James Bay resident Bruce Campbell marched up to Paul Mathews at the Victoria Sky Ride Gondola open house Wednesday and offered to trade houses with him.
Like many in the neighbourhood, Campbell is vehemently opposed to the idea of gondolas whisking thousands of cruise ship passengers above the treetops in James Bay from Ogden Point to Victoria Harbour.
“Will you trade houses?” he asked Mathews. “Will you come and live at 27 Oswego St. and stand in my front yard on a summer’s day? I’ll have your house. I’ll trade. I haven’t seen your house yet, but I’ll trade you.”
Mathews, president of Whistler’s Ecosign Mountain Resort Planners Ltd., is a partner in Sky Ride with former Langford administrator Geoff Pearce. Sky Ride is willing to spend $10 million to build a gondola system to carry passengers to and from the city centre during the May to September cruise ship season.
“A few people support the idea, saying it’s very innovative, a new idea that needs to be considered at least because it does solve a lot of problems,” Mathews said at the open house at the James Bay Athletic Association Clubhouse.
“But the majority is dead set against it, calling it the craziest idea they ever heard, telling me to go back to Whistler. We’re trying to explain it this afternoon and evening to clear up a few myths.”
At the lively open house, James Bay residents aired their concerns about privacy, loss of views and parkland, property devaluation and the logistics of moving 2,800 passengers per hour in each direction.
“Gondolas are fine when you’re going through the snow and up a mountain. But coming through a nice neighbourhood like James Bay, with the small houses and the apartments, everyone’s going to lose their privacy because these things are going to go by all the time,” Ben Levinson said.
“For nine or 10 months of the year, we’re going to have this wire going across our view, and we have to look at it all the time. And if you’re on the second floor of your house or the third floor of an apartment building, people are going to be looking down on you sitting there in your underwear.”
His wife, Carla Levinson, predicted the gondolas will be noisy.
“They have a hum,” she observed. “If it was a good idea, we’d say ‘Great. It’s a nice change.’ This is not a good change for this beautiful seaside city. It would be a shame to destroy the ambiance.”
If the proposal is successful, Oswego Street resident George Marioni will be looking out his front window at a steel tower nearly 22 metres tall.
“I’m going to look down the road where the view of the water is right now and I’m going to see a station,” Marioni said.
Campbell, who is living in the Oswego Street house built by his grandfather in 1941, predicted Sky Ride would be a “really horrible” sight.
“Those things will be lit and they’ll run at their convenience. And they do not provide any public transportation,” he said.
Robin Lowry, who lives at 52 Owego St., also spoke his mind.
“I’m totally opposed to this. This is Coney Island. It’s a nightmare. I agree that property values would be zero. Nobody would buy a house with a ski lift-gondola going over it,” Lowry said.
-thumb.png;w=120;h=80;mode=crop)
