Quote:
Originally Posted by realcity
you talk like you're the expert of downtown bc you have an office selling condos.
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He has some good points - and I DO speak as someone who is an expert of downtown because I have lived in hamilton all my life and done my research on its history. Yes jackson has those things but the core is severely lacking in anything that it had in its heyday. And those stores will never return due to a lack of demand and because those amenitie sare offered now in malls and not in buildings that once operated as businesses. The biggest deterrent is:
a) parking in front of businesses - before they widened king st in the gore park area cars used to park diagonally all down that stretch in front of businesses.
b) The gore actually had REAL businesses - it had robinsons, it had the right house, it had kresgys, it had woolworths - it had big businesses to draw people to the core - it has none of that stuff anymore -the only draw to downtown is jackson - and half of jackson since the eatons center still sits pretty much vacant and would have probably been demolished by now if the city of hamilton hadn't set up shop upstairs.
It is starting to get james st and king william as restaurants bloom all down those streets, as well as some beer places - but any of the other businesses slowly get pushed out - art studios are flash in the pan - we still have a severe lack of actual BUSINESSES moving into that area aside from some architectural firms and some coffee stores. And granted there are the banks.
hamiltons biggest detriment in the core is, aside from festivals there is no central entertainment complex to motivate people to go downtown. Sure there is a bowling alley but there are bowling alleys other places - same with the theatre - it has nothing unique to the core itself.
Anything past the banks and you get into a concrete jungle that is both bewildering and disorienting. The top of jackson, for all its potential is utterly deserted at almost all times, and mcmasters presence I might add was originally from toronto - they moved to this city back in the day, so we can't really even lay claim to that.
I don't know about you, but there is only so much eating I can do in the downtown core. If I am going to stay in a boutique hotel downtown, I want things to do in the gore that are local, exactly like hamilton23 said. I want entertainment, like the playhouse theatre, or maybe even an opera theatre (and yes I know, theatre aquarius, but I still want a legit one) - almost everything to do is outside of the core area - like a giant sprawl with a void in the center.
Everything in this city is scattered all over the place - we need to centralize and provide everything in a close easy to access area. So we're building a new park on king william - whoop de do. People generally still don't have much to do along this stretch at night. Sure there is absynthe and the restaurants - but what else?
I know back in the day the downtown used to have a lot of parades, maybe we need to bring parades back to the gore. Or non-big box shopping, although I am pretty sure those days are numbered.
So other than businesses, banks, hotels and restaurants, what else can we fill the gore with?
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