Fischer-Hallman & Bleams development

[bravado]

I wonder how much money people will pay to live in towers that encircle a massive sea of asphalt and retail stores. Projects like this really show how we rarely put thought into our built environment in this country.

You don't really get attractive environments when everything you build is a public liability or a private equity financial tool :|

[neonjoe]

Apartments by retail = 15 minute city!
In actuality the shopping centre at least has most of its parking facing inward with the retail attached to the street. The area itself is well connected to transit and a walk to the Williamsburg Town Centre is less than 10 minutes. For a suburban area it is a step up from what we normally see of endless suburban homes with some density sprinkled in. Here at least there are places to visit or walk to other than just more homes.

[danbrotherston]

Apartments by retail = 15 minute city!
In actuality the shopping centre at least has most of its parking facing inward with the retail attached to the street. The area itself is well connected to transit and a walk to the Williamsburg Town Centre is less than 10 minutes. For a suburban area it is a step up from what we normally see of endless suburban homes with some density sprinkled in. Here at least there are places to visit or walk to other than just more homes.

Retail + housing...that's what capitalism describes as the entirety of human existence I'm afraid.

But honestly, these kind of developments are getting better, but I wish there was more cohesive planning at a city level for new stuff. The neighbourhood I live in is completely planned from the ground up by a democratic elected government, then private developers built components of it, but those components are still tied together by an actual, human centric plan.

[ac3r]

Government projects aren't always better either. Europe and North America are littered with failed planning ideas, particularly those done by left leaning socialist and at times Marxist ideologies. It's been hard work the last few decades to repair the failures of the 20th century. Whether our current planning practices are less flawed we have yet to fully realize.

[neonjoe]

Crane is up.

[ZEBuilder]

Here's a picture of the crane from the Food Basics Plaza:
   

The soldier piles for the shoring is also mostly complete, they only have a few more piles left to go. They were also working on the lagging between the piles in a few places today. It looks as if the shoring is only going along the plaza's access road and the BMO parking lot/future commercial building, they have also installed some shoring along Fischer Hallman where the guy wires for the hydro poles are but the way the excavation is makes it impossible for any other shoring to be installed along Fischer Hallman or Bleams.

[ZEBuilder]

The soldier piles for the shoring on the site is now completed and they are adding the wooden lagging on the BMO side. The first portion of the raft slab is also completely built they have to excavate some more of the sandy silt to continue building the slab. They also have the pad footings marked out on the portion of the site between the raft slab and the currently under construction building C of the commercial.

   

[Kwjinko]

New to this forum but I live in the area, at what point in this process is it announced which businesses will be taking the spots in this new construction?

[tomh009]

New to this forum but I live in the area, at what point in this process is it announced which businesses will be taking the spots in this new construction?

Retail tenants are rarely announced before the building is ready for occupancy. (Speculating on those is a popular sport in these forums, though!)

[ZEBuilder]

The site is progressing fairly quickly now that they've got the building permit, the raft slab is about 1/3 complete and the underground parking walls and columns are going up in places now as well. They have completed all of the standard shoring on site and they are now excavating along those walls starting footings for columns and the exterior wall.

The side fronting Bleams is certainly having some of the more interesting works occurring, they're excavating for the sump pit in the center of the raft slab and it's very much in the ground water table as the excavation has standing water in that location. Now for the more interesting part that someone on here might be able to explain, along the Bleams side they never put any standard shoring in so it looked like they would do an open cut excavation to the bottom of the raft slab elevation but the last two days they have set up a trench box system almost as a shoring wall which is certainly super bizarre. It's hard to get a good angle to get a picture of it so the best one I could get is posted. I went looking and there isn't any stubs for pipes into the site in that location, the sanitary and storm connections both come through the shoring from the commercial plaza, there is a storm stub that extends from one of the catch basins along Bleams but the issue with that is the trench box is in the wrong direction for a pipe to be going to that particular stub. The other issue with it is it appears they've formed a wall within the trench box but the trench box doesn't seem wide enough for you're standard footing and it isn't anywhere close to the same height as the walls that are formed already so it doesn't seem to be an exterior wall. 

I know from working on the site across the street (1198 Fischer Hallman) and on the Bleams Road Reconstruction that the native soil is a silty sand, once you get down towards the water table it changes to a more darker silty sandy, the sand itself is almost like a beach sand, so when you cut into it with an excavation it has a tendency of pouring into your excavation especially if you place a load right next to it so it makes sense for it to be a shoring system of some kind but it's a super strange approach if that's what it actually is.

A picture of the site:
   

The mysterious trench box: