The Downtown of Sudbury is bounded by Ste-Anne Road/Davidson Street (1909) pg 12 to the north, Douglas Street (1909) pg 13 at Brady (1905) pg 6/Elgin Street at Howey Drive to the south, Kitchener Street to the east and Alder Street to the west, and includes one of the city's largest concentration of retail businesses and offices.
The downtown core was the city's original neighbourhood, which was filled with early settler log cabins, none of which currently exist.
An urban renewal project in the 1960s under expropriations saw the historic downtown Borgia Street (1890) pg 61 neighbourhood demolished in favour of a large shopping mall facility, now known as the Rainbow Centre, a realignment and expansion of Notre-Dame Avenue, a low rental tenement and a further expropriation for land to build Tom Davies Square, the city's modern city hall. A parcel of this land adjacent to the city hall was later donated by the city to the Sudbury Theatre Centre. The city also attracted national press attention in the 1970s for the creation of St. Andrews Place, a multi purpose church facility which incorporates a small chapel, retail space and a seniors housing apartment tower where two historic stone churches once stood.
With retail businesses in the city increasingly locating outside of the downtown core, particularly in the Four Corners, Kingsway and Lasalle Boulevard areas, the city has struggled in recent years to maintain a vibrant downtown. Recent projects have included the creation of Market Square, a farmers' and craft market, the redevelopment of the Rainbow Centre mall, streetscape beautification projects, and the creation of the Downtown Village Development Corporation, a not-for-profit organization that identifies and pursues development opportunities, creates partnerships, and advocates for and promotes initiatives that stimulate business and residential investment in Sudbury’s historic core. Although the city is in existence today because of the construction of the rail in this area of the province, at various times over the past 50 years, the city and community groups have proposed that the city purchase the CPR stockyards west of Elgin Street in order to expand the downtown area, although to date this has not been pursued. The farmers' market and historic CPR Ticket and Telegraph Building will be the site for Northern Ontario School of Architecture.
One of Downtown Sudbury's more unusual features is a five-acre park on a hill in the southeast corner of the neighbourhood, centred on a grotto dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes. The grotto was erected in 1907 on the private estate of Frédéric Romanet du Caillaud, a wealthy lawyer, writer and nobleman from Limoges, France who became one of Sudbury's first significant private landowners after moving to the city five years earlier. After Romanet du Caillaud's death, ownership of the site passed to a local businessman's family, and then to a succession of community committees. A pathway depicting the Stations of the Cross was later added to the adjoining parkland in 1958. The site later fell into disrepair, and following a vandalism incident in 1993 it was taken over by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sault Ste. Marie, which refurbished the park and continues to operate it as a public outdoor shrine.
In 2010, the city announced that it was investigating the process of having the downtown core designated as a heritage district, even though it has demolished many of its heritage sites such as the Edwardian Architecture dimension stone Federal Building, built in 1915 "despite the war", boasting a 90 foot clock tower which housed four faced clocks with carillon made in England, clock faced in opal glass & topped with copper dome, because of the rail line that passed in front of it, it was the only pentagonal Federal Building built in Canada or the Nickel Range Hotel, a five star hotel also built in 1915, of this historic boomtown, lined with Caen Stone and furnished with fumed-oak furniture, this hotel hosted King George VI and his wife Queen Elizabeth during their state visit with festivities in the grand hotel's ballroom, amongst many other notable buildings. Most of the architecturally important buildings have since been demolished. See also List of historic places in Greater Sudbury.
Read more about this topic: Urban Neighbourhoods Of Sudbury