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It has the potential to be just one of many diverse pieces that revitalize the near west side. A distinctive residential, office and retail development called Graffiti is planned for 2.3 acres of vacant land across the street, including the historic SW&A Street Railway building.

The city has set aside $5 million to begin narrowing University Avenue and potentially adding separated bike lanes and landscaped boulevards. It’s also negotiating with Canadian Pacific Railway for surface rights to the ravine that runs along the top of the rail tunnel nearby. Bortolin and Ward 2 Coun. Fabio Costante want to create a cool linear park.

Banners rebranding the area as RiverWest and illustrating its features, like Assumption Church, have already been erected.

Photo by Dax Melmer / Windsor Star

The city has the same chance to make a difference on the east end of downtown, where it’s also issuing a request for expressions of interest for the old Windsor Arena property after it was announced a high school will no longer be built there.

The Detroit-Windsor Tunnel and city hall divide downtown along Goyeau Street. The casino is like an island, and Water World has been long closed except for a few after-school programs.

Redeveloping Windsor Arena, vacant for seven years and now used for storage, offers another chance to inject more life into the core.

There are at least three very different potential proposals for what Windsor affectionately calls The Barn, I’m told. But here’s the real opportunity. We have another chance to save a building that’s on the city’s heritage register and was a place to go for more than 80 years. Built in 1924 and originally named the Border Cities Arena, it hosted not only the Spitfires but the Detroit Cougars — later renamed the Detroit Red Wings — for the 1926-27 NHL season. It’s now one of the oldest arenas of its type in North America.

There’s a silver lining here. Satellite emergency services will still be provided somewhere in the core, just not on the former Grace Hospital site. A new Catholic Central High School will still be built in the core, just not on the Windsor Arena site. And now the city can also guide development on two key sites at either end of the core, at a time when development is hot.

Done right, that’s a whole lot of possibility.

ajarvis@postmedia.com