The Bentway's Dominoes event, where 2.5km of dominoes were set up and set off through downtown neighbourhoods, on Sept. 22.Brandon Newfield/Supplied
Six years ago, The Bentway turned a zone under Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway into a unique public space. Now, that zone is poised to grow: On Thursday, the organization announced details of a major expansion, a 125,000-square-foot zone called Bentway Islands located near Front Street and Spadina Avenue.
The lead designers are the landscape architects at Field Operations, the firm that led the design of New York’s world-renowned High Line, together with Toronto’s Brook McIlroy.
The new project, planned to open by 2030, reflects the ambition and the success of The Bentway so far. Designed by Ken Greenberg and PUBLIC WORK, this is a public space that uniquely integrates recreation, cultural programming and connections to nature, all under an expressway.
Field Operations has a long experience in creating landscapes in odd urban places. They led design of the High Line, a conversion of an elevated rail line in Manhattan that is the most influential public space of this century. It now draws eight million visitors a year.
Isabel Castilla, an associate partner at Field Operations, has worked on the High Line for a decade as well as The Underline, an under-expressway project in Miami. She is leading the Bentway Islands work, and says that site has unusual qualities.
“It is very wide and very deep, which is unlike other spaces beneath elevated structures,” Ms. Castilla said. “Once you’re in it, it feels cathedral-like. It presents great opportunities for larger types of programs for the community because of its scale, and also for a lot of variety within the space.”
The site consists of three large traffic islands within Lake Shore Boulevard west of Spadina Avenue. The Bentway began exploring this zone with Staging Grounds, a temporary exhibition last fall that included walkways, art installations and planters fed by rainwater from the highway.
The design process for the new Islands has just begun, and the project still needs to find most of its capital funding from governments and private donors. But Ilana Altman, co-chief executive officer of The Bentway organization, said the space will likely include recreational facilities, a dog off-leash area and strong pedestrian connections to the city around it – along with a low-carbon construction and features that help manage the water flow from the Gardiner.
In this, it will build on the success of The Bentway so far. The public space as it currently exists, just to the west of the Islands site, includes a skating trail, splash pads and a robust program of public art and performance.
“We are quite literally inventing a new type of space,” Ms. Altman said this week. “It has emerged from this very unusual situation in the city, created by the presence of the highway, and it has had to create its own rules.”
The organization has been able to pursue its own path with respect to design. PUBLIC WORK’s original design is deliberately spare: pine furniture, gold paint and subtle signage harmonize with the highway’s concrete columns. For Islands, The Bentway sought designers through a sophisticated process that emphasized design and experience, rather than (as is usually the case in Toronto) local experience and a cheap fee.
They scored world-class landscape architects. Anywhere else in Toronto, hiring Field Operations would be a huge victory. Yet there’s something bittersweet in it: locals for once created something unique and special, but they won’t get the freedom to continue the project.
Still, the ambition of the Bentway organization is admirable. Ms. Altman, an architect by training, has led a unique programming approach that spans high art and crowd-pleasing happenings.
And sometimes, both. On Sunday, 250 volunteers set up 8,000 jumbo dominoes in a row that wound in and around the Front and Spadina area, snaking through buildings, over benches, across streets and into The Bentway itself. Dominoes, by the performance company Station House Opera, stretched a 2.5-kilometre path through the city to create a whimsical collective event.
Thousands of people came out to watch; the crowd issued a roar of excitement as the dominoes crested a hill in the adjacent Canoe Landing Park and tumbled down toward The Bentway, moving toward the future of public space.