Peds on Weds: Condo access fail

Suppose you're going to spend $18.5 million on a 12-storey (later 16-storey) condo building. You might build it with exclusively one-bedroom apartments that cater to young, single individuals. Such apartments aren't big enough to raise children, so you wouldn't need to worry about your residents getting in with a stroller. And your target market is decades away from using a wheelchair.

So despite legislation that gradually encourages more and more compliance to provide equal access to people with disabilities, you install a step at the front door:

If a resident loses a limb or is paid a visit by a wheelchair-using relative, there's a second-class entrance at the side of the building. When they're dropped off at the front of the building (as is customary), someone who is unable to walk up a step would of course have no difficulty walking 60 feet or so out of their way on a snowy sidewalk:

To add insult to (hopefully no) injury, the entrance was initially built with a direct ramp from the sidewalk. The step was added after the fact:

According to the Condo project website, a new development in "contemporary Canadian cities" has the following requirements: "a sharp and creative Development Team with a solid track record of success ... design innovation, marketing savvy, systematic project management, financial prowess and political acumen." (I won't go into the "partnership with...neighbours" bit where the first the community association heard of this development was the day before it went to the Committee of Adjustment)

But as the CCCA's Seniors Committee regularly writes in their column in the Centretown Buzz, our ageing population means that we also need to ensure that new buildings are built with accessibility and visitability in mind. These qualities are essential in ensuring that ageing individuals can continue to live in their homes, ensuring a healthy diversity of the community.

There's only so much you can do for older buildings that were constructed before universal accessibility was a consideration, but for new buildings there's no excuse a person with a mobility restriction can't enter the building with as much dignity as an able-bodied person from the first time they visit.

[Tune in on Wednesdays at noon for a new pedestrian-themed blog post. View the Pedestrians label for previous Peds on Weds posts]

Peds on Weds: Toronto-style sidewalks part 3 - the downsides

There has been a fair amount of criticism of the Toronto-style sidewalk design since it was made the standard in the City of Ottawa in 2006, just as there have been various challenges implementing it. As with any standard, you can't please all of the people all of the time, especially in a constrained physical environment like Delaware Avenue, below:

In the first part of this series, I described what "Toronto-style" sidewalks are and how they're supposed to work. In the second part, I detailed the rather technical history of how this sidewalk design, also known as "ramp-style vehicle access crossing", became standard, following through minutes from post-amalgamation City of Ottawa through to 2006.

Feedback about the design started as soon as the sidewalks on Delaware (pictured above) and Holland Avenue were installed for the pilot project. Since then, the design has also received its share of criticism from various sources. Today I'll be discussing these criticisms, and other issues the standard has encountered. I'll finish the series next week with a review of alternatives, starting with how Ottawa's sidewalks have been designed through the ages.

Saving the day on Cooper Street

During warm/wet spells like the one we got a couple weekends ago, I bring a sidewalk scraper around with me to clear away some of the more persistent ice banks that were blocking drains around the neighbourhood. Oftentimes it only takes a minute or two to clear a small path and gravity does the rest, the water widening its channel as more of it passes through. It's important to have cleared away these puddles while it's warm so they don't turn into skating rinks on days like today, where it's minus 15 Celsius!

On Cooper Street at Metcalfe there was a big one, stretching across the sidewalk and most of the way across the roadway. This one would be a challenge!!

You can often find a catchbasin in the sidewalk which is blocked by some snow/ice, or at least the yellow "T" on the centreline of the road points to the nearest drain on the edge of the sidewalk. But this stretch of Cooper still has its rectangular grates in the road, and even if Cooper had the yellow Ts, the water was too deep to see them!

Normally at this point I'd just call it in to 3-1-1 and let the City crews figure it out. I did that for a couple of spots on Florence where the ice banks were required too much effort to hack a channel through, and on Christie Street where an even bigger puddle than the one on Cooper wouldn't drain at all despite reaching the drains.

In addition to heavy equipment, City crews have calcium chloride, a strong salt that they dump into the catchbasin, melting whatever snow is clogging the drain. This is the same stuff they spread on the roads, too.

But this puddle was too odd. I whipped out my phone and pulled up the location in Google Street View (a stripped-down version accessible quickly via the City's GeoOttawa map):

I had already moved down the street on my phone in search for another catchbasin when I took this photo, but alas the only one was between two driveways. You can see it below, where it came up incidentally in this November 2011 shot which I tagged in my photo collection with "vanscaping":

Being between two adjacent driveways, the sidewalk was dipped horribly down and therefore engulfed in water. It was in line with the fence that runs between the two laneways, which was a helpful landmark, but my feet would be completely underwater if I went in (I'd left my rainboots at home!).

Luckily, leaning against the fence was a bedframe that someone was throwing out. After removing the casters, I was able to use this—very carefully—as a bit of a raft to give me drier footing to just barely reach the catchbasin.

I chipped away at the submerged ice in the approximate location of the catchbasin until I heard and felt the distinct "plunk" that meant that I had reached the catchbasin! That is, I had cleared the ice off of one of the twelve little rectangles of the grate. I stepped back and tried to look for signs that the puddle was draining. Between the wind and passing cars, the floating surface ice seemed to be gyrating, but I wasn't sure if this was because it was draining, or just currents from the wind and passing cars (or, given the size of the puddle, tides!).

But sure enough, the next day on my way to work, the puddle was gone!

So the next mystery was, was it my intervention that did the trick? Well, looking at the scene, there wasn't any obvious signs of the City coming by to clear it with machinery. Presumably if a crew had come by, they would have waited until it was all drained, in which case they wouldn't have left it covered with snow and slush like it is. It's also possible that time and the warmish weather helped erode the ice blockage.

Needing to satisfy my curiosity, I sent an e-mail to 3-1-1 asking if they had received any calls from anyone else. They replied a few days later to say that, no, they hadn't received any requests for that location, so the credit for clearing the pond was all mine!

I'll share the credit with gravity, of course :)

Peds on Weds: Toronto-style sidewalks part 1

For quite some time now, I've wanted to do a thorough writeup on what in Ottawa traffic-geek circles is referred to a "Toronto-style" sidewalk design. People love them and hate them, for reasons that I'll discuss over the next three weekly pedestrian-themed "Peds on Weds" posts, starting here.

The sidewalk seen below is an outstanding example of what people I know call a "Toronto-style sidewalk". I've no idea what people in Toronto call them, and for all I know the title might be apocryphal. The term refers to is a wide, flat surface for pedestrians, and the crosspath is ramped only to the minimum extent required for motor vehicles to get up to the height. This example is on the east side of Bronson looking north from Somerset to Cooper Street in August 2013, not long after it was installed. Pardon the spray paint markings:

The benefit is for pedestrians, but this is anathema to the car-centric roadbuilders who install them, as Eric Darwin described in a West Side Action post about the installation of the sidewalks on Bronson:

"I talked to the project / concrete foreman on the site [Bronson west side, north of Gladstone]. I complimented him on keeping so much of the walkway level. He, however, was much more interested in pointing out how gentle the motorists’ slopes were, so there wouldn’t be much of  bump for them."

The ramp is what gives the design its official name in the City of Ottawa, which has been the official standard in the City of Ottawa since June 2006: the "Ramp Style Vehicle Access Crossing" (being a traffic department term, naturally the title refers to its relationship to vehicles rather than to pedestrians or sidewalks). There is a gradual 2% grade over the flat part of the sidewalk to drain water away from the road (2% is not as steep as depicted here) which must be at least 1.05 m wide, and the ramp is 75 cm wide, assuming a curb height of 12.5 cm:

Mags & Fags switches up some more

In April, I posted that Mags & Fags cleared a newspaper rack out of their entranceway.

Even earlier in the year—in January—there was a water main break on Elgin Street right outside the store, closing it and Vanilla until water could be restored. There's a guy with a shop vac emptying out water that presumably got into his store's basement.

By the evening, crews (I presume from the City) had excavated a hole to expose the break in the water main. The vacuum truck on the far side of the backhoe is used to remove soil near gas lines, since a shovel can do lots of damage if it gets too close. You can also see the pipe leading up to the fire hydrant underneath the sidewalk, which, while unrelated, is still something neat you don't see every day.

Once the water main had been repaired, the hole was filled up and a cold patch was applied to cover it with rough asphalt. In the spring (June, actually), the road was resurfaced with good smooth asphalt, and the sidewalk was also replaced. An intricate ramp and plank system was used to retain access to the stores while the concrete sidewalk was curing. Some sections of sidewalk along Elgin Street were replaced when the street was resurfaced in 2011, and even more when Bell ran new cables under Elgin in 2010. Actually, Elgin Street's sidewalks have had over a century of turnover.

The minimalist magazine racks have been in the window for as long as I can remember. However, while I was walking past it last month, I noticed that they'd changed this up for a different style display.

The new shelves are busier than the old metal racks—two of which remain on either end of the display, but it works. It lets the store owners display other materials, to let potential customers walking by know that they don't just sell magazines.

Five years since Somerset House collapse

While a petition and articles in both the Centretown News and Centretown Buzz have recently suggested that it happened in November 2007, the collapse of the wall at Somerset House in fact happened exactly five years ago, on Friday, October 19, 2007. In this post, which is the longest so far on this blog with 30 photos, I'll go over some of the highlights on and since that day that mark the ongoing saga of the historic building. Given the milestone, I'm publishing at 9am instead of noon.

As the Citizen reported the day after the collapse (I can't link directly to archived Citizen articles; you'll have to log in to the Proquest database with your Ottawa Public Library card and PIN and search for them), a 44-year old Bobcat operator was stuck under rubble for about two hours when the southeast part of the building collapsed on him just before 3pm.

When I got there around 7:30pm, the whole area was taped off by the fire department, and it was raining hard. The Fire Department had connected tethers from the north sidewalk across the street into the building.

An hour later, a large crane arrived on scene. I didn't stay around for much longer, since it looked like work would continue all night.

Peds on Weds: Juliana sidewalk replacement

This hill on Bronson Avenue is looking south from Queen Street to Albert (where the bus is going), across to Slater and up Nanny Goat Hill to Laurier. In the immediate foreground on the right is 100 Bronson, the Juilana Apartments, built on the site of Henry Bronson's mansion in the 1960s by Douglass and Ross, as described in the latter part of this URBSite post.

I'm more interested in the sidewalk in front of the luxury apartment building. The little white arrows are telltale signs that those broken concrete squares of sidewalk will soon be replaced.

Looking north from Albert Street, back in the other direction, we see the other end of the imminent repairs. The white arrows were added in early August.

In late September, the City replaced the concrete sidewalk. It wasn't done all in one pour, there was some left at the Albert Street end of the stretch when I stopped by:

The stretch of sidewalk that was replaced only extended as far as the stairs to the apartment building.

That black patch of asphalt was actually put there not by the City but by Enbridge, which also put down that square of asphalt across the street after some work they did in the roadway. Since Enbridge dug it up, it's up to Enbridge—not the City—to replace it.

On the one hand, it's unfortunate that the sidewalk couldn't have all been replaced in one go by whomever got there first, but all told this is probably the simplest way. An alternative would have the City paying to reinstall the sidewalk that Enbridge dug up, and either footing the bill (at the expense of other needed sidewalk projects) or administering the paperwork to pass the bill along to Enbridge.

In the end, the broken section of sidewalk will have been replaced and that's what really matters.

[Tune in on Wednesdays at noon for a new pedestrian-themed blog post. View the Pedestrians label for previous Peds on Weds posts]

Peds on Weds: L'Es try something different (or not)

Recently some workers have been spotted on Laurier Avenue affixing drywall to the central podium section of the l'Esplanade Laurier office tower:

Stepping back a bit, both literally and figuratively, the building is a full-block structure surrounded by Laurier, O'Connor, Gloucester and Bank streets.

Peds on Weds: No; more ifs, ands, or buttons

Back in May I had a lengthy blog post titled No ifs, ands or buttons which described in detail how terribly complicated pedestrian buttons are in a road environment that is designed for cars.

Since that post, I noticed a few more situations I omitted about pedestrian buttons. These examples are all at the edge of Centretown or just outside it.

Outside the fancy new Ottawa Convention Centre at Colonel By Drive and Daly on the other side of the Rideau Canal, some of the concrete pavers are lined up with grooves in the middle. This is an accessibility feature so that the visually impaired can safely direct themselves to the crosswalk safely, and stop before getting to the edge. The grooves in poured concrete sidewalks perform the same function (and most streets that have precast pavers for sidewalks will use a concrete pad at the intersection to provide these accessibility features). Can you see the problem?

The groove takes you to the centre of the crosswalk, but the buttons you need to press to activate the pedestrian signal are at the edges of the crosswalk. And this crosswalk is so wide that the button on the right side didn't even fit into the shot.

But at least at that intersection, the button is necessary for anyone to use the crosswalk—not just the visually impaired—so at least there's someone else there to activate the crossing signal. As mentioned in the May entry, this is discernible by the sign above the button on the pole. If our blind pedestrian is lucky, the sighted pedestrian will press the button for three or more seconds, activating the audible signal, instead of just the quick press required to request the crossing.

Peds on Weds: Sidewalk Heave-Ho

One day in late June, I was biking up Elgin Street and saw this piece of sidewalk trying to jump out of the ground near the bus stop at Confederation Park. I phoned it in to 3-1-1.

I wasn't by there again for another three weeks or so but when I did in mid-July it had just been repaired, with a soldier row of pylons surrounding it to keep people off of it while the concrete sets.

Sidewalk repairs aren't as easy to execute as, say, potholes, because you can't just pour new concrete into a cavity in the way you can slap some an asphalt patch into a pothole. I'll go into more detail about the process in a future Wednesday blog post.

[Tune in on Wednesdays at noon for a new pedestrian-themed blog post. View the Pedestrians label for previous Peds on Weds posts]

Peds on Weds: Don't crack me up

I get very irate by people parking on the sidewalks (and I have many photos of such transgressions, which I tag with "vanscaping"). A majority of the time, they are blocking off the entire sidewalk (or enough that a stroller or wheelchair couldn't get through), when if they had parked entirely on the road there would have still been plenty of space for cars to get past. A case in point is this van on Gilmour at O'Connor.

But another reason is that sidewalks are only reinforced where there is a curb depression--i.e. where it is expected that cars will drive over them (with some exceptions like sidewalks over a bridge). Otherwise, for the post part, they are straight-up poured concrete.

Back in the winter, Eric posted at West Side Action about cracked sidewalks on Preston, likely from trucks having driven and/or parked on the sidewalk. In the photo above, a contractor's van is parked on the sidewalk, and the van's right tires correspond rather conveniently with the cracks down the middle of the sidewalk.

Individually, people who park on the sidewalk think that they are doing no harm. But collectively, as many people vehicles are parked on the sidewalk over time, the sidewalk breaks down and needs expensive and time-consuming repair. In the meantime, they are harder to keep clear of snow, and water that seeps into the cracks worsens the problem during the annual freeze-thaw cycles.

[Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]

Peds on Weds: No ifs, ands or buttons

Today is Wednesday, which brings with it the weekly Peds on Weds post about walking issues. Being the second Wednesday of the month, tonight is also the monthly meeting of Walk Ottawa, the upstart pedestrian advocacy group. At tonight's meeting there will be representatives of the City's traffic signals department to take questions from the group.

I thought this was a good time to share what I know about how pedestrian traffic control signals work in Ottawa. I don't necessarily agree that this is the way things should be, but it is the way they are.

One of the biggest sources of confusion among pedestrians has to do with the signals and the buttons. Here's a traffic post at the top of Elgin at Sparks, which looks innocent enough:

What you can't see from the above angle is that there is a button for pedestrians to request the walk signal on the other side of this same post:

Transforming Ottawa's pedestrian landscape

Today is Wednesday, and tonight Ottawa's nascent pedestrian advocacy group will have its second meeting. Notes from the previous meeting are posted on the Ottawa Walking Problems website. The group has recycled the name "Ottawalk" with the blessing of the members of the group of the same name that expired in 2001.

I figured a pedestrian-themed photo would be fitting for Peds on Weds. Here is a pedestrian desire line at the Ottawa Police headquarters at 474 Elgin Street:

Near the corner of Elgin and Argyle, pedestrians cut through the courtyard (next to the "Transformer Site" public art installation), hop the planter bed, and continue along the much quieter street. I wouldn't be surprised if many of them continue diagonally across the Museum of Nature's parking lot as well.

As with the item I highlighted in the post announcing the previous meeting, this is more of a nuisance than an real problem. Not all pedestrian problems can be so easily dismissed, and many nuisances in a single trip can discourage people from walking. The Ottawa Walking Problems is a good place to track the longer term problems, and the City's recently released ServiceOttawa.ca website allows you to directly report more acute issues, like icy sidewalks or malfunctioning traffic signals.

If you're interested in the walking group, contact Councillor Diane Holmes at diane.holmes@ottawa.ca, or feel free to come to the meeting tonight at 7pm in the Colonel By room at City Hall. (I should note that, while this is my personal blog, I also work on pedestrian issues--including the group--for Councillor Holmes)

[Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]

It only takes one

The City of Ottawa made a big ballyhoo in December 2009 about our official population reaching 900,000. They made a media event when they rolled out the new population signs announcing it. I was even lucky enough to see the City's sign shop making the numbers for these signs.

Alas, the temporary wood frame that was used for the sign on Booth Street in Lebreton Flats, for people entering Ottawa from Gatineau, was never replaced with a permanent structure. Parts of the sign have fallen off, and the sign itself has been literally pushed aside, oriented so that few will actually see it.

I hope it gets fixed soon.

[Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]

Bronson reconstruction public open house Thurs Nov 24, 6:30pm at Centennial

After a handful of meetings of the Public Advisory Committee (PAC) for the imminent Bronson Avenue reconstruction, the city's project managers and engineers will be presenting their plans to the public next Thursday evening at Centennial public school, 6:30 pm. All are welcome to come and share their feedback. More details are here on the City's website.

Much has been done behind the scenes by community representatives on the PAC to squeeze out every last bit of improvement in the plans, and you can help increase the pressure by signing the Rescue Bronson Avenue petition.

As you will recall, community groups united under the banner of Rescue Bronson Avenue to fight back at the engineers' assumption that the road should go back exactly as it is, except with wider lanes.

Rescue Bronson is made up of representatives from the CCCA, DCA, CCOC and Diane Holmes (I'm formally involved with all but the CCOC), and was previously pushing for the more northerly parts of Bronson to be put on a "Road Diet". North of Gladstone Avenue, the traffic volumes drop considerably, and again at Somerset. By reclaiming some space for pedestrians on Bronson, there would be shorter crossing distances, a less hostile walking environment, slower (though not necessarily less) traffic, and shorter crossing distances--altogether a safer street. In the last week or so, Scott Street got such treatment:

A Sidewalk Too Far

You'd think it would be easy enough to get from point A to point B, but sometimes in Ottawa you have to go through point C to get there.

I don't mean this metaphorically, but literally. In the diagram below, desire lines (a.k.a. "cowpaths") indicate that pedestrians want to get from A to B, but the sidewalk directs them to go from A to C to B. It's actually worse than this, which is why I'm showcasing it as an example for Diane Holmes' Sidewalk Summit, this Tuesday at 7pm at City Hall.

The story starts at Tom Brown arena in Hintonburg, where Albert and Scott Streets meet on the west side of the O-Train tracks. Last Tuesday, Citizens for Safe Cycling had its Annual General Meeting there and bike parking was at a premium (many had already left by the time I took this photo. At one point, every bench, tree, and signpost had a bike locked to it).

O'Connor and Kent: Cross with care

It feels like I took this photo just a few weeks ago, but it was actually June 2010. The street we're looking down is Lewis (my favourite stretch along my now-famous shortcut), and the cross street is O'Connor.

Like Kent Street, the one-way traffic on O'Connor travels pretty darn fast when it gets the green light. Both O'Connor and Kent were widened decades ago to be very close to the buildings, leaving little room to see around the corner when you're at the stop sign on the cross street.

I didn't see the collision, but I suspect this is what happened to the unfortunate driver of this sedan: he looked as far as he could up O'Connor for a gap in traffic to cross at Lewis, and was slammed by the SUV coming down O'Connor far enough away but going fast enough (not necessarily speeding) to not be visible from the side street.

This was a common occurrence on Lyon Street before the speed humps were installed on it. The traffic engineers were up in arms at the thought of speed humps on an arterial road, but so many cars had crashed into the house at the south-west corner of Lyon and MacLaren that the community had had enough and political will overruled the engineers. Now Lyon still carries lots of traffic, but that traffic is calm enough for a bike lane to run alongside.

The Centretown Community Design Plan suggests looking at converting Metcalfe and O'Connor back to two-way traffic. The plan's consultants have suggested this (as well as the rest of the transportation aspects of the CDP) be investigated as part of the Downtown Ottawa Mobility Overlay, a.k.a. Downtown Moves. Now that the DOMO and its terms of reference are out, we see that Centretown isn't part of the core study area. We'll see how many resources, if any, go toward looking at the one-way streets.

In the meantime, when you're crossing Kent and O'Connor on a side street, either on a bike or in a car, be careful!

[Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]

Post-and-ring bike rack update

Before I start, you may have heard the news that I've stepped down as President of the CCCA to work in the office of Somerset Ward Councillor Diane Holmes. I sent a message to the CCCA's members and followers on Wednesday night. If you're wondering, yes I'll still be blogging, yes I'll still be involved in community activities (perhaps even moreso), and yes I'll still be tweeting. I still want you to join and get involved with the CCCA, and to attend the AGM on October 25, 2011, at 7pm at the Beaver Barracks (464 Metcalfe, at Catherine). I won't be working regularly at City Hall until the last week of October.

With that out of the way...

I've written many posts about the City's insufficient provision of secure bicycle parking, particularly in the removal of parking meters. About a year ago, I gave the example of Elgin Street, which went from having many parking meters per block, per side, to one or two post-and-ring racks for both sides.

Back before they even started, I'd reviewed the City's list of where to put the bike racks that were left after removing most of them. In addition to noting locations where it was recommended not to replace parking meters, I also pointed out that bicycle parking shouldn't be limited to commercial areas and big condo buildings. I've often arrived at someone's place in Centretown to find that there was nothing in sight to lock my bike to, not even a street sign.

That's for short-term parking. It's even worse for many apartment-dwellers, like the ones along Frank street whose bikes were parked in the video in this post, and who don't have space in or outside their building to keep their bikes.

There is often a bike locked to this signpost on James Street at Kent, just across from St. Barnabas church:

What I suspect happened here is that someone unbolted the sign and lifted the bike over the post. Another related trick thieves use is to find a post that can be lifted out of the ground, so make sure to immobilize your wheel (i.e. don't just lock the frame to the post), and check to make sure whatever you lock your bike to is securely attached to the ground.

The number of bikes in town has grown significantly, even since last year, and these people need places to park their bikes. I've been told that a second round of post-and-ring racks is being installed soon (perfect timing given the imminent removal of the blue Velocity bike racks for the winter), and that Elgin is one of the streets that will receive them, after its recent resurfacing.

Whether this will include residential areas, I'm doubtful, but if there are people or stores you normally visit that have no secure place to lock your bike, please leave a comment!

(PS: As part of the Rescue Bronson Avenue project, I'll be meeting with the consultants on the Bronosn Avenue reconstruction to tell them where they can stick their bike racks.)

(Subsequent edit: In October 2012, many more bike racks were installed in Centretown, including 60 or so along Gladstone, which didn't have parking meters to begin with! Apparently the comments I had submitted a year or so earlier were consulted.)

[Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]

A safer crossing for pedestrians on Somerset

Well, the City of Ottawa has been on a roll, fixing up a number of problems that have been on my list for a while, including fixing the potholes on Lewis and the sign at McLeod and Bank, as I blogged recently.

Those were both nuisance issues, but one true safety problem has been fixed: the lack of crosswalk lines at Somerset Street West and The Driveway.

To recap, this was perhaps the only stop sign in Centretown that wasn't accompanied by a stop bar and crosswalk lines, depriving motorists of an important cue to give right-of-way to cross traffic (including pedestrians and cyclists). I'd been nearly hit on my bike by a motorist who stopped at the stop sign, but blindly started again without registering that I had the right of way along Somerset (thanks to my yell, he braked hard and his bumper just tapped my front fork).

In this photo, it looks more like a laneway to motorists coming from the right.

I'd noticed this past spring that the lines at the nearby intersection of the Queen Elizabeth Driveway and Somerset West were faded, suggesting that the city would be repainting soon. A prime opportunity to add crosswalk lines to The Driveway (the near intersection in the photo below). And this was the gist of my April post on the subject, which I forwarded to City Hall.

Give me a sign

In my September 2009 post about bike cutouts at traffic diverters, I finished the post with a description of the then-incomplete bike cutout on McLeod at Bank.

In February 2010 it was still incomplete because the space was needed for the cranes to temporarily remove the facade of the Metropolitan Bible Church: