09-28-2018, 02:01 PM
When the Buskers Festival and Jazz Festival were moved from King Street to the parking lots behind City Hall, it opened up the mindset of reimagining these parking lots as temporary public spaces. Unfortunately, while the Public Square is useful, it's more difficult to expand programming into King Street because of the presence of the transit (and in particular the LRT wires). Unlike King Street in Kitchener, where the Christkindl Market is slowly expanding into King Street, that's not an option here.
A huge downside of the parking lots is that they are very hot spaces. Creating green space around the Water Pumping station would offer some respite from the heat. Roughly speaking, that space also looks to be about the half the size of the combined parking lots that are used for the Buskers Festival (but about 4 times the space of the Uptown Public Square).
On a related note, one of Waterloo's original public squares was at the corner of Erb and Albert currently where the exKPMG tower stands, in front of the City Hall. The public square included a performance stage and later a Cenotaph. The Cenotaph survived the redevelopment and used to stand in the green space between Knox and this tower in what is still called, Memorial Park. The Cenotaph was moved to its current location some time in the 1990s.
A huge downside of the parking lots is that they are very hot spaces. Creating green space around the Water Pumping station would offer some respite from the heat. Roughly speaking, that space also looks to be about the half the size of the combined parking lots that are used for the Buskers Festival (but about 4 times the space of the Uptown Public Square).
On a related note, one of Waterloo's original public squares was at the corner of Erb and Albert currently where the exKPMG tower stands, in front of the City Hall. The public square included a performance stage and later a Cenotaph. The Cenotaph survived the redevelopment and used to stand in the green space between Knox and this tower in what is still called, Memorial Park. The Cenotaph was moved to its current location some time in the 1990s.