TAXPAYERS CAN’T USE A PATH THEY PAID FOR
Drugs, violence led to Waller Street Mall being barricaded for good in February 2017
A public pedestrian walkway into the ByWard Market has been locked for over a year, a victim of crime, bad design, a broken contract and failed corporate memory at city hall.
The city isn’t even sure who owns the gates that have been sealed tight since February 2017, when the board at the Place St. George luxury condo building closed them for the night as usual, locked them up and left them that way.
“There were good intentions when it was built back in 2003 or so by the city,” said Gord Diamond, the president of the St. George condo board (he was also general manager of OC Transpo in the early 2000s). “They put a nice paved stone walkway and shrubs and so on, but it became a gathering site between Rideau Street and George Street, a place where people could sit and hide.”
The Waller Street Mall runs north from Rideau Street between a pizza joint and a Beer Store parking lot. Its other end lets out on George Street between a Home Hardware and the St. George building ’s frontyard fountains; The Salvation Army’s Booth Centre is across the street.
The walkway has no storefronts or doors, no eyes on it. At its very best, it’d be a pleasant little pedestrian shortcut. In practice, it’s an alley that connects a homeless shelter and one of Ottawa’s less appealing arteries (the part trucks use), a liminal space nobody protects.
“We’ve had drugs, we’ve had incidents of violence, we’ve had even security guards being attacked,” Coun. Mathieu Fleury said.
In 1985, the city and the St. George’s builders agreed that the builders could have the property, which the city owned, so they could extend the condo’s parking garage underneath it. In exchange, they’d build and maintain the city-owned walkway.
In 2000, the city started working on spiffing the place up with new fences and planters at a cost of about $250,000. The old deal had run out, but the city reached a new one with the St. George’s condo board that included the gates and cameras, which the city would maintain, but the St. George security guards would monitor. A condo guard would also close the gates at 11 p.m. and open them again at 5 a.m., to minimize drunken hollering from bar-goers heading home.
The city fenced off the condo’s fountain plaza, where undesirables hung out and sometimes washed.
But, said Diamond, the new arrangement didn’t work out, either. St. George’s residents didn’t feel safe using the Waller mall during the day. Besides, the 5 a.m. opening time required in the agreement is dawn in June, but still night most of the year. The worst problems were at night, when the condo’s private guard had to evict people so he could lock up, Fleury said.
“In the end, the councillor and the local residents decided to close it and it’s been great,” Diamond said.
Except for the part where there’s this pedestrian route we paid for and can’t use. The St. George got its garage under public land, it got a fence around its fountains and the rest of us got ... locked gates.
“If push comes to shove, could we open the gates and leave them open all the time? Yes,” Fleury said. “I’m not comfortable doing that with the space the way it is.”
He’s been unable to convince the police to patrol more frequently. He’s trying to find the legal agreement city council approved in 2002 to determine who officially owns the fences and gates. Amazingly, nobody’s been able to turn up the document, only a summary that city council approved. (It suggests the city owns the gates, but doesn’t say so definitively.) A caretaker can walk away more easily than an owner and Fleury wants to know who’s in what position.
“Welcome to my world sometimes,” Fleury said ruefully. “I represent the oldest ward in the city. There’s a lot of history.”
Which is true, though this was done in 2002. John By didn’t sail back to England with the contract in his baggage. Some of Fleury’s fellow councillors voted on it.
Fleury hopes the new ByWard Market management board can make the place busier, possibly using the walkway as an “Allée des artistes” with vendors and performers. This has not been a notable success in the pedestrian underpass at Rideau and Sussex Drive a few blocks west, but that’s a concrete cave. At least the Waller walkway is open air.
The St. George was an unusual project in Ottawa for the mid1980s, but now condos are getting squeezed into built-up areas all the time. The city has made deals with builders to include walkways through them, build pedestrian bridges next to them, keep publicly accessible plazas in front of them. Wanting dense development around light-rail stations especially means negotiating compromises with builders: the city has approved 40-plus-storey towers around the Carling O -Train station that will practically cut it off unless outsiders can walk through their grounds. Public access to private property is essential for these projects to succeed.
Which means the agreements have to succeed, too. If they’re flawed, the problems need to be fixed. Likewise, if private partners have to be held to terms that become inconvenient, the city needs to be able to produce copies of the damn papers. We maintain good public spaces with work, not with hope.
If push comes to shove, could we open the gates and leave them open all the time? Yes. I’m not comfortable doing that with the space the way it is.