Downtown outdoor spaces

[Markster]

These two parks were one of Waterloo's first public squares.  Four lanes of traffic (soon to include an LRT track) and an elevation change don't make it conducive to much of anything these days.

Yeah, it seems it was an effective public square in the days before vehicle ownership was common. The kind of square that is really just a large area around the wagon track where you can easily set up a market or some other large festivity. When the square is full of people, the wagons will just have to go around, or slow down and go through.

On an related note, I just checked the space on Google Maps and noticed that there seems to be a 5-year span in the aerial photos.  William between King and Park is torn up for LRT work, yet Engineering V is not yet complete in the next shot north.

That was for sewer work that was done on William several years ago.