Quote:
Originally Posted by Yroc
It my opinion Sparks fails because it became a buisness district (does well during lunch Mon-Fri). The market flourishes because there are many condos and other housing nearby.
It's like NCC tried to build the Market on Sparks St, but it did not happen as it was already happening naturally in the ByWard Market area. Housing developers had to compete against huge businesses on Sparks for property but did not have to do that in the Market.
|
I think this is basically true. Sparks used to be in the core of a mixed-use district. You can see what the population pattern looked like in the Greber plan diagram.
http://qshare.queensu.ca/Users01/gordond/planningcanadascapital/greber1950/plates_doc/300/plate_4.jpg
Downtown would have been full of middle and upper class residents going to and from work, to the train station, to shop on Rideau Street... Sparks was a channel for people moving around the city. (And of course it was a streetcar street.)
Turn the clock forward, stick all the civil servants out in the suburbs, and you've got Sparks stuck in the middle of the CBD / Financial District. It's like having a pedestrian shopping street across the middle of downtown (business district near the NYSE) New York - after 5 PM, it's dead (in Ottawa and even in New York). Sparks goes from nowhere to pretty much nowhere - there's no major destination points close to the ends of the street, and even if there were, there's no pedestrian traffic to be moving between those destinations anyway.
IF you had Lebreton as a source/destination with good pedestrian connections (neither of which is true now) and IF you had something on the other end of Sparks rather than the tangle of traffic around the War Memorial, and IF you had more people living along that Sparks/Queen east-west corridor, then Sparks
might work.
As it stands, it's way more likely that with Mondrian, Central I and II and hopefully a few more developments near or on Bank Street, it's Bank that will start to become a good walking street (albeit not pedestrianized, although if I were in charge they would be running trams up and down Bank like the streetcars used to).