Fool on a Hill
If you ever need a place to go and sit to contemplate the absurdities of sprawl, may I suggest the top of the old landfill near the Windsor/Tecumseh border - three hundred and sixty degrees of “what were we thinking?”
No kidding, first of all you’re sitting on top of a couple of decades worth of garbage and then all around the bottom of the hill vinyl and plywood junk. My favorites are on the west side of the hill; semi-detached units with garages soooo big out front that the front entry door is around the side of the house. Fantastic!
On the east side there are a variety of flavours to choose from. There are long, four-unit, single storey condos. There are a couple of streets on which the builder tried to recreate some Victorian style homes (with garages in back) and my choice for an irony award is a street called “Cobblestone Crescent”. The street is less than ten years old, paved with asphalt, is lined with condos and there probably isn’t a real cobble stone for miles.
From the top of that hill you can see the gated community built on the site of the Rendezvous Tavern and you can see the shiny new St. Joseph’s High School surrounded by more crap houses.
There are few sidewalks but lots of bike/walking paths all around this area. Apparently walking/cycling is now only a leisure activity because the paths lead to the storm retention lagoon (the developer called it Blue Heron Lake) so that you may enjoy the majesty of the natural vista that was built to satisfy building regulations.
Tags: Architecture, Urban Design, urban sprawl, walkable
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so sad
I grew up about a mile East of there. There were actually fields to play in. If this is progress, it makes me sick. When will people wake up. People living in their cardboard boxes while perfectly good homes and buildings sit vacant and rotting.
Until Windsor recognizes that older homes have a purpose and a place in Windsor this kind of stuff will continue unabated. Until incentives are introduced to help with refurbishing or restoring older homes (not necessarily being “historic” in nature) these type of developments will continue.
I wish i could find the links again but, apparently the whole blue heron and lands west and north and south were part of a new urbanism plan with design charettes and planners calling for mixed use, walkable, etc…. It was a nice looking plan, but, as expected, the developers did not want any part of it as they thought it would be a tough sell to windsorites and the city just layed down. The result is what we see today. I think its the U of D planning school that uses this failed project as a case study on how you can’t sell good design to the lunch bucket set.
The original plan exist somewhere…
It didn’t help that Council approved commercial rezoning at the northeast corner of Banwell and Tecumseh and the west side of Banwell between Tecumseh and EC Row.
Those rezonings combined with lower than planned density and the relocation of St. Joseph’s to Clover/McHugh from McNorton/Tecumseh/Windsor border killed any demand for commercial in the ‘Banwell Core Area’.
It also didn’t help that the east-west roads were connected to their Tecumseh counterparts before they were connected to Walker Road. It was easier to go shopping in Tecumseh than Windsor if you lived in East Riverside. Even today, Wyandotte Street East does not connect with any roads in East Riverside.
Sporto, I dion’t think it has anythig to do with Windsorites. Who wouldn’t want sidewalks and walkability in their neighbourhoods?
This has more to do with the local developers here who want to make the biggest buck in the shortest amount of time without any regards to the city that feeds them.
Has anyone noticed how some suburban developments (houses priced over $300,000) have sidewalks, really nice pedestrian lights…? Yet neighbourhoods with great potential have nothing such? Why can’t the city help to build up these neighbourhoods with small details that make all of the difference? If we have millions of dollars for the mayor and council to play with I would have suspected that it would go to neighbourhood initiatives.
We battled the residents of the Blue Heron area (the section where they built those neo-victorian McMansions) over sidewalks. Apparently, the developer left the construction of the sidewalks to the very end and most of the residents had already done extensive landscaping/planting and didn’t want it all dug up to lay the sidewalks. Sidewalks, like sewers and roads, are infrastructure that must be put in place before the land is developed and we can’t let the developers off the hook like we did there.
Still, listening to the residents complaints at city hall was pretty ridiculous. They would lose a parking spot in their driveway and they argued that the sidewalks would be unsafe. It was pretty horrible.
Chris,
Don’t blame the developer, blame the City. It was the City that let the developer not put in sidewalks at the beginning on the argument that construction equipment would damage the sidewalk - and there is some merit to that argument.
I’ve seen developments in other municipalities where the sidewalk is put in save and except where the driveway will be. Construction equipment would use the driveway to access the lot. Once the house was completed, the remaining portion of sidewalk would be filled in.