Downtown West End just now. These are the older areas still filling in the spaces between the huge areas cleared for our modern buildings.
Same view (but from farther up) before huge blocks to the left and right were removed. If you look closely, you'll recognize the same corner (literally) store, although it's slightly more obscured below because the original streets were still intact.
Breaks my heart. The entire Downtown West End was basically ruined. There are pockets left, but almost none of it feels urban. Even the portion of Water Street that survives... it's only on one side, the other side was bulldozed for a parking lot and to widen the street to four lanes. And they put an arterial highway through it.
Basically, what's in the blue is nice, old downtown - with, of course, some sections now ruined, especially on the edges.
What's in the red used to be just as good, and now it's car-dependent. The main downtown streetcar loop used to end where the red ends, which is where the residential part began. The buildings that far out were even stone, but they're gone. We have, in my estimation, a nice downtown but a small one for a city of our size (at least, by the European standards of our city's age). But we could've had a normal-sized one if we hadn't destroyed half of it.
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