Each Monday, Spacing will bring you some of the popular posts from our sister blog, Spacing Montréal. We’ll keep an eye open for topics and discussions that are pertinent to current public space issues in Toronto.
• The Montréal All-Nighter, the city’s version of Nuit Blanche, was held on March 1 in several downtown neighbourhoods. The post Karine Giboulo: Of Pig and Men is a reflection on an exhibit in Place des Arts — one that Rob Ford might want to explore in detail.
• A post on Skyline Planning features an interesting diagram from Montréal’s Plan D’Urbanisme that demonstrates how buildings must be designed “to maintain the importance of Mount Royal within the urban landscape.” Imagine if Toronto took the same care and concern in emphasizing Lake Ontario, our city’s most important natural feature.
• The pedestrianization of Sainte-Catherine looks at plans to close part of this major Montréal street to traffic this summer. Writer Paul Erlichman examines the positive and negative aspects of this initiative.
6 comments
I’ve been thinking for a while now that we should essentially give up on the “waterfront” between Strachan and Leslie and deem it merely an internal waterway like the Don or Humber. It’s looking more and more like Bay Street-on-the-Lake these days.
Instead maybe we should use subway fill from the Eglinton LRT line to expand the Toronto islands and the Spit, put a transit-only fixed link at either end and essentially make the southern edge our official waterfront.
I think Toronto blew it with the waterfront. Yea, all those condo towers are okay for those that live there. But there was an opportunity to create perhaps the finest waterfront in all the world, and it just went poof! Part of the disappointment is that condo towers are probably the least creative solution.
We still have the eastern waterfront, which is getting much lower condos and plenty of public space. Besides, the islands are a great park. I think we really need to roll out some pedestrian areas in the city!
I don’t want to do a blanket defense of the Harbourfront area, because there are certainly some dogs in that neighbourhood, but I think the areas that are bad are much smaller than we think. Generally the area between Spadina and Yonge are pointed to as the worst offenders, but even there there is now HtO park, and the strip along Harbourfront by the Powerplant is nice and packed with people in the summer. Even that hated condo to the west of the ferry docks has an interesting park out front if people make the effort to check it out. Except for the ferry docks, you can stroll along the lake in most places unencumbered.
Uh, the article deals with skylines, in which Mount Royal plays a role. If you want to get into views of Lake Ontario, you’re really talking about land use and street grids and view corridors _at ground level_, not skylines.
A low building blocks out Lake Ontario from, say, Queen St. as much as a tall one – the problem is the streets, not the buildings. No one cares about the view from the 6th floor of a building – it’s the lost sense of the lake when walking the streets that makes us mad. If you had a series of wide north-south streets that ended at the lake, you would have great views from as far up as Bloor. The embankment for the railway plus the Gardiner plus dead-end streets equals no view, and Toronto does not have the inland slope to recover it through geography (unlike, say, San Fran).
Many buildings have giant buildings along their waterfront – we just screwed up the land use and street platting. It’s the fault of a number of people over a long time, and will not be easy to rectify unless you believe in burying both the Gardiner AND the rail lines.
Oops. Meant to say “many CITIES have giant buildings along their waterfront”. Sorry, I’m typing this from New York and we’re a little preoccupied here today. Ontario politicians may not be great at waterfront development but at least they avoid the scandals of NY and NJ!