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This Sunday, April 13th, there will be a community rally at Jimmie Simpson Park at 870 Queen East (just east of the railway bridge) to rally in opposition to the proposed “power centre” development in Leslieville on Eastern Avenue.
The proposed development may bad for the area, despite the protestations of the developers and architect Jack Diamond (if anyone can tell me how an architect is qualified to spout off on larger issues urban planning, instead of sticking to individual buildings, I'm all ears) that it's not a "Big Box" development, anytime your plans include parking for 1900 cars it means that you're catering to people who drive and ignoring the human-scale neighbourhood planning that makes Leslieville great.
This also has a good chance of negatively affecting cyclists who like to use the multi-use path on the north side of Lakeshore Boulevarde (like me), because the developer wants the option of putting "driveways" across the path so those 1,900 cars can go in and out.
The city wants to designate the multi-use path as a linear park, so that the developer can't do this:
This doesn't sound like a driveway, does it,? It sounds like a full-fledged intersection.The SmartCentres proposal would require a signalized intersection on Lake Shore Boulevard, with a drive crossing the bicycle path, in order to manage traffic.
[ InsideToronto ]
Here are some photos of what would happen to the multi-use path if Smart!Centres is allowed to build their "power centre" and make "driveways" to cater to automobiles:
The multi-use path at present: a great place to walk, bike and rollerblade.
The signalized intersection at Lakeshore and Leslie. We could have one, two, or MORE of these cut across the multi-use path - making it essentially useless as recreational infrastructure.
I can't find a site plan for the site anywhere, but other information I've found should make EVERYONE wary of these plans:
1. Using SmartCentres data (PDF file), the whole site is 18.47 acres, or about 805,000 square feet. They have planned for 1871 parking spots, and say that they can fit 2.91 parking spots into 1000 square feet. Do the math and you'll find that they'll be covering about 642,000 square feet with parking. That's over 75% of the entire site.
2. Using the renderings and elevations on their "Foundry District" site, SmartCentres has planned 2-3 story stores around the edges of their site - thus creating the 694,000 square feet of stores they have planned. Oh yeah, and there are breaks in the stores to let cars in and out of the parking in the middle.
So, they've got a big retail donut planned - stores around the outside, and a big giant empty hole of a parking lot in the middle, taking up 75% of all the space.
Here's a Google Maps mock-up of the site plan (which I suspect Smartcentres hasn't made publicly available because they are afraid that everyone will recognize that it's awful for the community.
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