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Originally Posted by someone123
On top of that there aren't many large, modern storefronts to attract anything other than small-scale boutique retailers. In a couple of years this will change. It's just too bad that rebuilding the street took 5 or 10 years instead of 2 or 3 years.
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Gauging the size of succesful urban storefronts is tough. Small storefronts, I'd say, are better suited to the street than large ones. They create a more fine-grained scale and allow for a greater diversity of small retailers. Really successful and popular retail areas (Toronto's Queen West, or Ottawa's Byward Market) are full of narrow, old-style storefronts, and restaurants, bars, and shops just squeeze into the narrow spaces.
It seems that when developments in urban areas involve big, broad storefronts, they're less successful, or are filled with big chain pharmacies and banks (most condo podiums are ample evidence of that). There's a five-block long stretch of Toronto's Beaches neighbourhood that was built all-new a few years ago, and it's persistently vacant because the storefronts are too big and costly for most retailers. It's killed an entire portion of that neighbourhood. Halifax has actually been good at building smaller-scale storefronts on new developments, maybe because the buildings themselves tend to be smaller than in larger cities.
I think you're on to something though, in that there are a lot of big stretches of the street that are out of commission (Roy and Espace) which really kills the buzz on the street. And of course there are the buildings that haven't yet seen good restoration work (Green Lantern, especially). Once some of the planned residential projects are built and a couple thousand more people are living around here, it'll be a whole different story. Hopefully that'll spur the owners of the still-rundown properties to spiff them up, a la the Brander-Morris Building and the Freemason's Hall.