A Sunday of immodest proposals

The Sunday Star had a few articles of note (since Tuesday is the best time to reflect on the Sunday paper):

Why not shop the better way? Andrew Chung wonders why the TTC isn’t looking at retail to inject more revenue into the system.

Around the world, mass transit systems are learning, as airports have done, that public dollars are finite, and that it’s essential to find other ways to generate revenue. TTC general secretary Vince Rodo, who’s in charge of the budget, understands this. Subways are terribly expensive, and so “you really have to do all these things to defray costs,” he notes.

However, as a sort of counter-point, Glen Murray provides a cautionary tale in Burning the furniture to heat the house by looking at the TTC’s plan to sell of excess land. Murray writes that the last time the TTC had an opportunity to deal with a development adjacent to a subway station, the results were less than stellar:

The construction of the Four Seasons Centre — Toronto’s first opera house — presented the kind of economic opportunity that mayors dream of: a dynamic new cultural facility between two very busy stand-alone subway stations, next to two of Canada’s largest hotels replete with convention facilities, a block from two major department stores and the largest downtown mall in Canada, with City Hall nearby and on the busiest streetcar route to boot.

Here was a golden opportunity for the TTC to build connections, realize new developments and, under dynamic leadership from the city, to forge a new cultural tourism district from the build-out of these subways and new connections between all these top-class cultural and tourism facilities.

What if we had rebuilt the Osgoode station so that it transitioned seamlessly into underground shops, then stepped up into dynamic streetscapes, that in turn created an energy and excitement connecting the opera house, the Hilton and Sheraton Hotels, the Bay and Nathan Phillips Square into a great avenue of culture and food?

What if we had lined the streets with public art and great street furniture, opening up opportunities for exciting restaurants and shops and converted the small north-south streets into a pedestrian mall?

This would have triggered an explosion of cultural experience into the street, enhancing the value of the land and buildings, and expanding the city’s tax base.

In other news at opera house scale, Spacing Votes columnist John Lorinc writes an open letter — A modest proposal — to David Crombie, a man in search of a place for Toronto’s museum. Lorinc suggests looking to Maple Leaf Gardens and doing something like the Tate Modern did when it moved into the former Bankside power station in London (arguably now the greatest place on Earth):

The Tate Modern’s power lies in not only its collection, but with the fascinating restoration of a mammoth, utilitarian structure that was never intended to be a museum. Some of the turbines have been retained, as has the internal generating hall. This wasn’t a work of “starchitecture” so much as a supremely imaginative example of how a city can preserve the rapidly disappearing artifacts of its industrial past.

We could do the same with the Gardens — a 76-year-old barn redolent of the gritty, working-class ethic that characterized early 20th-century Toronto. And though we mustn’t overlook the victims of the abuse scandal during the Harold Ballard years, the Gardens had an electrifying impact on hundreds of thousands of kids who went there to see their first NHL match. I can vividly remember the purely aesthetic experience of first setting foot in that cathedral-like space, with its brilliant collage of colours and noises.

To me, it’s also revealing that the late media mogul Ken Thomson was both a major fine-art collector and a dedicated hockey fan who frequented the Gardens. The building is evidently a place that has resonated very broadly across our city’s culture.

This modest proposal is sure to satisfy most folks worried about the future of the Gardens. Nobody really worried about the demise of Terminal Two at Pearson in same way — but just as we remembered it a few weeks ago, Bill Taylor gives the old concrete beast a loving send off:

Shortly after it began operations in 1972, at what was then called Toronto International Airport, MP Don Blenkarn called the new terminal a shed unfit for pigs. It should, he said, be used for freight handling.

It certainly looked like a warehouse. Perhaps whoever masterminded it had had an unhappy childhood and grew up hating people. Whereas today’s buildings at Pearson International are light and airy with huge windows looking out over the airport, Terminal 2 was deliberately made unfriendly to visitors. It was about a kilometre long and had no windows.

The pigs did get to ride moving sidewalks though, and that was something, back in ’72.

(Top illustration via The Star of early 1990s retail proposal. Note the kid with the ballons and #99 jersey — we suppose more believable than a Wendel Clark or Todd Gill shirt)