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Perth's crystal palace

Seizing an opportunity for architectural recycling and creative community development

by STEWART J
Perth's crystal palace Rideau Street Transit Mall opened in 1980 with great fanfare intended to make adjacent retail fronting onto both sides of Rideau Street more attractive and provide weather protection year round for customers and bus passengers. Instead, it was considered claustrophobic, deteriorating into a dingy, smelly tunnel, killing the life of the street, and having the opposite of its intended effect. Within five years, nearly every one of the businesses along this section of Rideau failed. Businesses realized that the only way to revive the street was to get rid of the covered walk; in 1993, the city finally contracted to demolish the Rideau Street Transit Mall. Credit: Postcard of Rideau St. with the bus mall in front of Ogilvy’s.
Published in November 2016 - Page 25

What do you do with an obsolete bus mall? If you are the City of Ottawa’s Rideau Street BIA, owners of the former Rideau Street Transit Mall, you tender a demolition contract. However, in the environmental spirit of creative reuse, a small town arts organization addressed the old adage “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure” – creating a community focus as part of their plans for a new theatre. Salvaged portions of the ill-starred

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