In the last few hours, Prairie Dog received multiple reports of a freaking metal table sitting in the middle of the freaking City Square Plaza roadway. The barricades are down and street is apparently open to traffic today — I took several photos of vehicles driving past the offending table — although the removable bollards were nowhere to be seen.
Who put the table there? Dunno. But it’s no surprise that citizens don’t know how to use the plaza. Its roadway is very badly marked — the bollards (when they’re there) are small and far from sufficiently obvious, the expensive Italian stone is the same colour in both the pedestrian and and traffic areas, and the space generally is a muddle of disparate elements that don’t coherently coalesce into a whole. The plaza was built without adequate public consultation over a couple of delay-filled years and underwent several changes mid-construction that probably didn’t help (the designing architect and the City are suing each other, actually).
This, people, is why good design is important: good design allows people to infer how a public space is to be used. Bad design leads to tables being set up in the middle of the street.
Ugh. This is one part of our beloved former mayor’s legacy he should leave off his resume.
FOOTNOTE: After photographing this (VERY) heavy metal table sitting in the middle of the road in this incoherently-designed plaza that makes no sense and is understood by no one*, Engaged Citizen Karen suggested we move the thing. Which we did, because it’s freaking dangerous to have zillion-pound metal tables in the middle of the road.
*I assume it was built in an ugly brutalist style at taxpayer expense to be the front lawn for a future Hill tower but there’s no evidence of that, that I’m aware of.
More photos after the jump.