Downtown Kitchener

A short break from the Hamilton series to bring you Downtown Kitchener, largest city in the Waterloo Region:

Thanks so much for the great pictures of the old hometown! You really have a talent for making even crappy places look quite lovely, and you even got a picture of my old high school. It's cool to see the new statue they put up next to the stairs of William Lyon Mackenzie King, its most famous student, to celebrate the school's 150th Anniversary a couple years ago. The school board wanted to close our school back in my OAC year, but we successfully fought it. There were "Keep KCI" signs all over the city. June Callwood, among others, even came to speak at one of the school board hearings as her sons were also graduates.

This old Lang Tannery building is set to become the beginning of Kitchener's own "Distillery District"-type mixed-use project if a few developers have their way. I'd love to find the article again, but it was in the K-W Record not too long ago.

WOW! Definitely not what I expected it to look like! Good job with the pics and thanks for sharing.

^but that's the only thing there. A few metres from there it gets ugly rundown and then the sprawl begins. Too many parking lots in the area--the locals think there aren't enough

It will take decades for waterloo region to think of itself as a cohesive urban city--the place basically reminded me of mississauga only instead of older small towns and villages linked by highways and suburbia you've got a few older (mostly rundown) small-medium-sized cities (with a few cool pockets of uniquely "German?-style victorians) linked by hideous 6-8 lane roads and big box sprawl. If you don't have a car there (i didn't) you're out of it.

So, some cool (and never photographed) rundown old neighbourhoods exist in k-w but the downtowns (even uptown waterloo is empty except for students and grannies) are places for park'n stop not walk'n brunching.

Ugh.

I think it's traditional to disparage downtown areas in Ontario.

I expected rundown buildings, street people and crack houses the way people talk about it. I always photograph rundown buildings, but I didn't see that many. I only saw a couple of sketchy people, nothing like Hamilton, Toronto, or even London in that respect. Some of the surrounding neighbourhoods were nice, some weren't, but no ghetto to be seen. On the other hand, certainly more working class than Waterloo.

While much of Waterloo Region is sprawl of the worst kind, I thought downtown Kitchener was alright. It doesn't have a big city feel, but with strong growth in the region and some residential projects (like Kauffman Lofts) going on, it should improve.

^Kitchener might not be the most urban place right now, but, it at least has potential and something it can build on. And with a lot of growth taking place, and some signs of urban investment, it is at least on heading in a positive direction, even if it is just small steps at the moment. An LRT in the region and proper rail connections with Toronto and Pearson would probably be a strong enough catalyst at this point to inspire and foster more urban growth.

Great photos as always Flar. Your series on Ontario towns and cities has been outstanding.

Kitchener hit bottom about 10-15 years ago, I think, when there were more abandoned buildings - Manulife had yet to take over the dead mall across from the yet-unbuilt new city hall (which is one of the most attractive newer civic buildings in Ontario), Market Square just lost Eaton's (and now redeveloped largely as offices for Stantec and later the K-W Record), and the factories all around looking grim - a few were demolished, but happily the biggest ones - Kauffman, Arrow Shirts and Lang, are seeing new development.

Whoever said Uptown Waterloo is for grannies and students only is so wrong. Uptown is absolutely taking off-- it's amazing. There are so many important inernational aid organizations, a world-renowned physics think tank, a new school of International Affairs just announced, huge mixed-use developments, many art galleries and Canada's national ceramics and glass gallery, more shoppers and office workers than ever before, including groups of teens out with friends shopping, all the way up to middle-aged and yes, elderly as well. A public square goes under construction in August, and in a few years the residential population of Uptown will be absolutely thousands more than it currently is. (That's a fact based on the approved residential developments alone.)

You might want to rethink your comment about Uptown Waterloo, which is the most urban and stylish part of the city.

urbandreamer said:

^but that's the only thing there. A few metres from there it gets ugly rundown and then the sprawl begins. Too many parking lots in the area--the locals think there aren't enough

It will take decades for waterloo region to think of itself as a cohesive urban city--the place basically reminded me of mississauga only instead of older small towns and villages linked by highways and suburbia you've got a few older (mostly rundown) small-medium-sized cities (with a few cool pockets of uniquely "German?-style victorians) linked by hideous 6-8 lane roads and big box sprawl. If you don't have a car there (i didn't) you're out of it.

So, some cool (and never photographed) rundown old neighbourhoods exist in k-w but the downtowns (even uptown waterloo is empty except for students and grannies) are places for park'n stop not walk'n brunching.

Ugh.

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I’m the first to complain about my old hometown, but aside from the bit about the car-orientation (totally true), such an assessment isn’t really accurate. I can understand how you might think it if you’re a student living up in the north Waterloo student ghetto, but there’s really a lot more to the city than that. First of all, I can count the number of roads in the city beyond four lanes on one hand, so it’s hardly an endless parade of 6-8 laners. There are significant areas of historic housing on the fringes of the two downtowns, filled with historic homes at dirt-cheap prices by Toronto standards. The difference is that most of the houses around downtown Kitchener (aside from the Victoria Park area) are filled with working-class families, while a lot of the Uptown Waterloo heritage homes are filled with university professors and the like. Sort of an Annex twenty years ago.

Downtown Kitchener does, however, have major problems. Aside from 20 King and a couple other restaurants, and some shops that have been there for decades, retail seems to find it very difficult to sustain itself. In the 90s, council decided to turn the area into an “entertainment district†for the region, and many bars opened, including two large venues built in historic theatres. After a few years, they quickly backpedaled as people complained that the club-goers scared away visitors. It’s true that the police presence was pretty heavy late at night back in the day, particularly around the Lyric, which was bought and torn down by the city a few years ago and is subject, along with some neighbouring properties, to a redevelopment plan that I posted a few weeks ago. King Centre was one of my favourite places in the city before it was turned into Manulife offices. It was a dead mall like you couldn’t even imagine. A vast (~100 stores) urban mall literally completely empty except for a Sears Value store, two or three shops clustered around it, and a Laser Quest. Market Square was a bit less of a total failure, and I remember going to the bookstore and a couple of other spots there when I was very young. Basically, right now downtown seems to be treading water. The office buildings are doing quite well, and are mostly fully occupied. Partly this is simply a sign of the region’s strong economy, but a lot of it is coming from offices fleeing high rents in Waterloo. Unfortunately, the after-5pm life is a bit quieter and shows few signs of real resuscitation. The main drivers seem to be cultural facilities, such as the extremely well-used Centre in the Square (known for its spectacular acoustics coupled with a somewhat unfortunate brown brick design) and the somewhat less successful Theatre and Company and Children’s Museum (built mostly with RIM money).

In fact, charitable institutions and cultural facilities of all kinds are doing extremely well in Waterloo Region. There is a very large number of successful entrepreneurs which are quite lavish with donations, something that you just don’t see in cities like Hamilton where most donations are from large corporations’ charitable programs.

“Uptown†Waterloo is a completely different story. It’s been much more successful in recent years, driven mainly by the extreme success of the city as a whole. As much as I’m a proud Kitchenerite (though one who could see Waterloo from his back window growing up), I do accept that Waterloo has been driving the region’s economy in recent years (with help from Cambridge’s heavy industry like Toyota). Back in the late 90s, at the height of the high tech boom, there were massive plans for redevelopment of the Waterloo Town Square site and Seagram lands. It was a ~$300 million project including theatres, shopping, condos, hotels, offices, and pretty much anything else you could possibly build. They had elaborate renderings of piazzas and pedestrian walkways galore. After a few years, the project was slowly downscaled so that it was limited to the Waterloo Town Square site, and a part of the existing mall was retained. A cross-street severed by the mall was rebuilt with shops along one side, while King Street’s parking lots were replaced with mid-rise (4 floor) buildings with retail at the base and offices above. They’ve been somewhat controversial in the community, among some people for being too high and looming over the street (they prefer setbacks) while among others (primarily local shopowners) for eliminating much of the free parking. There are lots of neat little shops in renovated houses surrounding the rather small core area. Houses converted to commercial uses are one of the building typologies I most associate with K-W. It’s obviously because the community was quite small even just a few decades ago, so even major arterials were lined with homes. It makes me quite happy that many of the heritage houses have been retained rather than being replaced with strip malls.

The biggest mistake ever made in the city was the location of the university residences, particularly U of W. They should all have been located down around Seagram Drive and the old Married Student Apartments where they would be a quick 10 minute walk through the park to the uptown area. From up along Columbia street, it’s quite a trek through a windswept campus.
I could go on forever about my city, but I should probably stop now.

^Nice summary. I graduated from Waterloo four years ago and there have been a lot of changes since even then. Waterloo Region is disjointed and car-dependent, but it's taking a lot of positive (and a few negative) steps. It has some great history to build on.

Great photos as always Flar. Your series on Ontario towns and cities has been outstanding.

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I agree. Keep 'em coming.

Construction update. (First cladding up.)

I think the glass being used on this building is absolutely a wonderful and surprising departure from the cliche typical frosted glass of all the glass buildings going up in this country currently. Maybe it is tacky to some people, but I like it!

Why is that building taking so long to construct? It has been sitting at about that level of completion for nearly 6 months. And I am always surprised at how small it is--and also, what a silly idea to spread a campus around the city. UW has enough empty spaces, parking lots etc to fill with nice buildings.

K downtown has its good points; however, it's still rather depressing and old fashioned for all the wrong reasons.

I've been really curious for ages about how that building will look when it's finished. Through all my sources, that rendering seems to be the only one I can get my hands on.

I've only see three or four pics of the pharmacy building. The rendering above, the pic of the model (below) and then a couple showing it meeting the street. It looks like it will be a pretty cool building, but there's no way it'll be ready for the incoming class.