12-15-2014, 04:37 PM
(12-15-2014, 04:11 PM)BuildingScout Wrote: Granted, there's a bit of hyperbole there but much less than you think.
Is it really that much better than a big box store? Let's see:
This building has several of the best stores in Uptown: Aroma Cafe, Cobblestone Gallery, Twice is nice, Duke of Wellington, The Savoury (and Twelfth night, past which I walked for many years without ever noticing it was there back before it closed), yet many of those stores struggle because of its many flaws.
- Isolated structure in a sea of parking: Check
- Little to no interaction with the street, i.e. inward looking: Check
- Architecturally disconnected from its environment: Check
- Located on a drive through street with no street parking: Check
- You would walk past it without thinking about going in: Check
All true. Now you made me look at that site in Google Maps and there's an interesting sat photo artifact right at that very building.
It seems hard to fix the location in a sea of parking without building on top of the parking though. (I'd be fine with that). It certainly does not stand out. It would be nice to have a more continuous streetscape from BMO on King to there, although the elevation change doesn't help.