The Best Intervention of 2006 goes to the bench installed, without permission of the City, outside of the Parkdale Library on Queen Street West.
In late-March, the City and the Parkdale BIA unveiled a new piece of public art outside the local library and community centre. The World Peace Monument is a bronze globe that contains a water display (only is use during the warmer months). There were a number of complaints about the City allocating $300,000 for a sculpture when the neighbourhood is in desperate need of funding for affordable housing, slum landlord oversight, and the battle with the very public crack trade on Queen Street West.
The globe was placed near the front of the local library which occupies the area that was once Parkdale’s town square. When Parkdale was an independent village in the late 1800s the square and town hall were the centre of this new and prosperous Toronto suburb. From the 1930s onward, the area was slowly neglected and unmaintained, and by 1964 a low-rise modernist library was opened on the space of the old square.
When the City and the Parkdale BIA revealed the public art project in the spring it was seen as an attempt to return the area to a gathering spot. A BIA report states the globe at will become a “place to meet and a public landmark from which you can start exploring all that Parkdale has to offer.”
So if you’re making the area a place to meet why wouldn’t you include some benches? It wasn’t an oversight, said Parkdale BIA co-ordinator Devin Horne in a NOW article: “In the last two or three years, a lot of the benches have been pulled out by the City,” Horne said. “They were being slept on all the time and were a magnet for drug dealers specifically.”
This type of mentality is what sadly plagues many of Toronto’s civil servants, BIAs, and resident associations: let’s remove (or not build) something because of its small negative side-effects and ignore all of its positive benefits.
In early April, a “sit-in” was organized and the bench was installed without the permission of the city or library. It hasn’t been removed and probably to the surprise of the Parkdale BIA, the bench has not become a drive-thru for the drug trade. I walk Parkdale’s Queen West strip almost daily and have watched the activity around the bench with great curiosity. Most of the time the bench is in use by elderly folks, school kids visiting the library, or (in times of good weather) folks eating their lunch. At night, people use the bench to wait for friends, yet I’ve never seen a person sleeping on it.
The bench may not be the biggest or most publicized intervention of 2006, but it’s having a lasting impact and proving all of its critics wrong.
4 comments
As a 23 year resident of Parkdale I think that I can speak with authority in that benches near the library created an outdoor office for drug dealers and this night time activity created a wedge in the heart of the community as people did not want to walk past it. Getting rid of benches and payphones at this specific location was something that residents living in the area, especially women, wanted. There was a lot of talk about it within the community and the City listened. The BIA and citizens are painted with a pretty broad brush in this story which goes back at least 25 years.
There are shelves of studies that have been done by consultants for years about this specific corner. The library is a very important community resource for sure but people have never really been able to come up with something that worked as a community square there; despite being surrounded by 1313 gallery, and other cultural buildings. Maybe its time to give up on the town square concept and build an extension on the library.
The globe though was one of the stupidest wastes of money I have ever seen. The scale is wrong for that tiny spot and to be honest the money would have been better spent on community activities at the busy community centre across the street. What a waste of money. How this helps the community escapes me.
I pass by the bench a number of times a day, at all times of the day, and I have to say it has not been a gathering spot for any of the BIAs “undesireables.” I’m not doubting Scott’s comments, and I don’t know what Queen and Cowan was like with benches (before my time) but this new bench is working out fine.
My firends living nearby use it and we’ve talked about it a number of times. We’re glad it hasn’t been removed.
I would add that the area has improved with the closure of some dodgy establishments (such as Jim Tavern) and the overall turn over in real estate underway. Do I think benches belong there, in the long term , yes.
I reckon no one sleeps on the bench because it has no back rest – hence it is easier to roll right off it. Perhaps a new design point the city can take into consideration when installing benches in areas where this might be a concern?