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Posted Jan 14, 2012, 4:05 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Windsor, On.
Posts: 1,861
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Here's a couple feel good article about Windsor in 2012, listing the scheduled developments downtown and another article talking about a future museum for Windsor, a proper museum hopefully, finally.
Quote:
Vander Doelen: 2012, the year Windsor re-builds
The next 12 months are going to be a time of major activity and big changes for Windsor, with more than a dozen projects transforming parts of the city.
City council’s approval this week of a developer’s plan to turn Windsor Arena into a $12 million downtown market mall is only the tip of quite an iceberg: by the middle of this summer there will be construction and redevelopment projects going on in every corner of the city.
Even without the $1.4-billion Windsor-Essex Parkway project — and a new international bridge too? Dare we hope for that, now that Matty Moroun has been in jail? — Windsor is going to be a construction hot spot.
By this June, ground will be broken on so many projects that, I humbly predict, national media attention will focus here along the lines of “What the heck is going on in Windsor?”
The first of these transformative projects started very modestly on Friday, when contractors started work to turn the former Palace Theatres into the new home of The Windsor Star. It’s not a big dollar project, certainly, but developers tell me that The Star’s move will spark other reinvestments and new tenants for downtown landlords.
The Star’s move will also lead to the eventual redevelopment of its current 100-year-old home on Ferry Street into a school of social work for the University of Windsor. That project is not expected to start this year, although the U will take over the former downtown Armouries this summer for redevelopment as a faculty of music.
In February, contractors will begin work on the city’s much-anticipated $73 million aquatic centre. That project is going to change the city by bringing thousands of kids and their families into the core, not to mention tourists, and adults drawn to its new public health club.
But the aquatic centre will also fill a major hole in the city centre — the empty blocks which have blighted the core for 25 years. It might also jump-start residential development on nearby blocks owned by developer Shmuel Farhi, who’s also got one eye on the new university population moving into the downtown.
By March work should be underway to turn the ground floor of the Art Gallery of Windsor into the new home of the city’s main downtown library branch. By then city council will also have in its hands a report on building a new community museum, which won’t be located far from those two institutions and could conceivably see a construction start this year.
In March, work also begins rebuilding one of the worst eyesores to assail the senses of newcomers arriving in Windsor either by air or from Highway 401: reconstructing and widening 2.5 kilometres of Walker Road from the airport to the E.C. Row Expressway at a cost of $30 million.
That strip of bad road and its leaning poles and cheesy gutters has looked like a hick town commercial slum since the day I moved to Windsor 30 years, one month, and one day ago. But heck, now that’s it’s going to be fixed, who’s counting?
Tenders for the Walker job are out right now. New sewers will be installed first and the work will take the rest of the year. Half the money comes to Windsor from the province as part of parkway funding to fix border traffic.
In March, work is also supposed to start on the first phase of the $36.7 million Vista project, which will rebuild 16 kilometres of Riverside Drive into a fully landscaped scenic route with traffic circles. Council is expected to approve Vista in February; work will last until June.
In April work should begin on the new downtown market, whose concept drawings I think are stunning. I know, I know, concept drawings always look great. But so do the buildings King Developments Ltd. recently had a hand in, including St. Clair College’s new health sciences building and its downtown Mediaplex.
I think the market design created by husband-and-wife team of James and Leigh Ann King has the potential to change the way Windsor thinks of itself — particularly the way we think of our dowdy downtown.
The King market could also mark a turning point in private investor sentiment: it’s the first retail investment in the downtown in many years.
By May, work will start on another roadway eyesore: rebuilding the country intersection of Cabana and Provincial roads. It’s going to cost $9 million to rebuild that antiquated traffic mess, which has resulted in backups for years.
“Those are huge,” Mayor Eddie Francis says of the Walker Road and Cabana road improvements. He says you won’t recognize these public spaces after the bike paths, sidewalks and turn lanes go in, and two more gateways to the city will stop being ugly.
By late summer, but definitely by the fall, work begins on the $34.2 million reconstruction of the Windsor-Detroit Tunnel plaza, a joint project of the federal and provincial governments.
There will be other road work underway: a few million to rebuild Wyandotte Street between Walker Road and Olde Riverside; a few million more to cure the corduroy roadbed of Wyandotte West near the university.
A handful of private investments are coming too, the mayor hints. Remember the major financial services company thinking of locating in Windsor that I told you about last month?
It’s still on. Francis says he has other job-creation irons in the fire, too, but he can’t discuss them yet.
“It’s going to be a busy year,” Francis said Friday, with evident relish. “We’ve got some good things coming, a lot of things happening.”
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Quote:
Will Windsor's history finally go on display?
The frantic pace of asset development in Windsor will be cranked up yet another notch early next month with the unveiling of plans for a first-class downtown museum linked to the Art Gallery of Windsor and new central library.
With the ink barely dry on the $77-million aquatic centre contract and with the dust still settling from this week's stunning revelation of a $12-million private investment to transform Windsor Arena into an urban mall and farmer's market, Mayor Eddie Francis now has his sights trained on a new museum that would tell Windsor's colourful story and become another key piece of the downtown renaissance puzzle.
"The museum is the next priority. It will be huge for our downtown on top of the other investments. It offers a whole new opportunity for Windsor," said Francis of a museum plan being developed by Lord Cultural Resources, a Toronto-based consulting company that's been involved in more than 1,800 museum projects around the globe.
Lord Cultural, awarded a $95,000 contract last fall to conduct a museum feasibility study for council, will be at Mackenzie Hall on Feb. 2 to roll out its plans and get feedback from the community.
Francis, who described the museum as his primary 2012 objective, along with freezing taxes for another year, said if council likes the proposal it could have the green light by May or June and construction could begin either late this year or, more likely, in early 2013.
Francis said he can't provide details on how the museum would be funded but anticipates a significant federal contribution and believes the project will qualify for the long stalled Joseph Chimczuk's bequest, now in excess of $3 million. Plans for a transient marina, already budgeted, will be postponed once more. "We got elected because we're fiscally responsible. We're very balanced in our approach," said Francis of the anticipated howls of outrage over "runaway" spending.
The plan would see synergies created by physically linking the art gallery/central library with the new museum. One obvious potential location would be the former Docherty "hole in the ground" east of the gallery, which boasts a panoramic view of the riverfront.
The Windsor Community Museum, housed in a tiny but historically important home on Pitt Street, has been an embarrassment to Windsor for decades. I can't think of another Canadian city of this size that would allow its rich, diverse history to be stuffed into a postage stamp of a building, with most of the collection in storage because there's no room to display it.
Some rural townships have better facilities. Windsor, I've argued since the late 1980s, seemed determined to bury its past in either shame or apathy, often with the help of a bulldozer.
A museum worthy of Windsor is a great idea, I told Francis. Long overdue. But how on earth, on top of everything else, are we going to finance it?
It won't be a problem, Francis insisted. "We don't issue long-term debt," he said, and that will remain true with this project. The city's financing strategy will remain intact and taxes won't be increased to pay for the museum. He said he's confident, based on discussions with the feds, that funding will be available through the museum assistance program operated by the Department of Heritage and Citizenship. "They (the federal government) told us to go out and get an independent study done. I'm taking my direction from that." He said Windsor is the only city of its size in Canada that has been unable to tap federal cultural funds.
"This is not a one-off. This is all part of our strategic plan," said Francis of the museum project. He described it as "one of the final pieces we have left" in a strategy designed to make Windsor affordable and attractive to both current residents and those interested in moving to this region.
Cathy Masterson, the city's manager of cultural affairs, said the proposed plan involves a unique "hub and spoke" approach to celebrating Windsor's story. Instead of piling everything into one massive building, the downtown "hub" would be designed to create an appetite for further exploration with visitors directed to "spokes" that could include, among others, the distillery in Walkerville, an undetermined site in Sandwich, the downtown multicultural centre, the Serbian museum on the far east side, the transportation museum in greater Kingsville and the historic Gordon House in Amherstburg.
Masterson said she's just itching to see what Lord Cultural, which has delivered on projects ranging from South Australia to Ground Zero in New York, rolls out on Feb. 2.
She won't be alone.
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