Oddly, the demolition seems to be done at Lauzon & Tecumseh.
Cynical me, figured it was destined to be a parking lot for the WFCU Centre, but it appears to be some adaptive reuse going on…
It looks like it has been taken back to create to larger retail spaces on each end, joined together by a smaller, longer space? Hopefully there are tenants moving in. It will be interesting to see how this works out.
On a side note however, the old Lear/GM Trim site is now all leveled. It’s too bad the office building section couldn’t have been saved, it was a very cool modern design.
Enjoy the long weekend everyone.
The old Woolco is becoming a strip mall.That’s what I have heard through the grape vine.
There was a site plan that went before council back at the beginning of the year for this property. It will become a L shaped strip mall.
it’s interesting that commercial development keeps being added to the city. there was a study done recently (i think this year) that indicated that windsor was oversaturated with commercial spaces. I was at a public meeting a couple weeks back for the official plan and the planners/consultant put forth an idea that there should be a temporary slow down of commercial development to allow for existing vacancies to be filled and to have businesses invest in existing neighbourhoods and downtown. unfortunately no one from the public attended the meeting to offer an opinion on the idea.
This is technically not commercial space being added. The commercial space already exists and is being adapted to actually do something.
The layout of this reuse actually makes it have potential for some sort of artificial lifestyle center. However, I doubt that our developers would risk that. Imagine if they simply carved the bldg up to be U shaped with a town square public space in the middle, instead of only parking?
Imagine a small space in the center with a small stage or outdoor art exhibit space? Imagine some cafe’s in the frontage whose patio’s intertwine with such a space?
There’s a potential to reuse some of these “Ghost Boxes” in exciting ways, I just wish we had more exciting developers such as Dante Capaldi that would imagine these types of uses
I would take the artificial lifestyle cenrte any day over the plethora of parking lots downtown. Not to mention the entire lack of retail or diversification of our downtown businesses. Can anyone tell us why people would go downtown if we keep building more retail outside of core areas?
ME, why would anyone go downtown in the first place when there are no stores to shop at?
What about Shanfield’s?
The former St Thomas the Apostle church on Edgar near Lauzon was being torn down this morning.
This is an interesting reuse. These “grayfield” locations are notoriously difficult to re-tenant/re-purpose, so it’s nice to see something ‘creative’ being done with this space. As I’ve stated in the past, the old Woolco actually had a touch of style with the big flagstone flanks on the facade (this was common to Woolco’s of that vintage across North America)…and it should be noted that in the context of suburban mass merchandise stores, Woolco was way ahead of it’s time, building locations (like this one) that exceeded 100,000 square feet at a time when most discounters had smaller footprints.
i heard it was going to be the new train station….
Jim, they are not tearing down St. Thomas the Apostle. They were just removing the old roof panels the other day. The building will remain standing and is being converted to a funeral home. There’s a small drawing of what it’ll look like on the Families First website.
I heard the same rumour as rf that the old Woolco site was going to be the new Via train station.
i keep hearing this phrase the city’smaster plan can anybody out there explain just what that is because you never hear any details Wait i know !! the master plan is to get rid of all the heritage sites in windsor here’s something else to think about the Families First funeral Parlour is about 95% finished wait till the NIMBY’S get their hands on that
Does anyone have any pics of the old Woolco to post?