Edmonton Construction 9 (2008-08)

[Airboy]

With the AHW and Ray Gibbons Dr extention it should be easier to get there.

There are a few smart firms already there. Some, I'm sure use CCA as well.

[Coldrsx]

Originally Posted by Kevin_foster

Parking lot on RHW has got to go, otherwise it will always look crappy. That building is the berlin wall of berlin walls

Some ideas of mine including wrecking ball to the parking building, creating a mirror of it's commerce to the north west with 4 or 5 patios facing west, 2 or 3 facing north and possibly widen the sidewalks and close off traffic to RHW from 8am to 6pm

i would love it to go but at least it has commerical on the main... IMO it is not the problem... the problem is filling the office in the kelsey/ramsey block and putting some solid places beneath it.

have cosmos get the hell out and put a moxies with a real patio

[240glt]

Eww. Moxies ? The Montanas/Moxies/Earls/J.T.'s rubber stamp restos are okay I guess, but they're so generic. I mean really, take away the 'trendy' atmosphere and the 🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵, what have you got left ?

[Kevin_foster]

^ a menu that is primarily made up of cheese?

[Coldrsx]

Originally Posted by 240glt

Eww. Moxies ? The Montanas/Moxies/Earls/J.T.'s rubber stamp restos are okay I guess, but they're so generic. I mean really, take away the 'trendy' atmosphere and the 🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵, what have you got left ?

cactus club then.... but we (love it or hate it) need a NAME on that street along with some great indies.

[tony0911]

Job No 87617482-001: To change the use from general warehouse to residential sales centre and to demolish (320 m2) of the building.
9160 - JASPER AVENUE NW
Plan RN37A Blk 2 Lots 1-3
REDLEAF ENTERPRISES INC.


And what would this be for?

[Coldrsx]

red leaf = new condo developer.... so i am guessing one of those projects down thataway

[240glt]

Wasn't there a red leaf condo rumour a long time back ? Chinatown condo maybe ?

[Coldrsx]

Originally Posted by 240glt

Wasn't there a red leaf condo rumour a long time back ? Chinatown condo maybe ?

99 and bellamy

[Coldrsx]

Edmonton’s Muttart Conservatory reopens after $6.3M facelift


BY HANNEKE BROOYMANS, EDMONTONJOURNAL.COMJUNE 25, 2009 2:01 PMCOMMENTS (6)


STORYPHOTOS ( 1 )



Seven-year-old Sean Kreutz, right, points out to his twin sister, Jessica, left, some of the finer points of a sculpture at the entrance of the newly renovated Muttart Conservatory in Edmonton on June 25.
Photograph by: Chris Schwarz, Edmonton Journal
EDMONTON - After 15 months and $6.3-million worth of renovations, the Muttart Conservatory will open its doors to the public again on Saturday.

The project was originally slated to cost $3.2 million, but the renovations had the misfortune to begin during the boom time.

Tenders came back far above the original estimate, said David Saunders, co-ordinator of capital projects for the city. The project was able to move forward because of a $3-million municipal sustainability initiative grant from the province, he said. That pushed the province’s total contribution up to $3.8 million.

Another reason for the higher cost was because additional bits of work were tacked on to the project to take advantage of the first total conservatory shutdown, he added. Increasing wheelchair accessibility in the tropical pyramid was the biggest addition, costing $500,000, he said. That pyramid also has a new waterfall, stone work and plants.

The renovations also include a mini-engraved pyramid at the entryway that sits in front of an elegant new courtyard featuring cascading wall-mounted waterfalls and planters full of red, pink and purple flowers.

The gift shop, courtyard and cafe can now be accessed by people who are just passing through the river valley, without requiring them to pay entry to the rest of the conservatory, said Judith Rohovie, director of the facility.

There are also three new classrooms — one is a “wet” classroom that allows children to plant and explore botany in more detail.

Luke Bristow, 8, returned to the wet classroom to fetch the small tropical plant he’d transferred to a pot earlier. Overall, Luke was impressed with the renovations.

“I’ve been here before and there’s been a lot of cool changes,” he said. The digital camera he carried was full of plant snapshots, his favourite a vase plant featuring a vivid pink flower.

Ed Muttart, 79, leaned down from his six-foot-six inch height to chat with some of the children.

“I’m really impressed with the classrooms that they’ve added,” said Muttart, a member of the Muttart family for which the facility was named. “This was the original intention when we first built it, that there would be classrooms for children to come to. Unfortunately they seemed to have disappeared in the process. Now there are three beautiful classrooms. And in the one that they call the wet classroom they’ve got tables that you can crank lower for small children and higher for people like me.”

Muttart, who projects a gentle demeanour despite his height, reflects on what he hopes the conservatory will provide to the people who enter.

“I guess overall I hope it gives people who come here a spiritual connection with creation. That they can come here and feel peaceful, if they’re under stress, if they’re unhappy, if their hearts are broken, they can come here and get healed.”

[email protected]

© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/Technology/Muttart+reopens+after+facelift/1732346/story.html

[Kevin_foster]

IIRC the redleaf condo was fug ugly.. but perhaps I'm mistaken

[kcantor]

Originally Posted by onishenko

/\ No, please share. I did see him in the council room picture that was in the Journal this morning though. haha

all you had to do was ask...

"Mayor Mandel and Councilors,

Thank you for the opportunity of speaking to you once again – and once again on the Edmonton City Centre Airport.

The last time I was here, I prepared and spoke to a Power Point presentation entitled “City Centre Airport, the price at the top and the price at the street”. In it I presented some of the images of the price that is extracted by the City Centre Airport every day from the lack of architecture at the top of too many of our buildings, the lack of grand spaces at the urban edges of too many of our buildings and the myriad of strange spaces in too many of our buildings as a direct result of paying that price.

You will hear people trot out the latest billboard slogan that says “airport not for sale”. Based on those all too real costs alone, you don’t even have to sell it to be further ahead. Just make sure general aviation is adequately relocated – and there are options – and turn it into the continent’s largest off-leash dog park and the city would be further ahead. So while I would be happy to answer questions in these areas, I would like to venture a bit further afield this time.

One of the other things that will be trotted out will be the impact on medevac operations. You will be told how awful it would be if the City Centre Airport was closed and shortly thereafter the city was sued for millions of dollars for additional pain and suffering or even death because transfer times may have been nominally impacted as a result and the city was blamed.

Well how awful would it be if the City Centre Airport was kept open and shortly thereafter the city was sued for millions of dollars for additional pain and suffering or even death because a transplant heart got stuck in an ambulance trying to get across the high level bridge while the patient was on the operating table. After all, why not blame the city when the city should have anticipated that to be a logical consequence of increased growth and densification and traffic…

There will be many good questions surrounding the City Centre Airport issues but, like this one, there will never be 100% certainty. The right answer to some of them won’t be the same depending on changing circumstances and some of them won’t be the same a decade from now. That’s life – no matter what choice we make, someone else will be able to make it out as being callous. All we can do is make the best choice we can with the information we have and know we won’t always be 100% right but we’ll be right much more often than we’ll be wrong.

You will hear about the 20,000 passengers that use City Centre Airport every year as if that is significant when compared to the 6 million that use Edmonton International. Except that it’s not 20,000 discrete passengers. 128 people using the City Centre Airport 3 times a week 52 weeks a year is all it takes to record 20,000 passengers. Maybe it’s not 128 but it’s certainly not 20,000 either. How do you compare that with NAIT’s 84,000 students who either stay and contribute to our economy or become some of our best ambassadors all over the world?

You will hear about an employment base of skilled technical workers which is true. You probably won’t hear how many of them are employed at SPAR which is shutting down their operations here or at Shell who are moving their operations to Josephsburg regardless of whether this field stays open or not.
You will hear that development may take 20 or 30 or 50 years to complete and that’s probably true. But it’s equally true that it will take 20 or 30 or 50 years to complete regardless of when you start and that if you had started 20 or 30 or 50 years ago you would have been done by now.

You will hear that the City Centre Airport is a gem and a jewel and an asset to the City of Edmonton to be lusted after by other cities across the continent and across the world. It will be held out as a key business development driver for the region. You will be provided with copies of letters that say so. Except none of them will be from businesses that came here because of this gem and many of them will be from businesses whose leaving was expedited by this jewel - a legacy that goes back to Shaw and Safeway and Petro-Canada and the businesses that supported them from accounting firms to restaurants and it continues to this day with North American Energy Partners turning its back on what they previously called “our last great advantage of efficient and cost effective access”. This jewel didn’t attract AirSprint’s head office or maintenance facility to Edmonton. AirSprint operates here but those facilities are at Calgary International.

None of the firms that left or located elsewhere moved to Fort Myers to take advantage of a City Centre Airport. They all moved to cities without a City Centre Airport but with better national, continental and intercontinental air connections to the world’s financial and trading centres. Edmonton is indeed the Gateway to the North but Edmonton is also the North’s gateway to the world and that happens at Edmonton International, not at City Centre.
As long as Edmonton doesn’t get this – and rest assured that Calgary gets it – then the connections that really matter to business won’t get built here. For anyone thinking I’m only talking about oil companies from decades past, ask yourself how we will keep our software firms from being moved to Seattle or Silicon Valley or our pharmaceuticals from being moved to Pennsylvania? How are we going to continue to keep our contractors and our engineering head offices from fleeing as well because they can’t do the things they need to do and their clients and brokers can’t do the things they need to do here either?

Decades of “cheap rent” didn’t create a world class business environment in Edmonton and neither did City Centre Airport. This debate is about much more than “taller buildings”. It’s about carving out our place in the world, not just carving out our skyline.

Those firms that retain a business presence here do so because it makes good business sense for those business units to be here and if it weren’t for the City Centre airport perhaps some of their head offices would be here as well as some of their business units.

Perhaps it’s time to put an end to something that makes it less expensive to park a Cessna 172 or a Beechcraft at a downtown airport than it is to park a Honda Civic downtown."

you're welcome...

[noodlenoodle]

Fantastic as always Ken, fantastic.

[rapid_business]

Thanks Ken, and thanks for speaking some sense at a chaotic mess of a hearing.

[IKAN104]

Originally Posted by Kevin_foster

Parking lot on RHW has got to go, otherwise it will always look crappy. That building is the berlin wall of berlin walls

Unfortunately, parking lots never burn down.

[IKAN104]

Originally Posted by 240glt

Eww. Moxies ? The Montanas/Moxies/Earls/J.T.'s rubber stamp restos are okay I guess, but they're so generic. I mean really, take away the 'trendy' atmosphere and the 🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵, what have you got left ?

Trendy atmosphere and 🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵 is what brings people in. Nothing wrong with that. I bet if it wasn't a chain you wouldn't be opposed.

[IKAN104]

That was an awesome speech Ken. Thanks for saying the things that we've all been thinking but couldn't or wouldn't say quite so eloquently.

I hope the councillors all got hard copies of that too so they can read it over and over again.

[tony0911]

Excellent work Ken, thanks for bringing a logical viewpoint to the argument.

[Coldrsx]

Originally Posted by IKAN104

Trendy atmosphere and 🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵 is what brings people in. Nothing wrong with that. I bet if it wasn't a chain you wouldn't be opposed.

and that's the thing... one big "problem" with downtown is that we don't have enough chains (retail and rest) to bring in the crowds... and while i will be the first to say that is a blessing and a curse, it is needed and our downtown will eventually be better off for it.

[tony0911]

^ You need the chains to draw people and get traffic flow, people will then rotate between indies and chains.....but the indies do not draw enough traffic on their own.