Urban Planning, Anyone?

A major, unexpected benefit of building the King's Town School structure was the opportunity to do some re-structuring in the nominal Rideau Street/Wellington Street/Place d'Armes neighbourhood. Or to put it another way, where do I want to move the buildings around to? Or to put it yet another way, Urban Planning! After:

When I tried to place the school, or in my modelled era of 1970, Warren Plumbing Supply, I came up against (literally) the Sowards coal shed. And that ain't prototypical! So, I had to find a way to cover my tracks (not literally). So I took a few trees out of the tree box and plunked them around the school. I was pleased with the results. It greened up the layout significantly, made the school area look natural and lived-in, and actually visually separated both the school and the coal shed from each other:

I've since constructed a green cardstock 'scene mat' on which I placed and painted green some modelling clay, added some ground cover, and planted the trees in them before gluing the mat to the layout and placing the school in the midst of it.  The glue is still drying. Before:

No trees around the school. Who would ever make HO scale students study so close to a loud, clattering and dusty coal shed? Not me. The trees should absorb some of the coal dust and give off some HO scale oxygen!

The black and white of the layout as well as a few grey areas. I plan only to keep moving the buildings around every so often, trying to get the ideal juxtaposition of them all. That garage is a nice structure but I have yet to rework it! Aerial photograph view, with the iPhone right up at the drop ceiling, with your humble blogger teetering on a chair to get the shot!