RC8
Senior Member
Torontovibe, Queens Quay tried becoming a retail strip and there's almost nothing there that's not a corporate franchise or an underwhelming piece of retail. Integrating retail into buildings and making them front the street is far from enough. Almost all Cityplace buildings offer some sort of retail, but spaces are relatively vacant still. Only way they could have made it work would have been by having a cobblestone Fort York Boulevard with a mixture of heritage recreations and modern glass-steel retail pieces, or something along those lines.
St. James town was made up of all rental buildings with few amenities and all the towers were completely isolated from roads and thoroughfares. There was originally no retail whatsoever in the area, and the units were very basic, with kitchens were below the standards for back then, and no laundry facilities ensuite. The floors are hard to customize and the balconies are dark uninviting spaces clad with metal sheets. It was a recipe for disaster from day one, and I believe that only one or two towers from their 60s/70s era have escaped becoming lowest-class housing, even if the buildings were standing alone in very successful neighbourhoods full of retail and whatnot.
St. James town is a story of failure not just from an urban design perspective, but also from an architectural standpoint. The architecture at Cityplace is, unlike in those towers, capable of offering very high living standards comparable to those you'd get in any other contemporary type of housing.
St. James town was made up of all rental buildings with few amenities and all the towers were completely isolated from roads and thoroughfares. There was originally no retail whatsoever in the area, and the units were very basic, with kitchens were below the standards for back then, and no laundry facilities ensuite. The floors are hard to customize and the balconies are dark uninviting spaces clad with metal sheets. It was a recipe for disaster from day one, and I believe that only one or two towers from their 60s/70s era have escaped becoming lowest-class housing, even if the buildings were standing alone in very successful neighbourhoods full of retail and whatnot.
St. James town is a story of failure not just from an urban design perspective, but also from an architectural standpoint. The architecture at Cityplace is, unlike in those towers, capable of offering very high living standards comparable to those you'd get in any other contemporary type of housing.