how the city sells land, with up zoning first and trying to capture maximum value. Then small or medium sized developers bid in too much and win but have destroyed the economics of redevelopment without even more upzoning.
 
Calgary is larger, more walkable city and millennials are nostalgic for things like markets . I don't think it is absolutely necessary to be directly connected to transit for a market to succeed. The important thing is to keep it simple and authentic. Another mall with brand retailers and a market component will just fail again. That's dated.
I think there is some cultural components to this - Calgary's core has been largely bleached of small, independents or non-corporate minded businesses and organization due to the 1980s - 2015 office-focused, O&G boom (apart from Chinatown). Wildly expensive land, speculative development priced for mega-developments all but erased the ability of an independent market type use from competing.

Where downtown markets have happened, there is often government intervention of some sort: Vancouver (Granville Island), Montreal (Atwater and Jean Talon market), Winnipeg (the Forks), Toronto (st Lawrence market) all have publicly-owned lands/buildings as a core component at least for some or all of the market's history.

Calgary has few champions for such a project - stampede would be a natural fit but they, ironically, don't seem interesting in agriculture as a practicing business and would rather have their taxpayer-funded parking lots sit empty 340 days a year. Also, unlike almost every other major Canadian city, we have no pro-urban MLAs or MPs that have championed similar projects throughout history, a crucial support level that has always been missing in downtown Calgary.

Calgary did have a public market until 1954 when it burned down.
calgary-public-market-1922.jpg


Now would it be crazy to have a public market run by a non-profit in the core in an age of privately run supermarkets, uberEats and Costco mega-centres? Not really, we seem perfectly fine to have publicly funding recreation centres and arenas competing against private recreation facilities for decades. What it would take is vision and leadership.
 
Wow I never knew about this public market until now. However, looking at pics of it and thinking of how it would have been such an amazing anchor for that area makes me feel really sad. What a loss....
 
Wow I never knew about this public market until now. However, looking at pics of it and thinking of how it would have been such an amazing anchor for that area makes me feel really sad. What a loss....

We can never understate the damage to our urban realm that:
  1. Being too small and irrelevant in the pre-automotive era resulting in few buildings, institutions or urban-minded boosters to act as a defence to -
  2. A petro-fuelled mega-boomtown in the peak-automotive era and all the money, redevelopment and history-erasing projects that come with that
 

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