While the bulk of last week’s media coverage of Infrastructure Ontario’s curiously-timed disclosure of Therme’s lease focused on the financial terms and the mega-garage, the bits that most intrigued me have to do with a phrase that comes up dozens of times in this 297-page contract: “Therme Public Area.”
During the too-ing and fro-ing over the configuration of this half-billion-dollar human aquarium, critics, including several experts on Waterfront Toronto’s design review panel, focused intensively on the fact that Therme’s giant structure essentially colonized all but a ribbon of shoreline public space on the West Island. In response, Therme and its design team came back with an updated version that included an expanded shoreline area, created from new lake-filling, as well as some kind of publicly accessible path network on the spa’s roof.
Therme, we were also told, would foot the bill for constructing all that new “public space” — perhaps this obligation accounts for the reason the ballparked capital cost has risen from $350 million to $500 million — and then maintaining it, apparently in perpetuity.
The lease’s copious attention to these new areas indicates that we’re not in Kansas anymore, at least in regards to the way the contract will treat what has been dubbed a public space. Yes, the lease says the Therme Public Areas shall always be accessible without an expectation of payment. But the reality is much more complicated, although the phrase itself — “Therme Public Area” — clearly indicates the publicness of those new lands will be subordinate to the business imperatives of the Austrian wellness company that is building, financing, managing and commercializing all this new shoreline.
In effect, the Therme Public Areas are an offshoot of the “privately owned public spaces” that dot the core, but with a twist: they will be, in many important ways, “publicly-owned private spaces,” and thus something new in a city that struggles mightily with public space.
According to the document, Therme has considerable latitude to commercialize these areas beyond the walls of the spa building — up to 30% of the total space — presumably with events, concessions, and shorefront amenities (think: picnic tables, deck chairs and miscellaneous equipment rentals, as well as, per the contract, “free time attractions and fun, cultural, health, wellness and relaxation activities and programming, in each case which shall be open for admission to the general public.”) The lease doesn’t have anything to say about what happens if Therme tries to expand its public area footprint beyond the contractual 30% limit. Hard to imagine that any entity would halt a creeping expansion, given the lengths the Ontario government has gone to guide this stinky deal towards Therme.
The province has thoughtfully indemnified Therme for anything that happens in these public areas that results in a lawsuit. The contract, however, requires Therme to maintain them to some minimum standard, and it seems clear the quid pro quo here is that all the commercial activity envisioned for the Therme Public Areas will help defray those expenses, less profits and whatever else flows back to Ontario Place.
Let me say for the record that I’m not against the notion of allowing certain types of congruent commercial activity to take place in public space. Toronto is exceptionally bad at this sort of thing, as the city locks into weirdly lopsided deals, such as the concessions along the boardwalk in the Beach, which allow the operator to do the absolute minimum, year after year after year.
Many other cities with more mature approaches to public space are able to permit concessions that offer decent and well-maintained retail food/beverage services, yet this is a riddle that Parks Forestry and Recreation seems unable to master.
The bulk of what’s planned for the Therme Public Areas is likely to be oriented towards the summer months, when the company will want its patrons to be able to take advantage of the newly constructed waterfront access zones.
What’s anything but clear is how those commercial operations will co-exist with the types of activities that people who aren’t interested in paying for Therme’s wellness services want to do in these areas. I can easily imagine confusion and conflict over access to, say, picnic tables set out by Therme, or the use of its water’s edge amenities (waterslides or whatever). Will these very ordinary objects be truly accessible to everyone or will visitors have to pay? After all, Therme’s footing the bill for all this stuff, and, in the narrow logic of commerce, it might feel it has the right to charge. How that happens is anyone’s guess.
Based on the gauzy renderings prepared by Diamond Schmitt, it also seems clear the new lookout/promontory on the west end of the island is destined to become a busy event space, for outdoor concerts or talks or whatever.
Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this idea. Cultural programming in public spaces — think Choir! Choir! Choir!’s Christie Pits sing-alongs or any of the summer music festivals — adds to the richness of urban life. Indeed, the city has become quite good at encouraging this kind of activity — for free. You show up, you watch, you enjoy yourself. No cash changes hands.
How will those bandstand events work in Therme Public Areas? Again, who knows? I can envision scenarios in which seating areas are limited to ticketholders. Is that the end of the world? After all, the outdoor stage at Harbourfront operates precisely like this. But the difference, in my view, is that the Therme Public Areas will always be subject to what Therme wants to do on any given afternoon or evening, thus public accessibility is invariably contingent.
However, what’s most concerning about the management of the Therme Public Areas is what happens with — or to — those members of the public whose behaviour or activity conflicts with Therme’s commercial objectives. Let’s not trot out Toronto’s favourite bogeyman — the homeless person sleeping on a bench or in a tent (although the Supreme Court has ruled that such uses are constitutionally permitted in public parks).
Rather, I’m wondering about, say, groups of boisterous teenagers or a large gathering of a lake-swimming club or a flotilla of kayakers that decides to take up lots of space on the shiny new shoreline that Therme built, and certainly not out of the goodness of its corporate heart.
Again, the cold logic of the commercial activity envisioned for the Therme Public Areas suggests the company will want to find some way to, uh, manage activities that interfere with its various lakeside businesses. The lease is as silent as a church mouse about how those conflicts over public space will be resolved, and by whom.
Certainly, municipal authorities in Toronto have shown they aren’t exactly skilled in dealing diplomatically with such conflicts in public space, and the deployment of private security guards seems to have become the default strategy. The miracle of Ontario Place before the closure (and last week’s appalling clear-cutting) is that a kind of self-policing ethic prevailed, as visitors understood the importance of co-existing with one another.
A decade or so hence, I’m guessing all that additional open space around the big spa will retain none of that vibe. Those lands may be public areas, but they’ll always belong to Therme.
