Lansdowne Park Revitalization | N/A | N/A | Proposed

[Deez]

http://www.ottawa.ca/residents/publi.../index_en.html

Let the ideas flow.

[clynnog]

Originally Posted by Deez

http://www.ottawa.ca/residents/publi.../index_en.html

Let the ideas flow.

Isn't the fact that the NCC is now a 'partner' the kiss of death on this project.

[Deez]

Fortunately, the partnership is "limited". The NCC has only agreed to consider integrating the land that it owns adjacent to the canal into the plan...not to have a decisive say in the plan's outcome.

[clynnog]

Originally Posted by Deez

Fortunately, the partnership is "limited". The NCC has only agreed to consider integrating the land that it owns adjacent to the canal into the plan...not to have a decisive say in the plan's outcome.

Oh, you are so naive if you think that is where the NCC's seat at the table will start and end.

[Deez]

Meh. Cynicism hasn't led me very far in the past. May as well start anew with naivety.

[Ottawade]

It's such a fantastic spot in the city with so much potential. I'm somewhat unaware of what types of ideas have been forwarded. I dislike the casino idea. I also am unsure of conference center idea. I think cleaning up city center would be better for that kind of project. More room for a high-rise hotel and other services plus good access to transit.

I guess I would really hope that this could be turned into a public space that people could use on a very frequent basis.

[Jamaican-Phoenix]

I guess I would really hope that this could be turned into a public space that people could use on a very frequent basis.

Read as "more grass and trees".

[Mille Sabords]

Originally Posted by Jamaican-Phoenix

Read as "more grass and trees".

I'm afraid Jamaican Phoenix is right. We have to cram the consultation website with comments from the public demanding more than grass - the canal-side has to be BUILT-UP - it has to be developed (yes, DEVELOPED) so as to bring people close to the water, and people doing more than just jogging. An extra inlet of water through the site wouldn't be all bad, though, if it's given a hard edge and lots of activity onto it.

[AuxTown]

I know I've said it already, but I really liked the proposal put forward late last year in that Ottawa Citizen article (the one Scary Larry was all over). It really made the most of the site with many different land uses and I'm sure it would also make the grass/trees/flowers/jogging/annoying people happy as well. The only thing that I would change is to have the parking garage on the East side of the stadium and putting the 2 condo towers in its place. It would be awful to have a parking structure adjacent to the canal. I think this plan illustrates another important point that this development has to integrate seamlessly into the Glebe neighbourhood to the North using medium-density residential. Thems are powerful NIMBYs in that neighbourhood and we best make them happy.

[Mille Sabords]

..dp

[ajldub]

Is there a stipulation that says Frank Clair stadium has to stay there in some shape or form? I say move it somewhere else. It's so massive that it will still dominate any new development that goes next to it, and nobody in the glebe likes CFL anyways. Send it to Orleans maybe, then we'd have a football team that could sell tickets. And as interesting as a plan to incorporate the canal into the new design sounds, I bet there is some UNESCO rule saying that current world heritage sites can't be expanded or redesigned without heavy consultation from the policy wonks in Geneva or wherever they are.

[adam-machiavelli]

That plan seems okay except that the high-rise residential area in the southeast part seems to be too disconnected to the rest of the project. People living in that area will find it an inconvenience to walk to Bank Street or a bus stop.

[Deez]

Over the past week or so I've been chipping away at a draft plan of what I would like the park to look like...and here it is:



Guiding Principles

• Seamless integration with surrounding area: I wanted the plan to make Lansdowne feel as if it was part of the Glebe, rather than some fenced off area that hosts football games. To accomplish this, I imagined street-friendly row housing with Vancouver-style rear laneways fronting Holmwood. To further achieve continuity, I extended Adelaide and O'Connor right into the park and angled the modified grid pattern of the roads to match patterns in the Glebe.
  
• More than just a once-a-week destination: More than anything else, Lansdowne's huge surface lot shows that the park is a place where a bunch of people come all at once for a short time and then leave immediately afterwards. I wanted to maximize the use of the land by introducing a variety of uses. Firstly, the supermarket (which I imagined as a Rideau St. Loblaws kind of facility) would help attract people from all over central Ottawa to show off what the park has to offer. As an added bonus, the parking required for this building could be used to accomodate cars for football and hockey games. Next, a mix of employment, residential and commercial buildings will help keep the streets vibrant at all times of day...rather than just after a game. Finally, the addition of the public soccer field adds some sorely needed amateur sport infrastructure to the City's core and pays homage to Lansdowne's sports past.
  
• Attractiveness to pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users: I think one of the strengths of my plan is the multi-use pathway crossing the canal (and the Rideau River). This crossing would not only help to establish the Park as a walkable/cycleable neighbourhood, but it would also link the pathways along the canal with the pathways along the Rideau River. Also, the Riverside Hospital transitway station is less than a kilometer away following Avenue Road. This makes getting to games by transit much more viable than relying on a clogged up Bank St. Speaking of which, the north side of the Civic Centre could be set up as a pick-up/drop-off point for local buses (with the roundabout making it that much easier for access/egress).
  
  I'd love to hear any and all comments.
  
  
  PS: The southwest corner was intentionally left untouched to allow for redesigned south-side stands. I'd be up for suggestions for that area too.
  

[TransitZilla]

Originally Posted by Deez

Over the past week or so I've been chipping away at a draft plan of what I would like the park to look like...and here it is:



Guiding Principles

• Seamless integration with surrounding area: I wanted the plan to make Lansdowne feel as if it was part of the Glebe, rather than some fenced off area that hosts football games. To accomplish this, I imagined street-friendly row housing with Vancouver-style rear laneways fronting Holmwood. To further achieve continuity, I extended Adelaide and O'Connor right into the park and angled the modified grid pattern of the roads to match patterns in the Glebe.
  
• More than just a once-a-week destination: More than anything else, Lansdowne's huge surface lot shows that the park is a place where a bunch of people come all at once for a short time and then leave immediately afterwards. I wanted to maximize the use of the land by introducing a variety of uses. Firstly, the supermarket (which I imagined as a Rideau St. Loblaws kind of facility) would help attract people from all over central Ottawa to show off what the park has to offer. As an added bonus, the parking required for this building could be used to accomodate cars for football and hockey games. Next, a mix of employment, residential and commercial buildings will help keep the streets vibrant at all times of day...rather than just after a game. Finally, the addition of the public soccer field adds some sorely needed amateur sport infrastructure to the City's core and pays homage to Lansdowne's sports past.
  
• Attractiveness to pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users: I think one of the strengths of my plan is the multi-use pathway crossing the canal (and the Rideau River). This crossing would not only help to establish the Park as a walkable/cycleable neighbourhood, but it would also link the pathways along the canal with the pathways along the Rideau River. Also, the Riverside Hospital transitway station is less than a kilometer away following Avenue Road. This makes getting to games by transit much more viable than relying on a clogged up Bank St. Speaking of which, the north side of the Civic Centre could be set up as a pick-up/drop-off point for local buses (with the roundabout making it that much easier for access/egress).
  
  I'd love to hear any and all comments.
  
  
  PS: The southwest corner was intentionally left untouched to allow for redesigned south-side stands. I'd be up for suggestions for that area too.
  

I like it... the grocery store is a nice touch.

The only thing that I'm not a big fan of is having residential along the canal. The canal could really use a strip of retail and residential fronting right onto the canal and Lansdowne would be a perfect place for this.

What about re-aligning Queen Elizabeth further away from Lansdowne, and putting some mixed-use buildings with retail/restaurants on ground level that front onto both Queen Elizabeth an the canal? There could be a boardwalk on the canal side to carry the pathway. Have 3-4 stories of residential above.

I really think the canal should be the focus for any re-development.

[Mister F]

^Great ideas WRT the canal. Much better than the towers in the park proposed a few posts up. Lansdowne Park is such a waste right now. I'd love to see the canal have more Amsterdam style development around it. Probably not going to happen though, the NCC loves having those scenic country roads leading right up to downtown.

Originally Posted by ajldub

Well there weren't enough ticket-buying Glebites to keep the renegades around. Or the roughies for that matter.

You're making it sound like the market for football is limited to a 1 km radius around the park. By that logic there aren't enough fans in any given neighbourhood in Orleans either. The CFL would be a city-wide draw, only a small percentage of fans at any given game are from the local neighbourhood. For any city-wide draw a central location makes the most sense. It's close to the Queensway, local transit, and an easy walk from downtown.

My parents went to an event at the Rogers Centre (Skydome) in Toronto and it let out at the same time as a Leafs game a block away. The traffic at the event wasn't managed very well and the traffic jams were way worse than usual. My parents, being car-dependent exurbanites, were saying they should have built the stadium on the outskirts somewhere. I tried to convince them that that would have made things even worse - poor transit access, way more required parking, no integration with the neighbourhood, few opportunities for after-game nightlife....I don't think they quite understood.

[ajldub]

Does this mean that Ottawa can't support a CFL team then? Or were the Gliebermans really just that bad?

[p_xavier]

With the constant immigration flux, would a pro soccer team fare better?

[Deez]

Originally Posted by Mister F

^Great ideas WRT the canal. Much better than the towers in the park proposed a few posts up. Lansdowne Park is such a waste right now. I'd love to see the canal have more Amsterdam style development around it. Probably not going to happen though, the NCC loves having those scenic country roads leading right up to downtown.


You're making it sound like the market for football is limited to a 1 km radius around the park. By that logic there aren't enough fans in any given neighbourhood in Orleans either. The CFL would be a city-wide draw, only a small percentage of fans at any given game are from the local neighbourhood. For any city-wide draw a central location makes the most sense. It's close to the Queensway, local transit, and an easy walk from downtown.

My parents went to an event at the Rogers Centre (Skydome) in Toronto and it let out at the same time as a Leafs game a block away. The traffic at the event wasn't managed very well and the traffic jams were way worse than usual. My parents, being car-dependent exurbanites, were saying they should have built the stadium on the outskirts somewhere. I tried to convince them that that would have made things even worse - poor transit access, way more required parking, no integration with the neighbourhood, few opportunities for after-game nightlife....I don't think they quite understood.

I would also love to see buildings right up along the canal, but as you say, the NCC would never let it happen.

WRT stadiums in the burbs, get your parents to go to a Sens game and see how they like the traffic coming out of Kanata. If anything, traffic is much worse with suburban stadiums because way more people drive and everybody is heading home in the same direction.

[lrt's friend]

That approach dooms us to having no stadium. It's one thing to repair an old stadium, it's quite another to tear it down and build a new one.

The stadium has to stay. It's in an urban location, which makes it a rare gem. I disagree about your statement about people in the Glebe - there were (and still are) LOTS of CFL fans in that area, they just weren't busy whining to the papers and their councillors about the noise and crowds.

If the stadium were to be removed, never again will we be able to have a downtown sports facility like Frank Clair. Finding space would be almost impossible and, supposing you did, NIMBY's would kill it. Better stick with what we have, which is a stadium that has been there for way longer than all the Glebe whiners, who therefore have no valid argument. They moved knowing the stadium was there. Don't like stadiums? Then, the Glebe ain't for you!

Besides, there's the Civic Centre underneath the stadium. It would be rather bizarre to remove the stadium and leave this half-building just sitting there by itself.

Orleans? Are you in the 1970's still? Since when is a suburban relocation the right answer? If anything we should be looking for ways to move the NHL to downtown Ottawa.

Bravo! Well said. I was a season ticket holder for years. Lansdowne's central location with lots of choices of places to eat on the way there, and free parking in the surrounding community was a selling point. Scotiabank Place way out past Kanata was a big mistake. An island in nothingness. You might as well have built a moat around it. Anyway, Scotiabank Place is a pain in the rear to get there and back and we are eventually going to pay a fortune to get rapid transit there. We could have avoided all of this if we had built it at Bayview or Lebreton Flats.

[ajldub]

I appreciate the fact that a stadium should be central, but what about the fact that two CFL teams there have shown to be not economically viable?