[esquire]

This is going to sound familiar, but here goes anyway...

As a standalone piece of design it's great. But the location next to a stroad and situated well away from any busy pedestrian corridors that would draw people in means that it's doomed to feel like an empty void for the rest of the time. It's certainly not where I would have broken the bank on a beautiful garden.

And I still feel as though we missed an opportunity to have our cake and eat it too. A tower at the SW corner of the lot would have pushed the interpretive centre closer to the corner of Assiniboine and Main. Together they would have helped to hem the site in a bit and probably would have generated more foot traffic through the site. But we all know how that ended up.

The whole thing is a bit of a disappointment... it could have been better. But for whatever reason, Gary Doer decided to take his marching orders from Gordon Sinclair and his friends at the Manitoba Club, and this is what we got as a result.