Yonge and great: an assessment of Yonge as a great street

Some streets are better than others. Some are ordinary, and others are great. This paper explores what makes Great Streets and the key built form features. A case study analysis was conducted and was guided by an evaluative framework based on Allan Jacobs eight Requirements and five Criteria for Great Streets. The evaluative framework help assessed the degree to which Times Square and Yonge St - between Queen and College - met the Requirements and Criteria for Great Streets. The discussion demonstrates how improvement to the physical Requirements of streets can result in noticeable improvement in its’ function. While Yonge is Toronto’s ‘main street’ the evaluation identified areas for enhancement. Specifically, in order for Yonge to be a Great Street, future planning and design strategies should consider the following three Requirements: (1) Places to walk with some leisure; (2) Physical comfort; and (3) Quality Design.

Yonge and great: an assessment of Yonge as a great street

Some streets are better than others. Some are ordinary, and others are great. This paper explores what makes Great Streets and the key built form features. A case study analysis was conducted and was guided by an evaluative framework based on Allan Jacobs eight Requirements and five Criteria for Great Streets. The evaluative framework help assessed the degree to which Times Square and Yonge St - between Queen and College - met the Requirements and Criteria for Great Streets. The discussion demonstrates how improvement to the physical Requirements of streets can result in noticeable improvement in its’ function. While Yonge is Toronto’s ‘main street’ the evaluation identified areas for enhancement. Specifically, in order for Yonge to be a Great Street, future planning and design strategies should consider the following three Requirements: (1) Places to walk with some leisure; (2) Physical comfort; and (3) Quality Design.

Conclusion

Americans have built a global society whose peoples’ origins look much like the world. This is an observation made daily by international visitors for whom such symbolic locations at the crossroad of American diversity as New York City’s Times Square or the multicultural neighborhoods of big cities possess a cosmopolitan dynamism that seems uniquely American. At eye level these exciting manifestations of multicultural America are not easily forgotten, especially by those residing in more homogeneous societies....

Holy Cross on West Forty-Second and the Transformation of New York City’s Irish American Catholicism

Archbishop John Hughes created Manhattan’s Holy Cross Parish in 1852 to serve the thousands of Irish Catholics moving north of Lower Manhattan into what became known as Longacre Square (later Times Square) and the developing neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Holy Cross maintained a strong Irish American identity into the mid-twentieth century, and its path charted the transformation of the disciplined folk piety created by the “devotional revolution” in Ireland in the nineteenth century into an American Catholicism dominated by Irish American clergy who sought to defend communalistic Catholic distinctiveness amid the rapid urban growth and burgeoning individualistic capitalism of a historically Protestant nation. In the early twentieth century, clergy and laity at Holy Cross converted Irish Catholic longing for an independent Irish nation and ambivalence about American society into a powerful synthesis of Irish American culture and American patriotism. In subsequent decades, Irish American Catholics at Holy Cross also participated in an emergent reactionary critique of the changing sexual mores and increasing ethnic and racial diversity of urban America. The white ethnic Catholic stance on American social change would become a key rhetorical and ideological element of resurgent American conservatism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.