Charles St GRT terminal redevelopment

[plam]

I think the better spot for a new arena and convention centre would be on Gateway Park dr. where the empty big-box stores are across from silver city (or whatever that movie house is called now). Direct 401 access and future LRT goes right by there too... not really any current residential to be annoyed with people parking on the side streets and it's still a part of town that could use some encouragement to develop beyond big-box parking lots.

I think if there was enough demand for a convention centre Bingemans or someone else would have looked into building one already, I am loathe to support public money being spend on such things when there's a lot of places that have tried that whole "downtown convention centre revitalization" scheme and ended up just wasting a bunch of money on a building that sits empty most of the time.

I'm curious to see how Calgary makes out with the schemozzle they've got planned for their new arena and convention centre/etc.

Part of the thing about Montreal's Olympic Stadium and the Expos were that people said it was too far. And that's with quite a few people living nearby (but perhaps not the demographic of people-with-money). Or maybe it just sucked as a baseball stadium. Not very cozy, more cavernous. So, I'm not sure that putting a stadium in the middle of nowhere tends to work?

Convention centres: there are so many convention centres coming online in NZ over the next few years. There seems to be some sort of failure of imagination. It's not like, oh, you know, building bicycle infrastructure or something like that would pay off. No, let's build another convention centre. Wellington, Christchurch... how many does NZ need?

Maybe the city could demolish one of the above ground parking garages and put the parking under the new park (since we have settled on that being the best use of this land).  They could then sell the land of the parking garage for a condo.  City urban design is improved by removing one ugly parking garage.  

Three words that make this infeasible: High water table.

Ha, beat me to it.