Post-Soviet Dresden: Filling in the Gaps

A mural gracing the side of the Kulturpalast is a conspicuous reminder of Dresden’s recent history

Like many cities in the former DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, in English ‘German Democratic Republic’ or simply East Germany), post-Second World War Dresden followed principles of urban governance that were distinctly opposed to those that had reigned for centuries beforehand. The Soviet method of planning emphasized using cities as units of production and valued the creation of new residential blocks, spacious boulevards, and symbolically-charged civic spaces. The Soviet ethos also disregarded urban manifestations of past grandeur, and indeed disregarded many of the principles that underlaid the traditional development of German cities.

The tragedy that was played out in the city at the end of the Second World War is all too well known: the Imperial capital, with its meticulously-kept Baroque Altstadt (‘Old City’), was flattened by Allied bombs in the final year of the war, killing tens of thousands of civilians. What is not often communicated, however, is how the Soviet regime managed (or, rather, mismanaged) the reconstruction of the city in the postwar era, and how the city is only now patching up the holes in its urban fabric.

A former Soviet parking garage being redeveloped into a dense, live/work development

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The Cavern Quarter

When you mention the name Liverpool to a non-Brit, they are likely to think of one of two things: Liverpool Football Club, whose worldwide brand power is second only to their Premiership rivals Manchester United, or The Beatles (indeed, mention the city’s name to a typical North American and they will likely only make a connection with the latter).

Liverpool, the perennial underdog of British cities and the butt of many jokes from Londoners, is this year’s European Capital of Culture — far from being just a city of football and youth gangs. Large-scale redevelopment projects carrying designs by such ‘Starchitects’ as Norman Foster and Cesar Pelli are flowering up all along its UNESCO World Heritage Site-designated waterfront. Liverpool is hoping that its cultural coronation by the EU will shake the image that many hold of the city — that of a rough-and-tumble, crumbling port town where the locals speak a perplexing dialect, Scouse, which can be best described as a cross between Gaelic and Swedish.

Today’s Liverpool is more akin to the boomtown of the 19th century, when the steamship lines and related merchant industries held great sway in the city. However, despite the attention that Liverpool has recently been receiving for its cultural and economic revitalization, the city will perhaps always be umbilically tied to the fab name of its most famous export.

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Heritage Planning in St. John’s

St. John’s unique architectural vernacular is something that must be seen in person to be truly appreciated. No other large Canadian city has the degree or extent of revitalized heritage buildings that central St. John’s has, and the fact that the City of St. John’s fostered huge improvements to its built heritage beginning in a time when the province was at its economic nadir is a testament to the city’s innovative methods of heritage planning.

St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, home to just under 200,000 people, was one of the first Canadian cities to enact heritage planning legislation. In the 1970s, the city’s downtown core was in a highly deteriorated condition. Buildings were underused, clad in makeshift materials, and seen as a liability for people who wished to develop anew.

Despite the poor economics of the time, the city was not immune to large-scale commercial development: in the late 1960s, the twelve-storey Royal Trust Building took down a stand of traditional buildings on Water Street, and in the early 70s, the similarly-styled Atlantic Place cleared three blocks of St. John’s downtown building stock.

Following the changing values of the era — heritage issues were beginning to appear on the national radar, and Heritage Canada was founded in 1973 — the city issued a study into the creation of a heritage by-law. This by-law was approved in 1977, creating the first major heritage district in the nation and enabling the Heritage Advisory Committee, who still today act as intermediaries to council.

The city also lifted disincentives to homeowners who wished to renovate their older downtown properties and worked with new local heritage foundations to establish design guidelines that would restore the unique architectural character that the city accumulated in the years following the devastating fire of 1892.

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Perth, Ontario: A Case in Heritage Planning

Perth is a town of approximately 6,000 permanent residents situated about an hour’s drive southwest of Ottawa on the Tay River, a tributary of the Rideau Canal and Waterway. Several times voted the “Prettiest town in Ontario”, its summer daytime population booms as cottagers and tourists from throughout the eastern part of the province flock to the town to enjoy a stroll along the Tay River, to browse its unique shops, or to have a bite to eat in one of its dozens of restaurants, pubs, and cafés. Some must come to Perth just to escape the flashy, oversized, and overadvertised world of their everyday; to be surrounded by Perth’s wealth of well-preserved heritage structures, many of which date to soon after the town’s inception.

Perth, named for its sister city in Scotland from where many of its initial settlers arrived, was founded in 1816 as one of three military settlements in the region established after the War of 1812. Its mathematical square-grid layout with a central parade route (now Gore Street) reflects the influence that British military planners had on the town’s development (similar layouts can be found throughout Canada with varying degrees of success — Halifax, Nova Scotia and Kingston, Ontario were both established on military rectilinear grids).

In the 1820s, the town became the centre for administrative, judicial, and social activities in the Bathurst district, and this attracted a number of settlers to the area. Perth still has a a number of well-preserved Georgian buildings from its early settlement period, including several magnificent residences, not least of which being McMartin House, built in 1830 in the American Federalist style by a wealthy expatriate.

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Ottawa: A Monumental Dilemma

As the capital of Canada, Ottawa is endowed with numerous statues and monuments. Most of them grace the public spaces that surround the city’s federal buildings, museums, and sites of national importance. One of the most prominently-situated of these statues depicts the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who traveled past the future site of Ottawa in 1613 — two centuries before a settlement of any significance was established. Champlain who is now immortalized at the crest of Nepean point, a limestone outcropping that overlooks the Ottawa River, Gatineau, and Parliament Hill. The statue has graced this strategic site since 1915 and depicts an ‘eroicly-posed Champlain grasping his astrolabe — a navigational device that he famously lost during a portage up-river near Renfrew — as if to say, “Aha! There it is!”

But the majestic presence of the statue overshadows the controversies that have surrounded it in recent years. Historians have quibbled over Champlain’s astrolabe technique, insisting that he is holding the device upside-down (although, as my imagination leads me to believe, if the statue depicts Champlain in the midst of a “eureka!” moment, having just recovered the lost object and appraising its condition, it wouldn’t matter which way he is holding it). However, the most controversial part about the statue does not concern Champlain himself, but a Native scout that used to adorn the monument’s pedestal.

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Morning Coffee: Grounded

Manhattan, April 21, 2007: “My nose is going haywire this morning. Perhaps this is because when I travel I have to put off my morning brew until I can get from my hotel to a decent coffeehouse. Am I ever glad, then, that I discovered Grounded.”

I am a coffee fiend. Each day I venture out from work for an extended lunch break at my local coffeehouse, where I ruminate over a Fair Trade, organically-grown dark roast blend, a newspaper, and a notebook. Naturally, when I travel, I do not like to give up this daily routine. However, since finding a good independent coffeehouse is often left to word-of-mouth recommendation, I am sometimes forced to suffice with below-grade medium roast coffee or to chance it on espressos made by inexperienced baristas.

While my previous coffeehouse experiences in New York have been hit-and-miss, I seem to have stumbled over a great, unpretentious spot to enjoy a brew and gather my thoughts between bouts of aggressive phototouring. Lodged into a fifteen foot-wide crack between Victorian buildings on Jane Street in the West Village, Grounded is difficult to find amidst the brownstone rowhouses that fold over one another in this maze of a neighbourhood. To this travelling Canadian, though, it appeared as an oasis — an independent coffeehouse in the Village that serves fair trade coffee, isn’t overpriced, and hasn’t been overrun by scenesters or stroller moms.

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Capital Housing

Like many other cities across Canada, Ottawa experienced a boom during the 1880s and 1890s, which persisted well into the 1930s. Much of the housing that has become characteristic to the the nation’s capital was built during this period, and most of these homes still exist. As in Toronto and Montreal, the choice building material for Ottawa’s first permanent homes was brick. While Toronto and Montreal both had large quantities of apartment buildings, though, Ottawa’s housing stock was comprised mostly of relatively large single-family homes that were often later subdivided into apartments.

The photo above shows three 1910-era multi-family homes with typical Ottawa design features: the prominent front balcony, and in the case of the two houses on the right, “barn roof” detail. Such homes were usually built to house two families—one on the upper two floors and another on the bottom floor—but many have since been subdivided into three or four-apartment units.

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O-Train Follies

Recently-elected Ottawa mayor Larry O’Brien and his new council narrowly decided in a vote at City Hall yesterday to alter the city’s proposed North-South light rail line. In a move to “fix, not nix” the LRT project, O’Brien and company decided to keep most of the proposed route intact, but discard the downtown stretch. As was the original plan for the old proposal, construction on the new route will begin immediately. O’Brien recommended that an Environmental Assessment begin for a rapid transit tunnel underneath the downtown core; a process that could take up to three years to complete.

Only three weeks into his new job as Mayor, multimillionaire O’Brien and the City were under legal pressure by the LRT contractors of Siemens/PCL/Dufferin to begin construction on the route. The City would have faced a minimum $60-million lawsuit had construction on the project not begun by December 15th. O’Brien said that he would use the estimated $70-million in savings from the discarded downtown alignment to improve rapid transit in other areas of the city and to move forward with the proposed East-West light rail line.

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Morning Coffee: Bridgehead

Fair trade coffee has entered the mainstream. Far from its old image as the fringe product that one could only obtain through a shifty-eyed neo-hippie local roaster, fair trade coffee is now recognized by the majority of the world’s large coffee corporations, and some coffeehouses and roasters have worked with the movement to succeed in business while spreading awareness about socially-responsible consumer products.

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Sparks Street Blues

To Ottawans, the ongoing saga of Sparks Street is somewhat of a tragicomedy. The street, which runs parallel to Wellington Street just one block south of Parliament Hill, exists mostly as a pedestrian mall, with vehicular access limited from Kent Street in the West to Elgin Street in the East. During its prime from the 1880s to the mid-twentieth century, Sparks Street was the commercial hub of the nation’s capital. Several of the nation’s top banks established central branches along the street to serve the city’s booming business class, and the street was home to local department stores who competed with others across the Canal in Lowertown. Sparks Street is endowed with over thirty buildings of historical significance – perhaps the highest concentration of such landmarks in Ottawa, and a reminder of the city’s heyday.

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