Dear Editor
Certainly the parkade is an eyesore. But as a member of Canada's aging population I beg Mayor Cote and city council (fellow baby boomers) look in the mirror and ask yourselves: Is demolition the best cure for old age and ugliness? Every morning since the age of 50 I wake up and pray to be repurposed. I have to learn to do with what I have (and make it beautiful) instead of continually paying for what I can't afford. The earth is in its death throws and we want to cart tons of rubble to the dump - disturbing whatever ecosystem dares exist between the railroad tracks and the truck crossing - with another utopian vision.
Two senior professors of architecture and urban design at UBC's School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture this week, in a public letter to council, offered to make the parkade a special project for their student's next year - and we want to ignore such expertise and demolish the parkade before they can advise us? Sorry: we booked the operation two years in advance so it has to go ahead! Two architects, two engineers and a doctor recently informed us the cancer is in remission. Do we have to operate, Doc? Just because we planned it?
Frankly I doubt a few trees and some grass beside a truck route and railroad tracks (sandwiched between heritage buildings and new 45-storey waterfront towers) will be anything more than a place for people to pee.
The noise and the air polution are caused by trucks and trains - two problems that are not going away; neither are they remediated by the city's proposed solution of partial deconstruction.
How much polution will be generated by the demolition?
Let's refurbish, recycle and reuse the old parkade. Give the old girl a chance - she was considered an architectural marvel in the 1950s - to be beautiful again.
Craig Ruttle, Antique Alley, New Westminster
