The Overall Goal

The Heritage District Plan is a continuation of Collingwood's long tradition of citizen involvement, community foresight, and public investment to ensure the Town's future. It flows directly from the successful efforts, over four decades, to maintain the central business district as the retail centre of the town, and from the recognition, developed over a similar time, that the heritage character of the downtown core is a significant contributor to its economic vitality, particularly as tourism and recreational industries play a growing role in the local economy. The actions of civic and business groups and the Town Council over this period bear witness to a broad and sustained committment by Collingwood to value the quality of its built form and to preseve and enhance its heritage qualities as it evolves and grows.

The overall goal of the Heritage District plan is to ensure the retention of the District's heritage resources and to guide change so that it contributes to and does not detract from the District's architectural, historical, and contextual character.

Objectives Of The Heritage District Plan

In view of the foregoing, provisions and policies for the District should meet the following objectives:

Townscape

-- To preserve existing patterns of streets, lanes and pathways, and to restore the heritage character of streetscapes by control and guidance of new development.

-- To encourage conservation or re-introduction of historic landscape treatments in both the public and private realms, including both hard and soft landscape elements.

-- To ensure that landscape, streetscape, and infrastructure improvements enhance the heritage character of the District.

-- To preserve and reinforce existing vistas of significant features and buildings, and to open new vistas where this can be done without detriment to the heritage character of the District.

-- To encourage visual de-emphasis of non-heritage service functions such as parking facilities and utilities by inconspicuous location, planting, masking, and integration into elements that are sympathetic to the heritage character of the District.

-- To create visible markers at the main "gateways" of the District on Hurontario Street, First Street, and Huron Street.

Heritage Buildings

-- To retail and conserve the buildings identified in the Heritage District Plan as having heritage importance to the District.

-- To conserve distinguishing original features, qualities and character of heritage buildings and to avoid the removal or alteration of any such features.

-- To encourage the corrections of unsympathetic alterations made over the years to heritage buildings.

-- To encourage restoration of heritage buildings based on historical, archival, and pictoral evidence.

-- To encourage continuing use and habitation of heritage buildings in order to maintain their economic viability.

-- To promote retention and reuse of heritage buildings, and to take exceptional measures to prevent their demolition.

-- To encourage interior and exterior maintenance to preserve heritage buildings from damage or destruction from weather or fire.

Future Development In The District

-- To encourage new development that will enhance the heritage character of the district as infill construction on vacant lands and replacement construction or alterations to non-heritage buildings.

-- To guide new development so it can provide for contemporary needs, and to ensure its design will be compatible with the complementary to the character of the District and the heritage resources within it.

Community Support

-- To foster community support, pride, and appreciation of the heritage character of the District, and to promote the need to conserve this character for future generations.

-- To encourage public paraticipation and involvement in the conservation of heritage resources and the heritage character of the District.

-- To offer assistance and incentives to individual heritage property owners to assist in preserving heritage resources, and to ensure the use of proper conservation approaches when undertaking improvement and maintenance projects.

-- To maintain the commercial core of Collingwood as a progressive and competitive business environment by maintaining the distinctive heritage character of the District, while providing for development and supporting uses to meet contemporary needs.

-- To promote and protect the heritage character of the District as a basis for economic developmenet, particularly as generated by the tourism and recreational sectors, in both the District and elsewhere in the town.

-- To integrate the protection, enhancement, and promotion of heritage character into all policies and practices of the town and civic groups, as they affect the integrity of the District.
 

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