Arthur Peach and Oryst Sawchuk
Downtown is not about shopping; it’s about people. It’s been said before but worth repeating, the downtown is the heart of a community. A healthy heart is essential to having a strong community identity.
Downtown should be the showcase of our city. The historic core of our community and its buildings, and its architecture embody the community’s past and provide the visual and psychological identity for all of us in Greater Sudbury. If there are truths to be found in architecture, one must be that building cultural centers in urban environments adds value to the area.
Downtown for all its current shortcomings really matters by being a unique central core. From the very beginning, it united the Sudbury Basin’s historically separate settlements and provided a sense of social connectedness.
This role of the downtown has been stuck in a vicious cycle of lack of investment, fluctuating public interest and with a depleted resident population.
What once was
Back in the1940s, the lights were really brighter downtown. Pedestrians trumped the automobile with barn-yard (criss-cross) walks at the change of the traffic lights at the main intersections of Elm and Durham. S.S.Kresge and Woolworths’ competed with each other; the once-iconic Canadian department store Eaton’s controlled Durham at the Larch Street corner. Neon lights flashed out their messages, including a magnificent large treble cleft announcing Melody Music Store on Durham at Cedar Street where the Bank of Montreal now stands.
Back then, downtown was an important community space where people gathered from all parts of the region for its shops and services, and to meet for afternoon tea or a beer, participate in parades, talk unions and argue politics, and enjoy community events.
It was populated by residents who animated its streets and vitalized its services. Families lived on Minto, Shaughnessy, Drinkwater and Van Horne streets, on Cedar and Larch streets, as well as further to the north in the Donovan, south across the CPR yards in the Wembley Heights area and in the West End.
People living and working downtown contribute to the energy essential for a vital downtown. They provided economic support and “eyes on the street”, as Jane Jacobs put it, for a sense of security. The downtown was a walkable neighbourhood, a place where people lived within walking distance to most places they wanted to visit.
But the decades of 1950s and 1960s witnessed huge changes, leading to the downtown’s decline. The centre’s residential areas were decimated by massive urban renewal and by the repurposing of Drinkwater/Paris and Elm streets as a highway to serve suburbanites.
Downtown’s uniqueness was allowed to erode. The city’s historic references — including the old Post Office building, the Nickel Range and King Edward Hotels, the Borgia area with its CNR station and the city’s old farmer’s market — are all gone.
Today, as a result, downtown is a shell of what it once was, devoid of its resident population.
Fifty years of neglect, abuse and abandonment by the city’s consumers, as well as individual prejudices and private market forces, have all worked against the downtown. It is the “hole-in-the-donut.”
A new optimism
Fortunately, over the last 20 years or so this trend has begun to shift and today there is optimism. There is a chance to re-invent downtown, which recently has been spurred on by the new McEwen School of Architecture and the anticipated Francophone centre for the arts, Place des Arts.
The original concept for the amalgamation as the new City of Greater Sudbury was to recognize Sudbury Basin’s historical settlements as a constellation of units, “a community of communities.” Revisiting this notion of a constellation may be an opportunity to redefine the way we view the city, away from the conflicts that pit urban versus suburban that perpetuates a negative attitude toward the downtown. Replacing the status quo with the idea of a cluster of complementary village/neighborhoods centered on a common downtown may be an idea whose time has come.
The planner’s term of CDB or “central business district” generally applies to the downtown, but as the name implies, while it maybe central, it need not be the only centre. The concept is for a transformation of the mono-centric city into a multi-centered “Greater” Sudbury. It’s an appealing notion to have a geographically sprawling Greater Sudbury becoming a cluster of village /neighborhoods in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. (Think of Toronto’s many varied neighbourhoods.)
It’s an idea that allows for village units to be densified for a “20-minute neighborhood.” That is village/neighbourhood units in which every home is within minutes of travel time of jobs, shops, cafes, schools, parks and community facilities.Village /neighbourhoods where people can celebrate their own unique identity and “work closer to where they live,” a place where walking, biking, and public transit would be the preferred means of transportation, and motorized vehicles used on rare occasions.
‘A city within a park’
Such an idea of a multi-centered city, however, would require an attractive and efficiently run public transit system linking the network of densified, self-sufficient transit-centered village /neighbourhoods to each other and to the central downtown. The village/neighbourhoods area for walkablity would approximate the geographical area of a mile square township concession, encouraged to be clearly defined by applying appropriate land–use regulations and municipal tax policies.
The city envisioned as a constellation would have its urban areas as a ‘string of pearls” large and small, within the context of an overall open space or rural land in agriculture or as wood-lots and forest for a “city within a park.”
It’s an idea that’s in tune with the “New Economy,” the engine of which is knowledge. Workers, in the knowledge economy are often called the “creative class,” are generally young, highly educated and mobile. They are typically employed in occupations that add value through knowledge and creativity such as writers, artists, educators.
A constellation city would have suburbanites out of their cars enjoying environmental benefits, better health outcomes, improved local amenity, and stronger local communities and reduced traffic congestion all qualities associated with the “New Economy” and the sensibilities of the twenty-first century. It’s an idea right for the times.
Heritage Square
Last year was our sesquicentennial. It’s a timely opportunity to pay homage to our past and the role that the downtown has played over the years in Sudbury’s history.
Imagine the possibilities of re-purposing the CPR (VIA) Station as a Museum of the Downtown that highlights the lives and events that make up our story as a community.
The CPR Station is a legacy of Reeve Stephen Fournier, Sudbury’s first elected head of council, who at the first meeting with the newly elected council in 1893 adopted a resolution “getting after” the CPR for a new station. It was realized 13 years later in 1906.
Together with Sudbury Arena, a legacy of Mayor Bill Beaton and built in 1951, re-purposed as Sudbury’s cultural/arts hub with the proposed central library, concert hall and an addition of an art gallery facing the constant light of the north overlooking Memorial Park.
This is complemented with a new arena and a parking garage.
These important “city-makers” are clustered, defining a proposed Heritage Square/Place du Patrimonies.
Facing south it would be a sun pocket that would include the Farmer’s Market and would connect Sudbury Theatre Centre and perhaps a Seniors / Folk Arts Centre off Shaughnessy Street. All of which becomes a grand overall pedestrian precinct (shown in yellow in above image) within walking distance of the Sudbury Transit Centre. The precinct extends from the heritage CPR railway station and Elgin Greenway on the south to Brady Street on the north with Elgin looped around to meet Brady, and to Paris Street on the east.
True to downtown as a walkable neighbourhood, the square is pedestrian accessible from all parts of Greater Sudbury via public transit.
Just image a grand public celebratory place, yes, a place where all the public festivals, Northern Lights Festival, July 1st, Memorial Day, public demonstrations and more could be held.
It’s all possible, it can happen. It just needs the combined efforts and public support along with city council, and the combined will of the Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown BIA, and the Downtown Village Development Corporation.
Arthur Peach and Oryst Sawchuk are partners in the architectural firm Sawchuk Peach Associates.
