People walk through the fairway grounds of the CNE during media preview day in Toronto on Aug. 17, 2022.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Until Sept. 4, Exhibition Place will be busy. The Canadian National Exhibition has packed the site full of rides, people and pickle-flavoured cotton candy for its annual late summer fair.
But the bright lights obscure an awkward truth: For most of the year, the site is seriously underused. Owned by the city, Exhibition Place is 192 acres on the doorstep of downtown Toronto. But it doesn’t feel like part of the city. Nobody lives there, there is not a single store on its streets, and for much of the year, you can’t even buy a coffee.
Mostly, it’s a dead zone.
Yet it’s changing. The Ontario Line subway and frequent GO Train service are heading to the site – and several projects are brewing at the adjacent Ontario Place.
It’s time for the City of Toronto to rethink its approach to this area.
The site should be subject to an open design competition that puts everything on the table. Could some housing and retail knit it back into the city? How should the green space and historic buildings on the site serve the surrounding neighbourhoods? This is a massive piece of land that deserves high-level thinking from the world’s best designers.
It also has a long and complex past. Its colonial history goes back to the French Fort Rouillé in the mid-18th century and the British New Fort York. The CNE and its predecessors are 150 years old, and for much of that time, the site was a fairground – essentially a park dotted with high-quality exhibition halls.
But it’s been built up with an ocean of parking lots, and an array of new buildings that get worse with each generation. The city agency that runs the site, also called Exhibition Place, has done its own thing for decades with very little real oversight. For the past decade, the loudest politician on its board was Councillor Mark Grimes, who seemed committed to blighting the place with giant billboards.
To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you’re Exhibition Place, everything looks like an exhibition or a convention. In its most recent strategic plan, published in 2022, the organization doubled down on its traditional role.
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But how has that been working out lately? Everything built on the site in the past generation is questionable. The city agency has doubled down on its use as a convention centre and trade-show site.
It allowed the construction of Hotel X, an abominable building by local architects NORR that has a fortress-like presence. Then there is the Raptors’ practice facility, now called OVO Athletic Centre. This too is fourth-rate architecture, by the Oklahoma firm Guernsey, and it’s predominantly private.
Next up are an e-sports stadium and another new hotel, announced two years ago, both of them largely opaque buildings that are hostile to the streets around them. If these are built, they will solidify the site’s anti-urban character.
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Exhibition Place’s CEO, Don Boyle, who spent most of his career in parks in East York and Toronto, took over the agency in 2019. To his credit, he has spoken passionately about changing the site to bring in more pedestrians and cyclists. “We’re asking, can we reduce the number of roadways we have and create more animated pedestrian connections?” he said in an interview. The organization has hired transportation consultants WSP to study the site.
But there have been many half-baked studies and visions for Exhibition Place, most recently by City Planning in 2020. That report, whose conclusions were remarkably vague, did call for two new pedestrian routes through the site. One of these Mr. Boyle hopes will now be realized – his organization is collaborating with Metrolinx to plan a route that runs along the west side of BMO Field from the new subway at the north, down to a bridge at the south end to Ontario Place.
But the presence of a subway and frequent-service trains should put more pressure on Exhibition Place to reinvent itself. It now has 5,500 surface parking spots. Surely some of these can be replaced with more valuable uses.
One interesting point: the CNE’s lease on several buildings runs out in 2027. Then Mr. Boyle said he hopes to introduce street-facing restaurants into some or all of three major structures: the Better Living Centre, the Queen Elizabeth Theatre and the Food Building – all of them important Modernist buildings. The latter, Mr. Boyle said, could get a food hall.
Those are moves in the right direction. But they are far too small. This site is big enough, and important enough, to demand a coherent and bold new vision.