Entertainment District Plan

[taal]

Please move this to an appropriate thread if it exists, I could find no such one.

Planning for the entertainment district downtown. Similar in some ways to the Bloor street project (on a bigger scale) and parts of the waterfront transformation.

http://www.entertainmentdistrict.ca/downloads.php (District's BIA site)

Looks like an official draft plan should be available soon (sometime in December according to the site).

This can be really great, very needed as well. The streets in question have great venues but are lacking themselves and are not very connected. This will add a lot to the downtown core.

Though I'm sure we'll see progress eventually it'll probably be some time before we see any construction (years I suspect). Based on the usual progression of such plans/projects i.e. the plan produced could be like the one in place for Eglinton.

 

[Tewder]

This plan, and others in different areas of the city, are all essentially about beautifying the streets of ugly Toronto, making them more inviting. This is long overdue and I'm all for it.

For some reason though the 'Entertainment District' moniker bothers me somewhat. It feels cheesy and arbitrary. I mean isn't all of downtown a potential entertainment district?

 

[Archivist]

Tewder, I agree that the name is awkward, and I wish there were something else. I'm not sure what else it would be, though, this city map calls it "King/Spadina" while this private map calls it "Downtown West". I'm not sure either of those is a step up.

My other beef about neighbourhood names in Toronto is the "Village-ing" of names. "Liberty", for instance, was a longstanding if not particularly well used name, but it has morphed into "Liberty Village". So many names have done this over the past years. We seem to need all our neighbourhoods to be either Villages or Districts.

 

[Tewder]

I agree. I like how in New York they create place names by forming them from parts of the place names that are boundaries (Tribeca, Nolita, Soho etc). In the end you tend to forget the etymology involved and accept them as new place names in and of their own right.

 

[smuncky]

looking at the survey, most people like the name "entertainment district."

the one thing that was encouraging to see is that they are looking at good precedents from other cities which can applied here, with slight alterations of course.

 

[yin_yang]

i have noticed an increase in negative media about clubs in the ED and connections to drug dealing. very interesting.