Some Halloween decorations appearing in my suburban neighbourhood are not accenting the horror angle. All things considered, a Halloween with a light touch when it comes to horror would be greatly appreciated. Since the appearance of COVID-19, we have quite enough scary stuff in our lives already.
It is just a little store located in a somewhat out-of-the-way location. Oh, there's a lot of vehicle traffic in the area but getting even a small percentage of that traffic to stop is quite the feat. But the little grocery store, lunch stop, butcher shop and woman's clothing boutique with gift shop keeps going year after year.
I wonder how many other customers are like us, my wife and me, and simply want to support the underdog? Truth be told, if that is what we think we are doing, we may be wrong. We may need it as much as it needs us.
Today, we stopped by the little store so my wife could buy a fall outfit. While she shopped, I picked up some Polish perogies, some English crisp bread and some Italian dried beans soup mix before we both left with cups of hot pumpkin spice latte -- move over Starbucks.
In writing this I may have revealed to myself why the little store is still in business: creativity. It carries such an eclectic inventory of quality stuff that the place has made itself worth making a stop. Considering how stores come and go with great regularity in the large malls, maybe our local retail entrepreneurs located in the malls could learn from the little oh-so-creatively stocked store in the middle of nowhere.
Does almost daily rain keep the fall, at least the fall colours, at bay? It's chilly at night. The days are certainly much shorter. And yet the trees are late showing their fall colours this years. Oh well, it is easy to be patient when one is getting old, circulation is failing and the Canadian winter is running late. A few extra weeks of fall weather is fine.
Oh, and about the recent rain., yes heavy, frequent rain is said by some to delay the appearance of coloured leaves and when the leaves do turn, they may be a bit washed out compared to much drier, more drought like, late summers and early falls.
London's old streetscapes are disappearing bit by bit year after year.
When it was built the glass-skinned tower in the background was the tallest building in London. It was all of 26 stories. Today, it is an also-ran.
Downtowns were once more than "destinations." Folk both lived and worked downtown. Factory workers and bankers worked in the same area, sometimes on the same block.
Downtown is actually doing a bit better than many imagine but it is not doing as well as many would like. Whether or not all the recent changes, too often extreme changes in planning decisions, will bring vibrancy back to the core is still an open question. It is beginning to look like a lot of Londoners do not see the downtown as the all important beating heart of the city. These Londoners do not share the city planner's dreams.
My doctor's office is in a two story walk-up. Her office is on the first floor. In the basement, there is a small pharmacy. Accessing the front door proved very difficult for many patients and so today there is a very long entrance ramp at the rear of the building.
If I had to describe the two building infill development, I"d call it ugly and not all the practical. The distant building, a small apartment building, appears to have problems dispersing humidity. The surface of the white bricks on the side of the building is flaking, leaving ugly, rough, exposed red brick.
The near building has a small roof jutting out from above the front entrance. The roof is too small to provide much protection from rain but it is large enough to be struck by delivery trucks. Its days are numbered.
Is this really the best we can do when trying to maximize land use in the city? Surely infill can look attractive.
When it looked like Reservoir Hill would not support a multi-story apartment building, something had to give. It was the hill. It certainly wasn't going to be the developer who removed the offending part of the historic hill to safely erect his high-rise apartment on the cleared land.
It is one of the largest, most complex retaining walls I have ever seen. It is three tiers high with each tier possibly taller than any single retaining wall in the London area. It is surely among the largest, highest, deepest retaining walls in the province.
This wall is quite the accomplishment. Much smaller walls in the neighbourhood, ones not three feet high holding back a comparatively small amount of earth collapse regularly. Holding back the earth from a hill is damn hard. So far, the developer's wall has succeeded where many believed he would fail.
The construction of the apartment building dominating this image was accomplished over strong opposition mounted by many concerned Londoners. The rise of land, known as Reservoir Hill, was the site of a skirmish during the War of 1812 which marked the deepest penetration by American raiders into the British controlled territory to be known as Canada.
200 years later a second battle of Reservoir Hill was fought but this time between Londoners and a well known developer. Building a high density apartment building on a historic hill overlooking Springbank Park struck many as simply wrong. They also had some solid engineering worries.
For one thing, it was argued that land was not suitable for such a development. Supporting the weight of a massive apartment building could cause a catastrophe if the right measures were not taken to ensure safety. The protests failed and the building went up and the right measures to make all work were put into place; the hill, the historic rise of land, came down where the apartment went up.
The apartment was constructed on solid land on a site carved out of the hill. What remains of the high hill is held in place by an erosion-controlling wall. Concerns about the site safely holding a building of the proposed
size, concerns about grading and for the potential of serious erosion were all rendered non applicable by removing the land -- all except the erosion concerns. Erosion-control walls have a checkered rate of success. That said, the wall is holding up very well.
Blog posts were written, petitions circulated and protests staged at city hall and all to no avail. For more info, read Reservoir Hill: an uphill battle.
