Brantford Colborne Point | ?m | ?s | Vrancor Development

Is there anything we can do to reverse this and prevent this demolition still or is it out of the citizen's hands?
 
This is really terrible. I hope that this at least gets slowed down so the options can be reassessed. Those are just beautiful buildings that could easily bring some life back into downtown with some work and creativity. But Brantford's already in decline, right? So why don't we just raze any sort of culture it has and squeeze a few bucks out of turning downtown into another piece of suburbia. There's so much that can be done here, but no! Raze them so we can put another strip mall on that road!
 
The buildings will come down any time now. Tonight city council voted to proceed with demolition despite FedDev's grant being withheld on the grounds that Brantford has not done a real heritage + environmental assessment for the properties.

Any calls to Minister Chan's office would be appreciated. He's the Ontario Minister of Culture - he has the authority to issue a stop work order, but apparently has not had enough pressure coming in as of yet - understandably he doesn't want to step on a municipality's toes.


Michael Chan - Phone: (905)305-1935 / Fax: (905)305-1938
Email:mchan.mpp.co@liberal.ola.org

OR
Ontario Ministry of Culture - Phone: (416)212-0644
Toll Free:1-866-454-0049 & Email: info.mcl@ontario.ca
 
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Some of us are hopefully going to try to get in front of the bulldozers, as it will likely now come to that. Anyone interested in coming down to do the same, feel free to contact me: a@aking.ca / 519-774-0773 (cell).
 
destroying things that make the community interesting and give it charm. way to go brantford.
 
It's a shame more people didn't answer sabbatical!'s call; they came down today with almost no representation from the heritage community on-site.

They'll regret this if the theories about the buildings acting as a retaining wall are true.
 
Wow, was Brantford ever in a rush to rip down those buildings. Looks like they never even tendered the job.

Today's Spectator:

Demolition began before noon
June 08, 2010
JOHN BURMAN
BRANTFORD – In the end, there were few to protest the demolition of 41 derelict but beautiful buildings along Colborne Street today.

At exactly 10:48 a.m. a giant excavator from Stoney Creek began chewing away at the western end of the block Brantford city council voted less than 12 hours before to demolish.

Promised protests to halt the demolition never materialized.

The curious outnumbered conservationists by a good four to one among the no more than two dozen spectators standing in the sun on the opposite side of the street.

A huge cloud of grey brown dust rose over the doomed block as the excavator bit into the rear upper corner of the four-storey building that once housed City Signs.

“Get ’er done,” yelled a man on a power wheelchair, punctuating his words with short blasts on its tiny electric horn.

The demolition started barely 12 hours after city council voted 8-3 Monday night to demolish the stretch of 41 derelict buildings on the south side of Colborne Street - some which pre-date Confederation - to make way for as yet undetermined development.

The city’s call to a demolition company went out Tuesday morning and workers were on site within hours.

Supporters of knocking the stretch of downtown buildings call them an eyesore, left vacant and decaying.

“These buildings are in a terrible, terrible shape . . . they need to go,” Councillor Mark Littell said after the vote.

Critics say Brantford is wiping out a part of the province's history.

“These buildings were part of the birth of commerce and industry in Ontario,” said Lloyd Alter of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario. “They should be preserved.”

Alter said in an email today he is still hoping Ontario’s Ministry of Tourism and Culture will step in and halt the process for review

With files from Spectator wire services
Click to expand...
 
"These historic buildings are falling apart because our city sucks. I have an idea! Let's tear down the only bit of urbanity and hope for urban renewal left and replace it with more suburbia! Yeah that's a great idea!"

Good job Brantford, you've succeeded in turning yourself into an 100% suburban wasteland. Just a checkmark on my list of places in Southern Ontario I no longer need to see.
 
Brantford still has some heritage worth seeing, like Clarence Square and some of the residential areas, especially immediately northwest of the downtown. The VIA station is a minor gem. But the anger I feel about Colborne takes so much away.

Hamilton has also had a very checkered heritage preservation history - it has conducted wholescale demolition of much of its downtown too, partly for a downtown mall that still struggles; and is littered with parking lots. It does have some success stories such as the TH&B station and even the much-delayed, but now well underway restoration of the Lister Block, and has some really great residential heritage, especially to the southwest of the downtown.

When Brantford knocked down part of its downtown back in the 1980s for Eaton Market Place, the intentions were good - draw people downtown by anchoring it with a new modern shopping mall to compete with Lynden Park Mall (and the big boxes off Park St and Meadowlands in Ancaster). But the Eaton downtown mall concept was a total failure in each Ontario city it went into, except in the big cities of Toronto and Ottawa - and both had an existing Bay/Simpsons to act as a co-anchor too. Brantford was not the kind of market for Eaton's, especially as Conrad Black raided Massey-Ferguson and free trade killed much of the industry.

So the businesses sucked from Colborne and into Market Place disappeared even before Eaton's finally left. Now, it appears, when there was some signs of life (ie My Thai), council wants to finish the job.

At least when some buildings on the north side were cleared, they were replaced by a po-mo complex with a public space in the middle and some new retail. I could see a case for selective demolition for where there was a viable alternative for the most decrepit of the properties.
 
I cannot believe this. Who in the name of all that is good are the current Brantford councillors to decide whether heritage buildings, some of which pre-date CONFEDERATION, are still needed in their town?
How old are some of the councillors? Are they still needed?
This mentality smacks of the "tear it down, then we'll figure it out" mentality of the 80s and earlier. Have we learned nothing from the wastelands that litter the rust-belt in both the US and Canada? Do they really think this is going to improve their town?
In my eyes, if you want to improve your town, you keep its heart, you keep what defines it, you keep what sets it apart from other towns and only seek to improve that heart.
What is the plan here now? Wider roads? Big box stores? Anonymous strip plazas? If so, job well done, make it look like the stuff that people already don't care about. You know who else is tearing down old, vacant buildings in hopes that the land may then actually become attractive? Detroit. Excellent place to draw inspiration from Brantford.

I'm not going to pretend that I ever cared about, or had any intentions to visit Brantford. But I will say this, if they did the right thing and breathed new life into the now demolished strip, say in a Distillery District, type of way, where you turn forgotten neighbourhoods and turn them into something worth travelling to, they would have caught my attention, as well as the attention of many others. But hey, it's nothing a Wal-Mart, a Best Buy and a large parking lot can't fix, right?
 
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