Quote:
Originally Posted by Dmajackson
Gottingen isn't sketchy anymore. I walked it in the late-hours a lot this summer and I found it safer than the Commons and the Bell-South Park stretch. The high number of people make it very safe especially in the commercial section.
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I have to disagree. I would feel safer walking down Gottingen at night than across the middle of the Commons, but there is definitely still a lot of (violent) crime and open hard-drug use in the area. Maybe it's not as bad as it was in the 80s and 90s (this was before I really paid much attention to areas outside my own immediate neighbourhood) - I've heard it was referred to as "crack alley" and was essentially our very own version of Vancouver's DTES. It may not be the DTES now, but it's arguably still "like" that area in many ways. To put things in perspective, last fall my apartment on Brunswick Street (2 blocks from the old Marquee) was broken into by armed robbers,
sometime in the early evening, and this was one of many similar incidents that happened within a ~5 block radius that month. Also, at any given time I could hear/see at least 2 people smoking crack from my apartment, and I lived on the
nice part of Brunswick. I've had strangers approach me on the street to ask if I had any cocaine. There have been times that I have gone as far as dialling "9-1-" on my phone, because people (adults) were screaming at/chasing each other in the streets and it was impossible to know when or how things were going to end. Gottingen might be picking up commercially, and thus has more people around at any given time, but since in practice it has become a haven for the marginalized, it can be a bit of a powder keg whenever something goes wrong. I would say that the combination of services/establishments along Gottingen between Cogswell and Uniacke was one contributing factor in the death of Raymond Taavel, for example.