Hipster Duck
Senior Member
Well the bad news is that Brantford's downtown is forever going to be a wasteland. It was figuratively a wasteland and now it's literally a wasteland.
The good news is that no other city in Canada is capable of doing this ever again; no other city has that unique combination of rust belt economic desperation and high Victorian architecture. All the other Ontario downtowns that have such worthy buildings also value them and have found adaptive reuse for their old commercial blocks. It's not like this kind of hick nonsense will ever be replicated anywhere else.
So I will shed a tear, but I also know that this is a one time deal. What gets me much more worried are proposals in our very own city to facadectomy very vibrant and intimately-scaled turn of the century strips such as the King street restaurant row or those corner houses on Church and Gloucester. Unlike Brantford's desecration, we know that won't be the last facade job in Toronto.
The good news is that no other city in Canada is capable of doing this ever again; no other city has that unique combination of rust belt economic desperation and high Victorian architecture. All the other Ontario downtowns that have such worthy buildings also value them and have found adaptive reuse for their old commercial blocks. It's not like this kind of hick nonsense will ever be replicated anywhere else.
So I will shed a tear, but I also know that this is a one time deal. What gets me much more worried are proposals in our very own city to facadectomy very vibrant and intimately-scaled turn of the century strips such as the King street restaurant row or those corner houses on Church and Gloucester. Unlike Brantford's desecration, we know that won't be the last facade job in Toronto.