EdmTrekker said:
Perhaps behind the scenes that was the plan and without Katz having to life a finger...
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It's an intriguing theory and actually makes a lot of sense to me. There is potential controversy and risk here at the initial stages that perhaps Katz did not want to get bogged down with.

So, if the project gets approved and it goes smoothly, Katz comes in and takes over. Having a bigger company and more resources proceed with this would make more sense plus it is right next to his big development.
 
edmontonjournal.com

Edmonton historic board urges city keep heritage in mind as older buildings demolished

Edmonton's Historical Board worries the city may not be taking heritage seriously enough.
edmontonjournal.com edmontonjournal.com

"We often find that one of the chief obstacles to our work and an ongoing concern is the approach of the overall administration … there is a bit of a concern about the culture that there is not a value appreciation — or frankly as we saw with the proposed demolition of a municipal historic resource — that there isn’t even an understanding of historic resources and the role that they play in our city.” - Dominic Schamuhn, Edmonton’s Historical Board Chair

Woof, city council and administration need to give their head a massive shake. I am very disappointed to read some of the lines in this article about how administration is an obstacle rather than a supporter of heritage, and that for the first time, more historic buildings are being demolished than added to the city's historic property inventory. Also, having Stantec speak to bringing life to a neglected area by tearing down the Horne and Pitfield building while downtown is filled with gravel parking lots that have gone undeveloped and maintained for decades is beyond disappointing.
 
Sometimes old buildings just need to be demolished. Of course a historic board believes too many buildings are not being saved, as that's always their only opinion.

If developers want to save buildings or facades I guess that's fine, although demolition is a lot more exciting as something completely new can take its place. I feel the views of the historical elites are overrepresented significantly within the conversation, especially when public funds are being used.
 
jason403 said:
Sometimes old buildings just need to be demolished. Of course a historic board believes too many buildings are not being saved, as that's always their only opinion.

If developers want to save buildings or facades I guess that's fine, although demolition is a lot more exciting as something completely new can take its place. I feel the views of the historical elites are overrepresented significantly within the conversation, especially when public funds are being used.
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What an unfortunate attitude. If Rome or Boston or London had that attitude those cities would've turned over their historic stock 10 times by now.

Your argument is flawed because more often than not in Edmonton nothing a lot more exciting replaces these historic buildings. Look no further than all the gravel parking lots downtown. At one point quite a few of those lots had an old warehouse or apartment building on them and none of those have been replaced with anything remotely exciting. And no, I am not talking about tearing down Staples so the JW could replace it.

But I must just be a historical elite so you must represent the gravel parking lot elite then 😁
 
CaptainBL said:
What an unfortunate attitude. If Rome or Boston or London had that attitude those cities would've turned over their historic stock 10 times by now.

Your argument is flawed because more often than not in Edmonton nothing a lot more exciting replaces these historic buildings. Look no further than all the gravel parking lots downtown. At one point quite a few of those lots had an old warehouse or apartment building on them and none of those have been replaced with anything remotely exciting. And no, I am not talking about tearing down Staples so the JW could replace it.

But I must just be a historical elite so you must represent the gravel parking lot elite then 😁
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That is the entire rub though, ain't it?

Government oversight and intervention vs letting the free market play out.

The public sector, especially today, is always in a rock and a hard place, because of various interest groups lobbying for certain things, media attention, and social media.

Historically, we live in a conservative province including Edmonton - that brings certain attitudes and behaviours toward how development is undertaken or not.

I think the current provincial government plays a hand in additions to the historic registry, so that is not helping things either.

I don't say all this to get into a political discussion; more just pointing out the historical realities that led us to where we are now. I'm also not sure this needs to be an either or argument - you can support both new development and retaining the old, but it is certainly more challenging and expensive than simply giving the green light to knock it over.

I don't know if it is a fair comparison to London, Rome or Boston where many of those were always dense to begin with. With that said, I will admit that I don't know the percentage of downtown parking lot land that once had buildings on it. Perhaps @_Citizen_Dane_ knows the answer.
 
jason403 said:
Sometimes old buildings just need to be demolished. Of course a historic board believes too many buildings are not being saved, as that's always their only opinion.

If developers want to save buildings or facades I guess that's fine, although demolition is a lot more exciting as something completely new can take its place. I feel the views of the historical elites are overrepresented significantly within the conversation, especially when public funds are being used.
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Ah yes, that dastardly cabal of heritage elites who've had unprecedented success saving buildings. Oh wait...

I'd understand this argument if we had the density of Vancouver or Toronto, but in a city where gravel parking lots reign supreme it's a fallacy.​

CaptainBL said:
"I am very disappointed to read... that for the first time, more historic buildings are being demolished than added to the city's historic property inventory.
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Agreed on all points, but this is a particularly salient one.

As @westcoastjos correctly guessed, the Province has a part to play in this. For those unaware, the majority of buildings on the Inventory of Historic Resources have been added through wide-reaching neighbourhood studies. Essentially, the City and heritage planners will map out an area and conduct an in-depth analysis of most properties located within it. That’s then whittled down to some fifty to one-hundred significant buildings which are then added to the Inventory. Although time-consuming and labour-intensive, it worked well — so well that they’ve been doing it like this since the first city-wide survey was completed in ‘93 – and allowed for large chunks of Edmonton to be cataloged. The Province, in most cases as far as I am aware, covered a substantial part of these costs. That changed recently, however. I was talking to Erik Backstrom, City Senior Planner, about this early today, and he said that one of the key problems facing the City right now is that our current provincial government has no interest in funding any more surveys for the foreseeable future. The last survey completed was the 2016 Glenora Study. In the years since the only new additions to the Inventory — roughly six to ten per year — are individual landowners coming forward to have their properties included. He pointed out, as the article did, that we’re reaching a precipice where demolitions of historically significant buildings are going to rapidly out-pace additions by a growing margin.
​
Then there's the fact that the outdated Historic Resources Act makes Alberta one of the few provinces where municipalities are actively discouraged from saving buildings, but that's a whole other can of worms...
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westcoastjos said:
I don't know if it is a fair comparison to London, Rome or Boston where many of those were always dense to begin with. With that said, I will admit that I don't know the percentage of downtown parking lot land that once had buildings on it. Perhaps @_Citizen_Dane_ knows the answer.
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As to your point, prior to 1950 basically everything between 96th Street to 105th Street, from 103rd Avenue to 99th Avenue, was of dense brick construction with an average height of around two to three stories. The outlying areas east, west, north, and south were largely industrial or residential, although Jasper Avenue itself was pretty well developed from 96th to 109th with the odd exception.
 
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Hate this historical tokenism. Why cant they build on any of the empty lots on this street. This building could be preserved by conversion to condos and retail, like cobogo or philips. Preserving 2 walls is an absolute joke, and putting these two walls into the historic register is a slap in the face to the city. It has become a free pass for developers to demolish whatever they want.
If this goes through I hope the walls are actually preserved and not demolished only for the outside brick layer be pasted back into place over top the new concrete structure - Like the Mclaren. Guaranteed, society will look back at this trend of so called "façade preservation" as a misguided failure to preserve anything of actual value. These Frankenstein structures will just be a sorry reminder of that.
 
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