Later this month the new 9.7 km North-South metro line in Amsterdam will start service. Like most large scale infrastructure projects, its opening has been delayed many times. 8 times according to this source. But this post is not about that. It’s about a byproduct of the line’s construction. 

The excavations required for the line meant that two sections of the Amstel River – namely the Damrak and Rokin sites – had to be drained. This took place from 2003 to 2012 and gave archaeologists unprecedented access to the bottom of a river in the middle of a historic city center.

Amsterdam started as a small trading port along the banks of the Amstel River some 800 years ago. So not surprisingly, they found a few things. Over 17,000 objects were found and all of them have been catalogued online according to time period, use, material, and location found.

For the full catalogue of objects, click here. Screenshot of the catalogue shown above. And to learn more about the entire project, start here. There’s a lot of good stuff in there for city nerds.

Chris Bateman does some terrific sleuthing in the Globe and Mail this week to determine that the girl pictured in the below photo, dated May 15, 1913, is Dora (Dorothy) Cooperman – daughter of Morris Cooperman, a clothing presser.

Dora is standing in front of 3 wood-framed “rear houses” located behind 21 Elizabeth Street in an area known then as St. John’s Ward, or simply, The Ward. Behind her is City Hall, which we refer to today as Old City Hall. 

If you’re familiar with Toronto, it shouldn’t take you long to figure out that she is standing in what is today the middle of Nathan Phillips Square in front of (new) City Hall. 

The Ward no longer exists today, but as far as neighborhoods go its history is one of the most interesting. It was a high-density and mixed-use precinct that served as an important landing ground for successive waves of immigrants until it was deemed a slum and ultimately cleared. I wonder what it would look like today had it remained. Perhaps a bit like Kensington Market.

It housed the Irish fleeing the Great Famine in the 19th century and was the center of Toronto’s Jewish community until the 1920s. The Cooperman family came from Kiev and identified as Jewish.

There are so many interesting aspects to the above photograph. Everything from Dora’s pose to the juxtaposition between her surroundings and the grand (old) City Hall in the background. (Sidebar: I would like to try and recreate this same perspective. Would anyone like to model?)

I also wonder why the city required a report to wake them up to the squalor that was living out in the Ward when they could have, presumably, just looked out their west facing windows.

In 1911, Charles Hastings and Arthur Goss published what Batemen describes as a “landmark report that stunned civic officials, who had long ignored the poverty on their doorstep.” Hastings was the city’s medical officer of health, and Goss was the’s city first official photographer and author of Dora’s above portrait.

One of the interesting things that Bateman explains about this report – and this is really the point of today’s post – is that it supposedly called out one particular housing typology as being highly problematic: rear houses. 

These were houses that existed off the main street and could only be accessed via a laneway, like the one Dora is standing in. Today we would call them laneway houses. And so this report is evidence of over a century of anxiety around this particular housing type.

It is obvious why overcrowding would have been deemed a serious problem at the start of the 20th century, but now one has to wonder how influential this report may have been in establishing the tone around these “rear houses.”

Whatever the case may be, Dora’s story is an example of the role that this typology has played in housing people of modest means throughout this city’s history. It is also interesting, but perhaps not a coincidence, that affordability continues to be a part of the pitch around laneway housing and laneway suites. 

Dora lived in a laneway house.

I was recently asked: How do you go into a neighborhood, build new, and not erase and/or sterilize what makes that neighborhood interesting in the first place? 

Gentrification is a controversial topic in city building. Too often I think we ignore what happens when we don’t invest in communities, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be deliberate when we do make investments.

Development is filled with tensions. We are constantly trying to navigate through constraints and balance out the wants of each and every stakeholder. It becomes an art. It doesn’t always work out as planned.

To state the obvious, I would say that it starts with caring. If you’re not interested in community and city building, then the default response will be to simply replicate what worked on the last project.

But every place has a local culture. And if city builders are to have any hope of preserving and building upon what makes that place unique, we have to first understand it. What made it successful in the first place? What is its DNA?

Because then you’re in a position to think about both built form and programming in a way that is culturally sensitive.

One example that comes to mind is the proposed redevelopment of Honest Ed’s / Mirvish Village here in Toronto. 

The “micro tower” design is intended to create the sense that the area was built up organically over time. And the fine grain retail (50-60 individual retail spaces) is intended to house local retailers, micro retail startups, and pop-up shops. To me, both of these elements speak to the history and fabric of the area.

Adopting a unique approach can also sometimes mean rethinking how you measure ROI. If all you care about is who will pay you the highest rent – right now – then you’re going to make a decision based on that metric.

Maximizing revenue is not a bad thing. That’s what businesses are supposed to do. But sometimes there is or should be a larger vision at play. And sometimes you need to take a longer view.

In Toronto’s Distillery District, the developers made the decision to eschew large chains and franchises (in favor of more local retailers) so that they could create a very particular place. Ultimately that particular place became a great place to sell condos, but they suffered early on for it.

I like how Gary Vaynerchuk put it when he asked: What is the ROI of your mother? Sometimes you may not be able to measure it, but that doesn’t mean the ROI isn’t there.

Any other suggestions?