DOWNTOWN GOES UPTOWN
Money, new attitude breathe life into the city’s core Part 3 of our five-part series
When Elizabeth Valencia first visited the downtown six years ago, she thought it looked like a set from The Walking Dead.
“It was kind of a zombie downtown,” she recalls.
“There wasn’t much. During the day, there was no one in the streets and most of the places were like For Lease, For Lease, For Sale or just empty.”
She had just moved to St. Catharines and downtown was one of her first stops. Downtown is where everybody goes, wherever they go in the world, she said. It made quite an impression. Fast-forward four years to when Valencia and her husband, Raul Ojeda, were looking for a location for their second restaurant after the success of Chile and Agave in Merritton.
Not surprisingly, downtown wasn’t top of mind for a new business.
But an invitation from a landlord to check out a heritage building on Academy Street left Valencia with a new outlook.
“I don’t come that often to downtown. It was a surprise. I mean, it was like a whole new downtown. There were lots of people walking around. There’s lots of cafes, little stores, little businesses and people happy and talking and laughing, buying juices and wraps and sandwiches. It was so alive.”
Downtown had changed. Dramatically.
The road from critical care to a downtown no longer on life-support was paved by a decade of planning, work and timing.
There was a city council that knew it had to revive the downtown to compete with other communities. An Ontario Hockey League team owner looking for a new home. A university that wanted to be a greater part of the community.
Upper-tier governments were ready to invest in a community with big infrastructure plans. And there were big dreamers. “‘Can’t’ wasn’t an option,” said Brian McMullan, mayor of St. Catharines from 2006 to 2014. “We had to somewhat reinvent ourselves as a city.”
He said the key for him was jobs and economy. Manufacturing was declining and had been for a decade. The goal was to make St. Catharines, and the region as a whole an attractive place in which to invest.
That meant improving quality of life for residents and making sure potential employers thinking of relocating would have things to do with their families on their offhours.
“St. Catharines is one of the oldest communities in Canada, back to the days of Shipman’s Corners. We’ve always had the ability as a community to reinvent or renew ourselves. I felt it was a time for renewal,” McMullan said.
“We had a sense of urgency. We were seen a little bit as a community in decline, and that was the last thing as mayor I wanted to see. I wouldn’t accept that. Council and the people of this community wouldn’t accept that.”
One of them was Critelli’s owner Joe Critelli, who helped push for changes like two-way traffic conversion through the St. Catharines Downtown Association and the chamber of commerce, headed by future mayor Walter Sendzik.
Critelli said two-way traffic, approved by mayor Tim Rigby’s council in 2006 and enacted through McMullan’s, was the catalyst that started to change the thinking about downtown’s future in the minds of the public, politicians and staff at city hall.
“There were a lot of people that knew that these changes had to come, and their voices started to get stronger than those that would say ‘no, the status quo should remain,’” Critelli said.
“The chamber knew we couldn’t live with the status quo and the downtown association knew it. It just took longer for a few others to agree.”
In October 2007, city council hired a consultant to create a downtown creative cluster master plan — a plan that would be key to obtaining other government funding later.
The 115 pages presented by Joseph Bogdan Associates Inc. of Toronto in April 2008 laid out the future of downtown. It included putting Brock University’s proposed school of fine and performing arts and the city’s new arts centre in the lower-level parking lot and incorporating the historic Canada Hair Cloth building.
It also told the city to build a new parking garage with ground-floor shops and to build a pedestrian link to the lower-level parking lot.