GATEWAY TO CANADA
WINDSOR, ONTARIO
OUELLETTE AVENUE MALL
I’m not sure if I’ve ever posted this one before… If I have my apologies. After 6 years, it’s hard to keep track 🙂
I don’t have too much info on the background of this card. Obviously at one time there was a plan to turn Ouellette into a pedestrian mall. Nearly everywhere this was tried, it was a dismal failure.
Even in Detroit, Washington Boulevard was converted in the 1970’s into a pedestrian mall, prior to the Superbowl, the “mall” was ripped out and the boulevard restored.
In the drawing above, I note we’ve got the flagpoles and four globe light poles that are still in place. Not much has changed… Except all the people who look like their shopping… There’s not a lot of places to do that down there.
Crescent Lanes first opened on Ottawa Street in 1944 at 1055 Ottawa Street, opposite Lanspeary…
Above is a photo of the home of Mr & Mrs Oswald Janisse, located at…
in 1917 two Greek brothers Gus & Harry Lukos purchased a one story building on…
Photo from Google Streetview A long time reader sent me an email the other week…
An unremarkable end to a part of Windsor's history. The large vacant house at 841…
One for the lost Windsor files, is this house that once belonged to Joseph Reaume…
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And, ultimately, that poor planning comes from the mayor's office. The Mayor is elected to decide how much money to allocate to roads, he has the final say in how wide they are, he oversees city planning. He's the one who signs the bottom line. And for $140,000 a year, we deserve someone who knows what he's doing. As long as the rest of you keep electing crappy, incompetent mayors, we're gonna get crappy, incompetent planning. Get a better mayor that doesn't keep wasting taxpayer dollars to hinder market forces and has some common sense, and you may, in fact, have shopping in downtown and not have to deal with Toronto style bottlenecks whenever you need to get somewhere. Two more years.... But, it won't change... He'll still be there... The majority in Windsor are like sheep that keep supporting the status quo...
The present mayor seems to be responsible for every bad thing that ever happened in Windsor, did he chase Ford to Oakvill? Check your timeline he was not even born. this example is etreme but points out the abuse he gets. I did not vote for him the first time but did the last time, he has ideas and vision, something not often found in Windsor.
If you look back over the last fifty or sixtie years their was lots of blunders and waste.
The best explanation I've heard about why pedestrian malls inevitably fail is because there is never enough people living within walking distance to justify their existence. Even people who live in the center of town often need a car to get to the grocery store or work, but for some reason pedestrian malls seem to thrive quite nicely in many European countries.