[St. John's] The Official Project Thread

[SignalHillHiker]

Can you just imagine how nice it will look with that empty parking lot developed?

I think that's been the only unintended and one of the very few negative consequences of heritage preservation. We've gradually accumulated too many empty lots that developers simply can't do much with, for profit, if all they're allowed to build are Victorian-era homes.

And my main concern with that is that these open spaces, these surface parking lots, greatly detract from the overall old town feeling of St. John's. They make certain parts of the city feel like a wide-open, frontier town out west.

Part of the charm of St. John's is the density, everything build on top of everything else. Projects like this Marriott expansion help to recreate that.

That said, we can never lose sight of the fact that what makes downtown St. John's special is the quantity of our heritage buildings, not the quality. There's nothing especially grand or impressive about what we have - it's just that we've keep so much of it, it creates a continuous whole. Our heritage buildings, NOT our modern ones, set the tone of the downtown. We feel like an old city peppered with modern buildings - not like a modern city peppered with old ones, which is the best many of our Canadian neighbours have managed to do.

We cannot lose that. It would be a crime against our city's past, present and future.