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It would be a perfect fit - perhaps add a real farmers market or some direct connection between agriculture and the grounds. Stampede has talked about being a year-round place for 30+years but never really pulling the trigger in a meaningful way, apart from replacement and upgrading of existing facilities, and now a small niche museum.
You’d think a farmers market would have been a key strategy. I go back to Philadelphia — a brilliant way to provide weekday infusions of customers to a market is convention facilities. Toronto the tourist area it stretches from the convention centre in the west to st Lawrence market in the east. A huge benefit. But they have the benefit of the long standing market.
Exactly - you'd think the Stampede would be all over this idea, it seems so synergistic to everything they say they want to be. In the time that Stampede has talked about being a year-round place, Eau Claire Market has come and gone that imagined something similar to downtown market. Eau Claire famously didn't pan out - not because the idea was wrong, but the location, programming and design was. It was yet another one-off scheme, no real synergies or alignments to anything. It was isolated, mostly inward looking, and unaligned to where people live and anything else they might do.
I suspect that we will 'need' to repurpose the main hall and main hall building of the Telus Convention Centre. The project will be paid off, it will be competing with the expanded BMO. It has parking, it has loading ramp access to various levels, it has train access, it is near the 'jobs' centre, it is right next to the civic gather spaces downtown, it has high ceiling heights to accommodate raising the floors for services, and adding services from above. It can trial pop ups reasonably easily without major infrastructure changes for a couple years to start on the cheap. Can start at a smaller scale and expand into the more over time, perhaps keeping some convention spaces operating as convention spaces.My partner and I were talking about where they could build a farmer's market in DT the other day, and we were thinking about Stampede Park and West Village (possibly where the Greyhound building stands)
If none of the buildings are given the Western Theme Park treatment, how will we ever achieve it?
This section of Stampede Park is kind of done isn't it? This one looking like a Old Western movie set would've felt out of place. The answer to your question is Stampede Trail but we know that isn't going to happen.
Beat me too it.
