Lansdowne Park sits in central Ottawa like a penniless dowager, with a single building of architectural distinction, a broken-down football stadium, a grimy hockey arena, scattered green space and acres of parking lots, backing onto the Rideau Canal, a World Heritage site.
What ought to be one of Canada's urban jewels is a blight that stands in depressing contrast to, say, Yaletown and False Creek in Vancouver, Crombie Park and the Distillery District in Toronto, the riverfront redevelopment in Calgary, or parts of Old Montreal.
Lansdowne's beckoning bleakness has defeated Ottawa politicians for decades, a not unusual situation for a city whose multiple layers of government and instinctive inertia often stymie progress. Until now.
This week, after months of public consultations, much local community anger, design reviews, extensive studies, duelling consultants' reports and political debate, Ottawa City Council voted 15-9 to approve a massive, multiyear redevelopment of Lansdowne.
The penniless dowager will never look the same, but whether the aims of the private developers who came to the city with a plan and those of the city will produce a gem or a lemon won't be known for years.
The essence of the redevelopment is to restore the football stadium with 24,000 seats, which would mean the return of the Canadian Football League to Ottawa where, it should be remembered, the sport failed twice. Also essential are the creation of about 360,000 square feet of retail space, the preservation of the only building of architectural note (the Aberdeen Pavilion), a farmer's market for local producers, additional green space, and residential buildings as tall as 12 storeys.
Political hell hath no fury like a local neighbourhood aroused. So from the moment that three local developers proposed the Lansdowne redevelopment (a sole-sourced proposal), residents of the nearby Glebe and Ottawa South were in full howl against the plan.
They have chipped away at details - too much traffic and noise, negative impact on existing local retailers, too much density, not enough green space. A downtown shopping mall, they called it, in part because one of the developers has built suburban shopping malls of customary aesthetic ugliness.
Others said the city would be financially hosed, that the developers were getting a sweetheart deal for "public" lands that should remain in public hands. City officials and consultants repeatedly refuted these claims.
Opponents and proponents were dug in from day one. The vote months ago to authorize further study of Lansdowne - 15-9 - was the same that gave final approval this week. Opponents, still determined, have threatened unspecified legal action.
Pressed for an alternative, opponents argued process and end product. They would have preferred an open competition, rather than the sole-sourced bid, although an open competition would have produced an unholy row in council about how the land should be redeveloped, let alone the process of open competition.
Fundamentally, the local neighbourhood opponents wanted no redevelopment, but rather an urban park, largely for their use, which would run against the city's sensible desire - one shared by planners across Canada - to intensity downtowns, especially along arterial roads.
When pressed, they offered a much scaled-down version of redevelopment (limited housing and 100,000 square feet of retail) that made such little financial sense that no private interests would proceed. The key to successful urban redevelopment in Canada has been private interests working in tandem with enlightened planners backed by strong urban bylaws.
If Ottawa really needs a central park - the city is already well-endowed with green space - it should get the federal government to hand over the Experimental Farm that eats up huge space that few residents actually use. Turning the farm into a serious urban park would be a better idea than growing corn, raising pigs and sheep, and fattening cows on prime urban land.
Lansdowne was the wrong site for an urban park. The relentless deterioration of the site, combined with its generalized ugliness, had to be changed at some point.
A very strong design team of architects, hired by the city from outside Ottawa, has worked with the developers and improved the original proposal. Do uncertainties remain about how Lansdowne will emerge, and how it will affect the local neighbourhoods and the entire city? Yes. Is the plan less than an imaginary ideal? Yes.
Will it be a huge improvement on the status quo? Yes.