A cyclist rides through the entrance path to Ontario Place, in Toronto, on Sept. 29, 2022.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
On a hot Saturday in June, tens of thousands of people crowded in pens to catch ferries to Toronto Island Park. Not far away, Ontario Place’s West Island stood empty and locked off, its forest and beach waiting for the bulldozers.
It is not hard at all to see what should happen here: Ontario Place needs to open up to the city. Unfortunately, the opposite is happening. Queen’s Park is pushing forward to demolish the West Island for a stadium-sized private indoor waterpark, supported by perhaps a billion dollars in subsidies.
How does Toronto continue to get everything so wrong with its great public spaces? Because City Hall has no vision, and those with the money and power – Bay Street and Queen’s Park – fundamentally don’t understand the value of public space.
This long-standing defect showed itself last week in a report by Richard Florida, an economist and urbanist.
The report’s start is promising. A waterfront is crucial, it says – a site of tourism, recreation and business that is “an essential part of [a city]’s iconography.” Toronto’s needs work. Mr. Florida cites strategies that have helped waterfronts in other cities, including New York. These include several excellent and heavily touristed parks: Hudson River Park, Little Island and the “transformative” Domino Park.
But will it work in Toronto? No. Instead, Mr. Florida supports the destruction of the West Island for the controversial waterpark by Therme Canada, the Austrian “wellness” company that is funding his report. He repeats many of Therme’s questionable talking points.
The key one is that Ontario Place is “abandoned.” In truth, 2.8 million people visited the site in 2022, about a million just to use the open space. This was once a beautiful, highly designed Modernist landscape with cultural offerings. Even with poor maintenance and minimal programming, it was a huge draw in recent years. It is very close indeed to the model of New York’s Little Island: A photogenic landscape with good snacks and good concerts.
People watch the sunset on the West Island on Ontario Place on Sept. 29, 2022. As many as 2.8 million people visited the site in 2022.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
But in Mr. Florida’s telling, it’s a blank slate, just right to hold a new “year-round attraction.”
What’s an “attraction”? The report refers to a group of major cultural institutions, such as the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Tate Modern. Mr. Florida does not exactly say that the indoor waterpark with an underground parking garage is comparable with these institutions.
And this is the heart of the problem. Cities are made of specific places. Those places have particular qualities, and require particular kinds of attention and design.
A spectacular art gallery is an object of civic pride, a draw for international tourists, and a type of place that brings in people on foot and sends them out into the street looking for cocktails and tapas, ready to tell their friends at home about the glories of the city. Toronto politicians don’t understand such places, even though Ontario Place was one of them – in 1971.
Then there is Therme Canada’s spa. That is a largely windowless box that requires the total demolition of an eight-acre island, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of water infrastructure and a huge parking garage – so its visitors can eat lunch inside, exit with their wet hair, get in the minivan and go home. It has no business in a central city. That is why existing Therme facilities are in the European boonies in Bavaria and Bucharest.
Any smart and honest analysis of Ontario Place would tell us: Keep it as a park. It has the most value that way, and will cost relative peanuts to build and maintain. Residents and visitors would love it.
Five years ago, consultant John Alschuler said as much to an audience in Toronto. He was right. Then he went to work for Therme, carrying water.