WHITBY FREE PRESS, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28,1987, PAGE6 "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." - Thomas Jefferson Advise an TOWN PLANNING PART Il: COMMERCIAL REDEVELOPMENT Architecture is the design of individual buildings; planning concerns how those buildings interact - with each other, with public areaslike streets, sidewalks and parks, and with the people who use them. Planning is about the aesthetics of a community - how it looks, how it feels and how it functions. It is something that concerns every citizen of the community whether they know it or not. Many of-the people who have beerr attending the Downtown Secondary Plan meetings have a hard time visualizing the effect of proposals brought forward by the planning department. Not surprisingly, they react vigorously to individual concerns like a one-way through street past THEIR front door or a condominium in THEIR backyard, but when it comes to general concepts like increased or decreased densities or general traffic patterns, their response, if any, is a lot less specific - eight storeys is too high, but by how much? Trying to visualize what a particular building would look like in a particular location is not easy. Shortly after the new clinic, across Centre Street from All Saints' Church, was announced, this paper published a picture which showed how the building would impact on its surroundings. Working with what little information we had, we produced a composite rendering which I believe was a fair representation - only time will tell. The decision to prepare that picture followed the discovery that nobody in the planning department had considered its effect on the buildings around it. For those who don't already know it, I think that building is a huge mistake both for the Town and the developer. I think that after it is built, people will see how bad it is and will look on it as an example of how Whitby's lack of planning controls on its downtown buildings has failed us. I was quite surprised, indeed shocked, when shortly after it was announced, I asked the planning director about the impact the new clinic would have on All Saints' Church. He hadn't thought of that. I asked him how high the building was - he didn't know. "How high is the church?" - he didn't know. "What will happen to the historic Robert Perry house?" - he didn'tknow. When asked at a public meeting how far the building was back from the road, the planners didn't know. They had considered it only as building on a piece of property - no consideration was given to its immediate surroundings. In fairness to the planners, the zoning of that property would have allowed an even worse building and since the proposed building met all the existing zoning requirements, its impact on the surrounding buildings was irrelevant - which simply indicates that the present zoning in the downtown gives the Town vir- tually no planning control. This in turn means that existing property owners have no guarantees that neighboring properties will not be redeveloped in an un- sympathetic and detrimental manner. . From a planning perspective, that building should never have been considered for the downtown. Virtually all of Whitby's doctors currently have offices within eight blocks of the Four Corners - this clinic simply increases that concentration. It will also create parking problems (Have you ever parked at the Oshawa Clinic?) Why the developer chose to locate on high priced downtown land instead of (for instance) a half mile north on Brock St. seems incomprehensible - but they did and the Town lacked the planning controls which might have influenced that decision. As construction begins on that particular building, it is evident that it doesn't even have a basement (it must be cheaper that way). In an historically sensitive area, a four-storey building is being built whose bulk could have been reduced by at least a quarter simply by putting a basement under it. Whitby needs to give itself the planning authority to control such developments and the downtown secondary plan is the ideal time to do it. The Town should set height limits, set backs and sight angles which will give it the room to negotiate better developments. The Town should be able to deal with developers from a position of strength - unless it has a strong bargaining position, negotiations will continue to be rather one-sided and the whole community will be the loser. The zoning bylaws should be such that undesirable developments would be- come uneconomic. For example, the property where the new clinic is being built had tremendous potential if it was combined with the car lot beside it. Required setbacks on the clinic property could have made its separate redevelopment uneconomic. Even combining the car lot property with the bowling alley proper- ty behind it would have been better, but the car lot has a five-year lease that would have had to be bought out. So Whitby gets anotherbargain basement, fast- buck development. In contrast to the new clinic, several other developments utilize and enhance the existing scale of the downtown buildings. Over the past few years, several older buildings have been converted to commercial uses - houses have become restaurants, the old blanket factory has become a furniture store (Woodcraft), another old house on Colborne St. became Ruffles and the Terrace on Byron Street has been restored to high-class commercial use. But undoubtedly the most imaginative such development is Pearson Lanes on Mary Street. Bill Little, Dav.e Stapleford and many others are investing in the character of these older buildings and creating high-class commercial developments which blend with and compliment their surroundings. New construction such as the Whitby Lanes development on Brock N. of Dun- das and the professional complex on the old arena property, both by Steve Wagner have also been designed to blend with their surroundings. These are the kinds of development Whitby needs downtown. It needs to develop planning criteria which will allow it to control what gets built where. Whitby has a long history of tightly controlling development of its new sub- divisions - why not use the same planning principles in the downtown? If Whitby is a well-planned community, shouldn't that planning be up front, on Main Street, where everybody can see it and be proud of it? NEXT WEEK: THE RESIDENTIAL AREAS. issent WITH OUR FEET UP By Bill Swan If there is anything Lem Greaserack loves it is an audience. Even little Georgie Porgue there, the one sitting by the rack of new tires: he's an audience, even. He may be only ten; he may be only pausing at the garage this late January afternoon because he's cold after delivering only half of his papers and he doesn't really want to deliver the rest. But he is an audience. Georgie sips a Pepsi through a straw and mun- ches on a Milky Way. Lem Greaserack looks up from the depth of the oil change pit, his face grotesque from the single naked bulb hanging from the tail pipe of the Honda. "Did I ever tell you," Lem begins, "about how Yuppies got to be Yuppies." This is not a question. Georgie slurps Pepsi and shakes his head. He is ready to grab at anything to postpone his journey to the Arctic of a January evening. Didn't think so. Well, it all happened back hun- dreds, thousands, millions, maybe forty years ago. And the world was doing ever so nicely, thank you, when 'Why a Fine Howdee-yuh-Do', a baby is born. "Not any baby. This is a Boomer, called Baby. That's right. Baby Boomer. "Now the first thing that Baby Boomer said was, 'I want a brass name plate and bronzed baby boots and lots of television and free love and the peace movement and...'. "But of course he couldn't have all these right away, because most hadn't been invented yet. Like television. So the previous generation went out and invented television. And subdivisions. And two-car garages. And outta sight mortgages. Or at least, back then Baby Boomer's parents thought the mor- tgage was outta sight. Little did they know, eh?" Lem tries to wink at Georgie, who is by now finished his pop. Instead he gets grease in his eye. Lem continues: "So soon Baby Boomer goes to school. By this time Baby Boomer is not alone. His numbers- or hers. they come in both sexes and some in between -- are legion. He cornes home from school that first day and his parents ask, 'What did you do in school today?' And Baby Boomer says, 'Destroy.' His words are prophetic. First he pillaged kin- dergartens. Then grade schools, bursting the boun- ds of physical space, sending school taxes soaring and driving parents to drink. "And the grade school people said to high schools, 'Beware this monster coming your way will destroy you forever.' But the high schools laughed. "Until Baby Boomer started high school, the numbers filling the space four times over and sen- ding teachers cowering in corners. "For by now Baby Boomer had discovered the power of sheer numbers. He and his classmates could demand anything and the adults would produce. 'I want options,' Boomer cried in high school. So basket weaving and fun creative stuff and tough thinking stuff like physics and math and Latin and provincial exams were out. "And the high schools, at the end of their destruc- tion, cried out to the universities, "Beware this monster coming your way will destroy you forever." But the universities laughed. But Boomer reached university and he didn't like tough learning and rules and stuff. So he got five million friends and they occupied the dean's office and shredded computer records because it was fun and said, 'We'll tell you what we want.' Finally, Boomer and his friends, having invented dope and dropping out and free love and organie farming, and having destroyed kindergarten, grade school, high school and universities, set out to the job market. And destroyed that, too. "As a lark they destroyed marriage as an in- stitution. Now they're back taking their second crack at the housing market. Seen what houses are going for these days?" Lem turns to Georgie. But Georgie does not know. He does know it is past six o'clock, and he has to finish his papers. His folks need the money to help pay the mortgage. He heads out into the blizzard, thinking of the nice comfie link-semi with the brass lighting fixture outside, and the brass mail box, and the brass parents inside. In the auto pit, Lem doesn't even know his audience is gone. "Florida retirement. Then nur- sing homes. And funeral homes. Cemetery lots. That's a good place to put your money now, son. Cemetery lots. Another forty years there won't be enough space,..". . -