There has recently been quite the uproar lately about what is happening in Downtown Brantford. The City Council has been planning to knock down 41 old building as part of their downtown revitalization project. These building date back to before Canada was even founded in 1867, so you can imagine there are more then a few people ticked off with this type of city planning.

Photo credit to Oliver Casarsa from the Facebook group

My original thought on the project was to tear them down. I lived in Paris, just down the road from Brantford and spent a good amount of my formative teenage years hanging out in Browntown. I moved to the area in 1994 and bore witness to the slow decline of the Brantford Core. There used to be comic book shops and book stores that I’d frequent, or memorable nights spent playing video games at Funtown then checking out a movie at the old $2 Cineplex. All of those things are gone. Purdy’s, a favourite among friends of mine for their weekly Monday music trivia. Long gone. Since this stretch of Colborne Street had been dead or dying for at least 10 years now, my thinking was what is there worth saving down there?

After doing some reading through the Facebook group called Save The South Side of Colborne Street, a couple things came clear to me. Originally when I heard they were knocking these buildings down I assumed they had a plan in tow that would utilize this space and help the ongoing revitalization process going on in downtown Brantford. As it turns out, not so much. All they really have planned is a spot for a combined athletic facility to be jointly used by the YMCA, Laurier University, Nippissing University and Mohawk College, who all have campuses in Brantford, which will occupy only 1/3 of the cleared space. The City Council is essentially rushing headlong into this project because it has government money to burn as part of Canadian stimulus spending. They don’t have a full plan for how this land is going to be used, they just want to raze the land in hopes that developers will come running to build projects on the land. The City claims that nobody has been willing to redevelop the area in the last 20 years, so they’re just going to knock them down. The Province of Ontario has told the City Council to reconsider their decision on this issue, yet they wish to soldier on.

Personally I think that this is just a big gambit by the City to force the issue of redevelopment within the core. In the end they have expropriated the buildings, moved everyone out and now have a large amount of empty buildings with a lot less strings attached then before. I think the city all along has wanted a white knight-type developer to swoop in and save the day here. By threatening to knock down 41 pre-confederation buildings, they’ve brought the downtown redevelopment to the forefront, garnering a lot of mainstream coverage of the issue. Their goal here has been to find a developer to take this project on, so raising the profile of the issue could enable them to pull on the heart strings of some developer, get them to open their wallet and get involved.

Think of the public relations victory for the City Council, the incoming developers and Brantford as a whole if the buildings get saved and properly redeveloped? Guess we can just hope this is what actually comes to pass.

Photo credit to Erich Davies

On this past Saturday Corina, Erich and I made our way to the Personal Computing Museum in Brantford, Ontario where they were having an open house. The reason for the event was that Syd, the owner of the museum had written an application for a Commodore VIC-20, an almost 30 year old computer, to enable it to send status updates or tweets, to Twitter. Essentially it was bridging the gap between ancient and modern computing technologies. I took a video of the historic tweet on my iPhone. Not the greatest quality, but at least you can hear Syd give the explanation of the difficulties of being able to write such an application for such an old device.

This was the first time I’ve been to the PC Museum and I have to say I was quite impressed. They have a wide array of perfectly functional, classic computers that people are allowed to use. Many had classic games like Space Invaders, Arkanoid and even text based classics like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I personally was fascinated with the back wall of the museum, which featured many of the original boxes from classic video game consoles and computers, and loads of old software boxes, cartridges, tapes and floppy disks for every sort of computer. It was pretty impressive. There was mention that they have a games night there twice a year, which I’d definitely be interested in checking out.

If you’d like to follow the Personal Computing Museum on Twitter, follow @vintagePC