Category Archives: somerset street

Chinatown shown the door

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Or maybe, Chinatown shows the door. Because the Chinatown BIA has embarked on an ambitious scheme to improve the physical look of the properties along the street by painting the doors and façades of various buildings. Not the whole buildings, but the parts closest up to pedestrians on the walkways.

They have commissioned the concepts from the Ottawa School of Art. These were on display to the public and merchants last week. Now the schemes will be revised to reflect the comments of viewers, and painting the doors and some windows will commence later this month.

The CBIA focussed on some of the more dilapidated doorways, those that enter non-public spaces (ie, service doors), and windows of active businesses as well as some of the storefronts used primarily for storage or wholesale purposes.

Here are some of the works:

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Above: painting an unloved doorway with flowers.

 

 

 

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Above: Painting the door AND the side panels and roof

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Above: painting the panels under an active shop window.

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above: painting some “filler panels” where previous doorways and windows have been blocked up

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above: painting on boarded up windows

My pic of one one concept did not come out. You will have to look for it on the street. The concept was to take a recessed doorway and the side windows leading into it, and painting a trompe d’oeil so that it looks like a curtain now hangs over the recess.

Yet another thing to liven up the neighbourhood and another reason to get out and walk.

The joys of winter

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The front of these stores on Somerset is much the worse for wear. The cause: walk  plowing.

I have every sympathy for the walkway plow drivers. The pavements are uneven. Obstacles abound. Throw in hidden objects and frozen masses of snow, and its a recipe for difficulty.

In this case, the plows seem to be crashing into the buildings to avoid the parking meter kiosks:

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I have no doubt that the minimum 5′ gap was allowed for when positioning the parking meter kiosk. I did the walkabout with the meter installers with both the Preston and Somerset BIA’s, when locations were being selected. The biggest problem is the clutter of other objects located on the walk space, and the ole bureaucratic maxim that the minimum spacing shall be the maximum allowed. And keep in mind that the area shown is already on a widened walk from a previous generation of streetscaping.

Maybe the temporary on Bronson should be permanent

The noisy work crews on Bronson have taken a winter break. They need one. It must be dispiriting for them to be reconstructing Bronson in the same dysfunctional 1950′s pattern of urban abuse. Our city is sometimes like a dysfunctional family, where the mistakes of the prior-generation parents are doomed to be repeated by the so-called adults of the present.

Here’s a view of the Bronson-Somerset intersection prior to the construction. Note the big yellow signal lights we so love to festoon above the traffic lanes, suspended on long metal arms in turn supported by freestanding metal posts, sometimes known as “street furniture”.

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For the winter, crews have put up temporary signals strung on parallel wires.

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Many other cities use this wire method of mounting all their signals at intersections. It requires only four poles, and the signals appear in the same location on all four sides of the intersection. I know wires running all over the place shouldn’t be attractive. But somehow, the wire suspension system — even in the temporary application on Bronson where the posts aren’t straight and minimal care was taken — looks somewhat neater than the collection of metal posts and arms, all of different lengths and angles, that Ottawa normally deploys at intersections.

It makes me wonder if the signals were put up permanently on wires rather than arms, would the intersection be neater than today? And maybe even more economical?

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(note that Somerset east of Bronson is mostly free of overhead wiring, the result of being a shovel-ready project at a time of prior Federal stimulus spending. Thank you Mac Harb. Unfortunately the freed-up overhead space was not put to good use, for example trees with large canopies).

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One small victory

Dealing with the City, or property owners, can be tiresome. Sometimes there seems to be so little progress. Or progress gets undone by strange decisions, like the City’s push to rezone most of the low rise residential areas south of the Queensway on both sides of Preston, to high rise, now that the neighborhood has been stabilized…

But there are victories. Little bits of progress that make one come back and try again.

Do you recognize this?

Its on Somerset Street, opposite the Plant Rec Centre. It’s the back wall of Luciano’s and May’s Chinese Garden restaurant, beside their parking lot.

Prior to street reconstruction, it was just another bit of forlorn asphalt. Tucked behind and under a large billboard (note the rusty-red steel legs on the top left) it couldn’t be used for parking right up to the wall. Gas meters, a fire escape, and litter contributed to the bleakness.

Since no one could park there, and the fire stairs are (hopefully !) seldom used, and only a limited amount of snow can be pushed in there, and never scooped out and trucked away … the Somerset Public Advisory Committee (PAC) lobbied to have the area landscaped as part of the Somerset reconstruction project. It wasn’t on public right of way, but Luciano  agreed to the landscaping. A curb, some topsoil, and a bunch of hostas later, there is an attractive, hardy-as-iron garden space that greens an otherwise lost corner. It won’t require maintenance.

And that is why community volunteers come back time and time again to PACs for various road, transit, and reconstruction projects, or for new projects like the OTrain MUP or the LRT. For every idea that gets implemented, several others get discovered, examined, lobbied for, and discarded.

before streetscaping…

after streetscaping

Please take a moment to compare the before and after pictures above. What a difference a better pedestrian environment makes ! The planter behind the billboard is such a small part of the total streetscaping experience, but the victories, no matter how small, are so sweet.

 

 

A little rain for the Urban Food desert

Much of the west side of downtown Ottawa is a food desert. Consolidation has been happening in the grocery business for a long time. Individual vegetable mongers and butchers gave way to the one-stop shopping convenience of the groceteria, then the larger grocery store, and most recently the Superstore, whether in big-box malls or spread across the urban fabric.

The resulting decline and disappearance of the smaller stores inevitably leaves some greater distance between the remaining or new grocery outlets. This space is sometimes called a food desert. Like any ecosystem, it also offers a niche for the nimble and specialized.

Walking along Somerset just a few doors west of Rochester I found a small raincloud of hope. Urban Grocery and Fine Foods has just opened. I talked to Jeanette about her hopes for the store.

As befitting the first day open status, there were more package goods than fresh. But there was fresh bread, dairy, and fruit. She plans to expand these departments as sales increase and turnover justifies bringing in more perishables. It’s the old chicken and egg situation. Speaking of which, eggs were reasonably priced. The supplying dairy is Cochrane’s which is apparently reputed to be more creamy than the mass-market dairies.

The store decor had a variety of “retro” fixtures:

The store stocks are variety of goods with an emphasis on local suppliers, fair trade, gluten-free, organics, etc. Obviously, she cannot compete with the giants on price, but the store is big enough to have a good selection of stuffs for the speciality market and the in-between grocery runs.

Her main outside sign isn’t yet up, but the store is easy to spot by the colourful window paintings.

Outside on the sidewalk I spotted a Zodiac Mouse twitching his nose in anticipation of a morsel of cheese. For Mr Mouse and the residents in the area, the drought may be ending.

The shadow knows …

 

The city can talk all it wants about how walking, cycling and transit are high on its list of priorities, but the real test is where the feet hit the ground, the wheel hits the pavement, etc.

An attractive, safe-feeling pedestrian environment welcomes walking, so that it becomes a desirable thing to do, rather than a “have to” or “should do”. Goodness knows, we have been very successful in making motor car travel the default choice. This bias in the public realm won’t be undone overnight.

But sometimes there are very little measures that really help. The benches along our newly rebuilt traditional mainstreets in Chinatown, Little Italy, West Wellington, Westboro, Bank Street … all help make the walk more attractive for a larger segment of the population.

New technology opens up new possibilities. The Chinatown benches, for example, have laser cut steel backs. The Asian motif helps reinforce the character of the street and ‘brands’ the experience. And there are very subtle, unexpected benefits too. Consider the interesting shadow cast by this bench:

 

 

The shadow alone will never make you walk the street. Nor will the inset zodiac features. Or the ped lighting. Or the decorative garbage cans. Red bricks do not compel me to walk. But together, the synergy builds to an invitation to walk.

Main street’s modal split

Annie Hillis of the West Wellington BIA (WWBIA) sent me the following data. They conducted a four-day survey in June, asking 830 people found along their typical older-city main street how they came to the street, their post code, and their shopping habits. The WWBIA main street runs roughly from Bayswater westwards along Somerset & West Wellington to Island Park.

The modal split numbers surprised me. 

Forty six percent of those found along the street got there by walking; 26% by car; 13% by bike; twelve percent by bus (numbers throughout this story are rounded off).

Only 26% by car? That’s pretty low. And it seems it’s always traffic and car parking issues that people focus on whenever there is a city study, infill project, proposed high rise condo, or cycling or sidewalk improvement.

Granted, West Wellie has an extensive hinterland of houses and some major apartment buildings on both sides of it, so it is in the centre of its market zone.

In contrast, the Preston BIA (“Little Italy”) lacks a hinterland on its west (cut off by the OTrain cut). There is lots of vacant land to the north, and south, due to our civic fathers’ foresight in “slum clearance” without the “urban renewal” that was supposed to follow along.

Many of the merchants along Preston have a regional and ethnic focus, drawing all over the central urban area for clientelle. I don’t know of any merchants who actually live in the neighborhood anymore, so they end up with a “windshield mentality” whereby they judge things by the way they live and move, which is behind the wheel of a car.

Chinatown actually has a hinterland to the south; and a truncated one to the north (the LeBreton Flats area was cleared in the early 60′s; 600 homes were built in the early 80′s; and now some apartments are being built albeit not yet contiguous with the existing neighborhood. But its merchants by and large are also focussed on a narrow market segment. They also cling to the notion they are a regional draw, which is less true every year; they haven’t yet switched gears to serving the local market (yes, there are some dependent on a very local area draw, but they tend to be newer businesses, smaller ones, not yet calling the shots the way the established Asian businesspeople do). The lesson from West Wellie might be that more goods and services aimed at the adjacent neighborhood would be viable. And that infill projects and intensification would be good for business.

So, back to the 46% who walked to West Wellie. About 78% of them lived close to the street, in the same post code. Not surprising, as distance grew between the shopping street and residence they were more likely to use bike and bus. A surprising  6% of the walkers lived quite far away from the street, many in Gatineau. I suspect they didn’t walk from home, more likely they walked from work at Tunney’s Pasture or other employers in the area.

Fifty three percent of the cyclists (who, recall, comprise 13% of the people surveyed) also lived within the KIY post code, showing once again how bikes are convenient for quick shopping and main street business. West Wellie makes a big deal of how it welcomes cyclists; I don’t sense the same welcome in some other neighborhoods.

Motorists made up 26% of the found ins along the street. Of them, 16% resided in the K1Y post code zone; 25% resided in nearby zones; 32% in other Ottawa zones; and almost 7% from Gatineau.

In general, those who walked and biked came more frequently to the area; 70% of walkers spent money weekly; 62% of bikers spent money weekly. This is in contrast to motorists, only 36% of whom visited and spent money regularly.  In fact, 38% of motorists were infrequent shoppers in the area (less than once a week), whereas only 10% of walkers and 11% of cyclists were infrequent shoppers.

Who shops, what they spend, how often they spend, and what mode of transport they use, makes for a fun data set. But the data is also dependent on the current make up of the surrounding neighborhood. There is still an abundance of low-income households in the area, who maybe don’t have a car. So it would be risky to extrapolate the current modal breakout to newcomers in the area, who may be of a more affluent character. Are people walking by choice, or by necessity?

It would be of interest to canvas residents of some of the new, upscale infill developments (eg St George’s Court) or condos to see if their behaviour is ”normalized” after they have been in the ‘hood for a year or two. Just how important is walkability to their decision to live where they do; and do they exercise that desire or not?

I’d love to see similar survey data collected on a regular basis for all the traditional main streets, perhaps every second or third year. I’m sure shopping centres collect that sort of data even more often to ‘prove’ their value to tenants. It’s time for the City and BIA’s to document and track changes to their market area on a regular cycle. Only with facts can we manage growth and change.