jozl
Active Member
Downtown Queen Street East, between Church and Parliament Streets, has long been a decaying dead zone. There is no development taking place there now and nothing new planned. It's always seemed odd to me that this huge parcel of land, right downtown, sits idle while the rest of the city is bursting with activity. The north side of the street is deadened by a huge ugly parking lot at Queen E and Mutual Street. Queen E and Jarvis are swallowed up by the armoury and adjacent desolate park (used as a staging area for the military). Empty space occupies the area south of the John Innes Rec Centre and the huge Maxwell Meighen men's shelter occupies the east side of that intersection. Continuing east along Queen Street on the north side there are a handful of heritage buildings that are literally crumbling apart and several more homeless shelters sitting between huge expanses of open unused land surrounding Moss Park, an ugly 60's style housing project. There are very few buildings on the north side available to repurpose like those on streets such as Dundas West and Ossington Ave. The south side of Queen East is lined with undeveloped one and two story building of various vintages with no coherent theme or purpose. There is another homeless shelter on the south east corner of Queen E and Jarvis. The entire area is an economic dead zone. So, what's to be done? Queen E has become a barrier that has halted northward development on streets south of Queen. Is City Council just planning to let the whole area rot? Developers will not touch this part of downtown unless major improvements are made. Perhaps getting the feds to move the armoury and the city to rethink, improve and move the plethora of homeless shelters will act as a catalyst for development. This section of Queen East is a blight and really needs to be addressed.