The heart of London is being transformed by multi-million-dollar developments and thousands of people pouring into it every day.
If you were a first-time visitor to downtown London today, you'd find a vibrant market, a hopping-busy arena and entertainment centre and a skyline virtually popping with new apartment buildings.
Not urban paradise, exactly, but a long distance removed from the landscape of even a decade ago.
Then faded facades, yawning storefronts and expansive parking lots gaped at visitors to the core.
The once vibrant commercial district was past its prime.
Pummelling the core while it was down were downtown mall wars, heritage fights and feuding politicians.
Today, aided by many millions in public and private dollars, downtown is making another effort to show itself to be the comeback kid.
If anyone has had a close-up view, it has been Roland Schubert. He and his wife Myra own Colour by Schubert, a King Street shop specializing in custom photo-finishing.
"It's phenomenal. When we moved here (26 years ago), the whole block was empty," he says.
Nearby stores were boarded up, the Covent Garden Market was a tired parking garage whose saving graces were its character tenants.
And the Talbot streetscape was faded and soon to fall victim to a spitting match between rival mall developers.
"The most depressing point was when they tore down the streetscape" in 1991 and replaced it with a muddy, 300-car parking lot, Schubert says.
He attributes the turnaround -- and he says it has turned around -- to the opening of the new Covent Garden Market in 1999.
A few years later, the city-backed, $42-million John Labatt Centre filled the old streetscape.
New restaurants and specialty shops have made the area interesting again, and fun.
"A lot of stuff is happening and it's just continuous," says Schubert. "I think it's terrific the way it is now."
It helps that his store has a niche. "Had we been just retail, it would have been just deadly. People don't come downtown to shop. They make it a destination."
A cynic might suggest -- exceptions such as Kingsmill's notwithstanding -- that more promises in the retail sector have been broken than kept.
For example, London Centre Arcade, later the Mews, opened in 1977 with 72 stores and services and slowly sank under the weight of its bleak brick exterior. It's now a parking lot.
Across the street, the modest Eaton Square underwent a $175-million expansion -- which its owners promised would mark the salvation of core-area retail -- to become Galleria.
Anchor stores fled; its fortunes sagged. However, it has been reborn as a services hub, home to a library, specialty education and call centres.
If a lesson was learned, it's that it won't work to throw money at an idea or a building and call it downtown revitalization, says Doug Ferguson, who was head of the market board when it was rebuilt.
"The (consumer) market has to drive it. You have to set out the conditions" for growth, he says.
"When we built the (new) market, we felt that buying into it wouldn't turn downtown around, but it would be a catalyst for further development," says Ferguson.
That seems to have started:
- Between 1998 (when city politicians set aside differences long enough to launch a comprehensive Millennium Plan) and 2006, more than $183 million in construction took place downtown.
- City figures show the private sector invested $2.59 for every $1 in public money spent since 1998.
- Much of the new money has been residential. Developments by Drewlo, Tricar, Prespa, Old Oak and Auburn have added or will add more than 1,700 apartment units to downtown.
"Residential is key to all this," says Janette MacDonald, general manager of MainStreet London. People who live downtown shop, dine and entertain themselves there.
But the core has significant holes, still.
Office vacancies hover around 18 per cent. Retail holes range from 10 per cent along King Street to 18 per cent along Dundas Street.
MacDonald says the holes will be filled. "We know that they're decreasing all the time," she says. "Now we're looking for better quality, not (just) occupants."
For historian Mike Baker, formerly of Museum London and now curator of the Elgin County Museum, downtown is less interesting than it once was.
No more Simpson's storefront displays at Christmas, no more street-level movie theatres, no more bustling pedestrians crossing diagonally at Clarence and King.
Endless potential was squandered by razing the Talbot Streetscape, despite its potential to house "some quirky and unique enterprises," Baker says.
He says downtown is too often a place people have to be, rather than a place that entertains and intrigues them.
However, it's better than in the recent past. "I think it is on the upswing," he says.
He loves the people traffic drawn by the market and the Wolf Performance Hall in the library -- although he wonders sometimes whether the thousands of visitors to the JLC "come and go by helicopter" instead of staying downtown to eat or shop.
Ferguson says the core is important to Londoners because, "Downtown is the only area of the city that belongs to all of us."
He says downtown needs creative architecture, lots of windows, fewer walls, a small grocery store, more destination spots for culture, recreation and entertainment.
"That's what makes cities memorable, not shopping centres."
And for Schubert, with the heart of an entrepreneur and the eye of the photographer: "It's been really interesting just watching things develop."
THEN AND NOW
What downtown no longer has:
- An on-street movie theatre
-
A grocery store 
- A selection of department stores
- The heritage Talbot streetscape
Downtown does have now:
- Renovated store facades and a fund to renovate more
- A new library with the Wolf Performance Hall.
- A new Covent Garden Market with parking and an outdoor ice rink.
- John Labatt Centre, for elite hockey and large entertainment events
- About 5,000 residents, with several highrise apartment buildings built or in progress.
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