Lush Victoria Park is oblivious to the disarray a few blocks up. Ninety thousand people live within walking distance of downtown, on expensive leafy streets and in poorer clapboard neighbourhoods. Gradually, they are coming out of their dwellings and revisiting a downtown they had written off as a disaster. The Princess Diana fund-raiser at city hall is only one drawing card. It is neither the beginning nor the end of a labour-intensive exercise to restore an exhausted downtown.
Chronology becomes hazy when multiple partners and projects are involved.
At the outside, it started about eight years ago at the end of the heady '80s. Attention to the downtown intensified. Public forums were held and partnerships formed among police, councillors, business owners, residents and the arts community. In 1993, a new city hall with a public square was built on King Street to draw residents to the core. Two years later, the city struck a mayor's task force on downtown and a downtown development team.