Painted Lady - San Francisco CA
1.
1.
Summary of Sustainable Downtown and Waterfront Master Plan
July 11, 2011
Baker Street is one of the most healthy and vibrant main streets in British Columbia, due in large part to an effective revitalization planning initiative 30 years ago.
The downtown will become even more vibrant with modern multi-use buildings that showcase heritage assets...
Plan recommendations
- Adopt design guidelines to provide direction for ways to relate new construction to heritage
buildings.
2.
City of Nelson Official Community Plan Bylaw No. 3114, 2008
Development Permit Area Building Design Guidelines Page 41
3.2.29 Colour
Colour is one of the most powerful design tools. The colour schemes of individual buildings and aggregate appearance of various paint schemes within the overall streetscape are very important to the image of the Nelson Commercial Core. Most major paint manufacturers have developed special palettes of "Historic Colours" - it is recommended that reference to these colour charts be made in order to select appropriate colours and shades.
Guidelines
Colour schemes for individual buildings within the Nelson Development Permit Area(s) should be devised to respect the qualities of the community's heritage and the natural environment, and to work harmoniously with adjacent building colour schemes and the context of the entire streetscape.
LoJo - Victoria BC
3.
Proposal to Revitalize Revitalization
This proposal will look realistically at and challenge sustainability of a healthy and vibrant Baker Street as an impossibility - within the context of Nelson's current mindscape.
It will specifically present a new approach to relate new construction to heritage buildings, with colours - if chosen imaginatively/creatively - indeed being a most powerful design tool for Nelson to make a statement, to expres itself uniquely.
The proposal's aim is toward economic growth - possibly sustainable only through a conscious revitalization of the revitalization planning initiative 30 years ago. A second renaissance, if you will.
3a.
Baker Street - Reality Check
For about half of the year Baker Street can be colourfully alive: sun; appropriately dressed crowds; leafy (for a while flowering) trees; hanging flower baskets; many cars - a summer mood.
For the other half of the year - like right now - it is possible to see Baker as it really is: no sun means not having to duck under canopies, awnings; uncrowded sidewalks means not having to focus on dodging; no leafy trees, flower baskets and fewer cars means being able to see the other side of the street easily and clearly.
And what one sees now - unadorned, unobstructed and in plain view - is a few blocks of colourless, dingy - even shabby - pseudo-gentility. Gentility - a wishful mindset only: certainly not provided by the street's heritage buildings as such.
Stripping buildings down to their historic gestalt - back then - gave Nelson a context with considerable depth - a raison d'etre. It energized Nelsonites, gave them confidence in themselves and the future: they became enterprising.
This heritage context was recorded, given rules, packaged: it became an industry. At first for practical economic benefit, then to just keep this initial rush of energy coming. Which promptly turned into an addiction. Part of this addiction's ever-tightening grip came from Nelson wanting to appear big and wonderful to the outside - while feeling it really didn't have much else to offer. Granted: there is the lake, and there are the mountains, but they are not unique to Nelson. Neither are heritage buildings, but because Nelson for some time was an economic and transportation hub, there are relatively more to be found clustered here than in other places in the area.
Baltimore MD
2a.
Official Community Plan - 3.2.29 Colour
Colour of heritage buildings: there isn't much on Baker (and at first wasn't in the rest of Nelson either) - just as there wasn't much when heritage buildings were put up anywhere else. Considering environmental conditions - the mud! - and well-controlled emotional conditions of the Victorian master in the early days - colour was definitely non-WASP and faded quickly with those non-WASPS who wanted to be folded into the motherly bosom.
Also - paints would have been a frivolous expense for most - even if they had been available and wanted anywhere within the Anglo-colonial psyche.
This presents a problem with Nelson's Official Community Plan: there is no such thing as a special palette of "Historic Colours" - they are a marketing-ploy coming from corporate paint-manufacturers' boardrooms. Translated into: regardless of local context - by using these pre-digested and predictable mudpuddle-colours - heritage anywhere looks like it all came from the same puddle. Nelson's heritage - where coloured - is part of this puddle, and even non-heritage buildings have been splashed by it. What exactly are appropriate colours and shades? If this corporate assembly-line colouring is very important to the image of the Nelson Commercial Core, what's with local creativity, originality? DOA!
2b.
Official Community Plan - Guideline
.....to respect the qualities of the community's heritage...and to work harmoniously with adjacent building colour schemes and the context of the entire streetscape.
The qualities of the community's non-Anglo/Victorian heritage have thus far not been respected. Acknowledgement and integration of Northern-, Central-, Southern-, Eastern-European and Asian heritage would mean an array of colours in the entire streetscape!
2c.
Official Community Plan - Colour Chart
There is a paint-chart in the bottom-right corner of the Plan's page 41 with an explanatory text. Seemingly an older chart, with an array of pleasantly predictable autumnal shades. This probably is meant as an example of heritage colours presented by a paint-manufacturer of long ago. It's accompanying text reads:
Colour schemes should respect the precedent of historic paint palettes and consider the colour schemes of adjacent buildings.
Magnification of this so-called palette actually shows that the chart is a basic colour chart only - Colours 101 explained - primary, secondary, tertiary colours. And a bar of the supposedly primary colours across the top - they should be a deep/clear blue, a deep/clear red and a bright/clear yellow - actually are a flat bluish/grey, a flat soft/orange and a sandy yellow. What follows is that supposedly secondary and tertiary colours aren't either! Provided one starts with colours commonly acknowledged as primary - one would get a rainbow.
But there's definitely no pot of gold at the end of this chart's result at the bottom. None of these colours fall into the most basic colour-construct the chart talks about; they are faded, washed-out beyond reasonable recognition - having nothing intended to do with heritage colours either! Possibly a poor print-job, exposed to the sun too long.
Page 41 generally presents a superficial and misleading approach!
1a.
Downtown/Waterfront Plan
A year ago Mayor Dooley talked about Baker's need of a paint-job. Aside from the one at the Co-Op recently - no painting or water-blasting seems to have been done there in years.
What started out as a tangible downtown revitalization planning initiative 30 years ago and became very effective has - over years - turned into an abstraction: constantly discussed and tweaked, but now without real momentum and outside the context of the whole - Nelson.
LoJo - Victoria BC
2b.
Official Community Plan - Guideline
4.
Official Community Plan - 3.2.29 Colour
Colour of heritage buildings: there isn't much on Baker (and at first wasn't in the rest of Nelson either) - just as there wasn't much when heritage buildings were put up anywhere else. Considering environmental conditions - the mud! - and well-controlled emotional conditions of the Victorian master in the early days - colour was definitely non-WASP and faded quickly with those non-WASPS who wanted to be folded into the motherly bosom.
Also - paints would have been a frivolous expense for most - even if they had been available and wanted anywhere within the Anglo-colonial psyche.
This presents a problem with Nelson's Official Community Plan: there is no such thing as a special palette of "Historic Colours" - they are a marketing-ploy coming from corporate paint-manufacturers' boardrooms. Translated into: regardless of local context - by using these pre-digested and predictable mudpuddle-colours - heritage anywhere looks like it all came from the same puddle. Nelson's heritage - where coloured - is part of this puddle, and even non-heritage buildings have been splashed by it. What exactly are appropriate colours and shades? If this corporate assembly-line colouring is very important to the image of the Nelson Commercial Core, what's with local creativity, originality? DOA!
2b.
Official Community Plan - Guideline
.....to respect the qualities of the community's heritage...and to work harmoniously with adjacent building colour schemes and the context of the entire streetscape.
The qualities of the community's non-Anglo/Victorian heritage have thus far not been respected. Acknowledgement and integration of Northern-, Central-, Southern-, Eastern-European and Asian heritage would mean an array of colours in the entire streetscape!
2c.
Official Community Plan - Colour Chart
There is a paint-chart in the bottom-right corner of the Plan's page 41 with an explanatory text. Seemingly an older chart, with an array of pleasantly predictable autumnal shades. This probably is meant as an example of heritage colours presented by a paint-manufacturer of long ago. It's accompanying text reads:
Colour schemes should respect the precedent of historic paint palettes and consider the colour schemes of adjacent buildings.
Magnification of this so-called palette actually shows that the chart is a basic colour chart only - Colours 101 explained - primary, secondary, tertiary colours. And a bar of the supposedly primary colours across the top - they should be a deep/clear blue, a deep/clear red and a bright/clear yellow - actually are a flat bluish/grey, a flat soft/orange and a sandy yellow. What follows is that supposedly secondary and tertiary colours aren't either! Provided one starts with colours commonly acknowledged as primary - one would get a rainbow.
But there's definitely no pot of gold at the end of this chart's result at the bottom. None of these colours fall into the most basic colour-construct the chart talks about; they are faded, washed-out beyond reasonable recognition - having nothing intended to do with heritage colours either! Possibly a poor print-job, exposed to the sun too long.
Page 41 generally presents a superficial and misleading approach!
1a.
Downtown/Waterfront Plan
A year ago Mayor Dooley talked about Baker's need of a paint-job. Aside from the one at the Co-Op recently - no painting or water-blasting seems to have been done there in years.
What started out as a tangible downtown revitalization planning initiative 30 years ago and became very effective has - over years - turned into an abstraction: constantly discussed and tweaked, but now without real momentum and outside the context of the whole - Nelson.
LoJo - Victoria BC
2b.
Official Community Plan - Guideline
So - the CHC will earnestly weigh a miniscule amount of narrow purple trim on a building on Vernon, set way back from the street and hardly noticed, provided one cared to look even - while Baker buildings are fading away or covered in grime - or both!
And while the CHC is lengthily discussing a set of inoffensive beige awnings on Vernon - the Masons on Baker have hung one awning - in very strong primary blue and yellow (their colours) - across two store-fronts and the building's entrance, with the Subway logo very prominently displayed on its front. One McHeritage to go, please! The awning has received much negative attention. How it relates to heritage buildings - harmoniously yet - is open to discussion.
3a.
Baker Street - Reality Check
More awnings. On the southside of Baker - between Ward and Stanley - we have the KWC Block, Lawrence's Hardware (Sonja's) and the Hudson's Bay Company (Nelson Trading Company Mall): all 3 have awnings - 15 in total. And over much time (never cleaned!) these awnings on all 3 have come to life with a streaming yellow-green growth. Straight out of Blade Runner. In addition, there are 10 more properties on Baker with awnings in conspicuous stages of benign neglect over years - from very dirty to growing moss. Most of them are heritage buildings:
660-690 Baker
King's Restaurant
247 Baker
333 Baker
441-445 Baker
507-509 Baker (and Ward) - Medical Arts
555 Baker
553 Baker
571-579 Baker
593 Baker
Again - during busy months tourists and locals don't look at buildings across the street, and even if they do - they look at shops over there but hardly up to the 2nd and 3rd floors. This applies to Baker anywhere. With few exceptions, very little of heritage is noticeable to out-of-towners, walking under canopies and awnings, looking at shop-windows. That and the lack of distinctive colour in these buildings hardly make them exist above and around stores on their ground-floors.
This may be just as well. The very long Nelson Trading Company - potentially an attractive building - looks particularly decrepit: doors forbiddingly closed, with darkness behind; dirty brickwork; a multitude of filthy awnings and tacky signage.
I do not know how deep the concern for the preservation of heritage in the Nelson Commercial Core actually goes on a practical level - but I do know that Nelson must strengthen its economic base to reach much-touted sustainability. The Downtown and Waterfront Plan talks about modern multi-use buildings downtown - seemingly mindful of heritage assets but modern nonetheless. For this to be possible the city will have to lighten-up (literally!), let go of its heritage-enclave attitude and facilitate interplay between Nelson-as-was, Nelson-as-is and Nelson-as-can-be.
After 30 years - the heritage-theme as wherewithal has run its course and is tired. This tiredness (and not much else) shows, while holding back development with its restrictive self/all-important rules.
Painted Lady - San Francisco CA
4.
Heritage of Colour
Heritage and its joyous expression in traditional folk-customs and celebrations usually is colourful in all countries - except for that of Victorian Anglos of the realm - and with that appreciated and cheered by most. Not so in Nelson when it was young, where non-Anglo otherness was unacceptable - except as a fetch-it labour-force. And with Anglo-colonial heritage thus having become the unquestioned norm here, Nelson - despite some creative vibes finding their way in - still is bewildered by colour as a state of mind and keeps it and heritage boxed and stored separately as much as possible.
San Francisco introduced colour as a life-force with the Summer of Love; Berkeley had the Free-Speech Movement around the same time. And England presented the Beatles and Carnaby Street with bold patterns. In California clothes and attitudes were stripped-off - a desire for freedom of ideas and imagination unbound was paramount. England went along with the stripping of attitudes but - being British - wasn't quite ready to strip-off clothes. So it minimized them by making them tight and short. Thus the mini-skirt was born.
In San Francisco people were painting themselves and each other boldly - life as art - and then expanded to painting their environment.
Houses!
This was the beginning of the Painted Ladies - Victorian gingerbread houses painted in all colours imaginable and beyond. Not as rejection of establishment values but as never-before celebration and appreciation of these buildings' design - often deliriously ornate. A riot of colours accentuating structural and ornamental intricacies, adding what those Victorian grandiosities had been lacking all along: beauty, wit and - life! Very quickly these pieces of lived-in art became a magnet for the Leave-It-To-Beaver crowd in the Midwest - where a man was a man, and a woman's place was in the kitchen! Tours! T-shirts! Postcards! Books! A tourism industry! Still today!
Nelson?
Victoria - the most BC-colonial of colonials - started to pay attention to its architectural heritage as a life-form - so to speak - in the 70s. Since then it has at least begun to overcome its maternal prissiness: it now has candy-coloured Market Square and LoJo - Lower Johnson Street - with the winter-issue of Westworld saying about it in a full-page write-up that a new rush was triggered: independent stores and eateries studding a jelly-bean stretch of heritage buildings, now Victoria's hippest hangout.
Nelson?
Over time heritage buildings everywhere/anywhere - often in seemingly unlikely places - have got a make-over: dress-up, make-up, the works!
Nelson?
Cathedral - Glasgow, Scotland
5.
Nelson Alive!
And why not Nelson? The city has talked about cultural tourism for some time - except the cultural part has not been identified and manifested. Talking to tourists about facilities we have - like the Capitol Theatre, Touchstones, the Royal and the Spirit Bar - is not enough, because their oeuvre is not consistent and not consistently available. Nelson needs to provide a basic feel-good setting - a heart! For many tourists there's nowhere to go in the evening: a missed economic opportunity for the city. And with heritage rarely on the tourists' mind even during the day - at night it doesn't figure at all.
So the tourism booklet for Nelson advertises a lot of commercial venues with unsupported over-the-top promises and finds only meager bits of general local interest with which to fill its pages.
I can see Baker - and spreading out from there to all of Nelson - embracing colour. Not as a CDC-contest for untried local talent but initially professionally planned. Turn all of Baker into a colourful piece of art everybody lives and participates in. Substantiating the Far Out/For Real slogan of the Nelson Kootenay Lake Destination Marketing Organization with this process! A breathtakingly stylish environment: providing a totally-fun indoor/outdoor shopping/eating experience during the day (with vehicular traffic on Baker minimized) and in the evening (completely closed to vehicular traffic) a cool strolling-dining-shopping-entertainment experience: all this well-lit; shops welcoming with open doors (literally!); tourists and locals dressed-up and gathering downtown - the place to be and be seen; sidewalk-dining with laid-back acoustic sounds - also strolling!
Items: I can see the Hudson's Bay building painted creatively - with appealing signage at the entrance; new awnings; flower boxes under windows; street-level doors invitingly open in summer; attractively lit/decorated inside - in total providing a strong, cohesive two-storey shopping environment. I can see the RBC's public-toilet architecture across the street modified with colour. And I can see the Capitol Theatre -currently with an appearance of no character whatsoever - make a bold statement in its packaging about its contents!
Turning Nelson as such into a place to experience - cultural (including heritage!) and recreational activities part of but not all of it! A time of exuberance - instead of earnest, unproductive single-focus stodge only. In summer and winter alike! Now!
Turning Nelson as such into a place to experience - cultural (including heritage!) and recreational activities part of but not all of it! A time of exuberance - instead of earnest, unproductive single-focus stodge only. In summer and winter alike! Now!
Dublin, Ireland
The Marketing Organization is perfectly placed to become a prime mover in this: part Chamber of Commerce and part local merchants. A truly vibrant downtown would benefit them thus Nelson - and potential economic benefit certainly was the reason behind its inception. Focused investment in the future. Pro-actively creating a solid economic base - instead of dreaming of an economic upswing, based on a dream 30 years ago!
Introducing colour into local heritage - long overdue because of its various components to begin with - would also allow for easy integration with Nelson's non-heritage and contemporary parts. Done everywhere else. Nelson's insistence on keeping heritage caged does not promote - it stifles. In an odd twist - it bumps into limitations it set for itself! Colouring Nelson's core extensively and dramatically (and then spreading outward!) should also appeal to the art crowd: creative expression on a grand scale such as here proposed may provide a more fertile foundation and environmemt for individually creative expression.
Painted Lady - San Francisco CA
Most important for a renaissance in/of Nelson is its willingness to embrace change.
Most important for a renaissance in/of Nelson is its willingness to embrace change.
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