Downtown St. John’s — a wheel with no hub
Don’t get me wrong, I love so much about downtown St John’s that this paper would have to give me a daily column to number the ways, but something is definitely missing: a public space to tie it together, a place which will encourage people to visit often, hang out, stay and not just shop, drink and eat infrequently.
Any of you who have visited Halifax recently will perhaps have seen the new library, not tucked away in a hidden and inaccessible corner of the city but unashamedly downtown. It’s a fantastic space, light and airy, there are coffee shops, lots of community events and the local universities put on public learning events in the space that both let the public know what they’re up to and are used as opportunities for community-based research. Every time I have been there it was packed with people of all ages and persuasions. Some just go to hang out on the glass eagle’s nest that is the third floor and watch the city going by.
Halifax isn’t perfect by any stretch, with too many condos being built on the waterfront and a plug-ugly new convention centre that obscures views and appears to have been assembled from the Vancouver planning department’s left over parts bin…. but the library, yep, they got that right. Did I mention that it’s a public building? In recognition of the rejuvenating effect that public spaces can have on downtown cores,
Sydney in Cape Breton is relocating a post-secondary campus to the downtown area; in Toronto George Brown College has a new waterfront campus and so on. It’s a trend not just across Canada but the world as a whole.
If we can’t get our heads around a new library, perhaps we could start a conversation about locating any new campus buildings for the college or MUN in the heart of the city, as the Battery facility is, and in not some suburban outpost that could be just about anywhere in big box strip-mall Canada. I have heard tell of a mythical new Galway campus. I certainly hope it remains the bad idea that it is.
Bill Radford St. John’s