Toronto's waterfront on Oct. 17, 2017.Mark Blinch/Reuters
Toronto’s long-neglected waterfront is finally seeing some progress. After decades of delays, a massive redevelopment effort is yielding visible results, including a string of creative parks and a new, naturalized mouth of the Don River.
But the good news comes with a big asterisk. Despite all the great things that are happening down there, the waterfront still lacks a focal point, a crowd-pleasing attraction that the whole world knows about.
Every successful waterfront has an anchor. San Francisco has Pier 39, which draws throngs of visitors for its shops, restaurants, aquarium and views of the basking sea lions. Chicago has Navy Pier and the Riverwalk area. Vancouver has Stanley Park. Sydney has Circular Quay, the ferry and transit hub with its museums, waterside promenade and view of the famous Opera House.
What is the go-to place in Toronto? Harbourfront, where the waterfront revival began, has lost some of its appeal over the years, though it still has lots of great arts programming and summer camps. The waterpark and health spa planned for Ontario Place should be a big draw, despite all the overheated complaints about it, but it is over to the west, outside the central harbour and away from the heart of things.
Sugar Beach, Sherbourne Common, the Music Garden, Ireland Park – all of these novelty parks are great on their own but, taken together, the waterfront is a mishmash, confusing and disorienting for visitors.
A new report by the Waterfront Business Improvement Area says that visitors are likely to feel “underwhelmed by the lack of things to do,” especially considering that most other waterfront cities have “significant tourist attractions.” The whole area has just five water’s-edge patios and an “almost complete absence” of attractive shopping outlets.
Fortunately, it’s not too late to give the waterfront a focal point. As I have said in this space before, all sorts of possibilities present themselves.
Toronto could build a harbour pier like Chicago’s or San Francisco’s. The foot of Yonge Street might be a good place for it. The ferry terminal there is a decaying, overcrowded embarrassment. The city plans to give it a facelift for this summer’s onslaught of visitors to the Toronto Islands. A better idea would be to build a whole new terminal (something city hall has talked about and studied for years) and make it part of the pier. Toronto’s mayor, Olivia Chow, is the perfect champion for such a project. The terminal is named after her late husband, Jack Layton.
That is not the only way to animate the waterfront. Toronto could build a new modern art museum on the harbour like Lisbon’s dramatic Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology. It could create a market district like Vancouver’s Granville Island, which brings floods of people down to the water to shop, eat and visit theatres and galleries. It could buy and redevelop the Redpath sugar refinery, the last big industrial outfit by the harbour.
Whatever it does, Toronto should think big and act fast. The city has squandered a series of chances to make something exciting happen on the waterfront. It might have created a splendid park at the foot of Yonge when the area’s industrial era was ending. It let a developer put up a hotel and condo project instead, walling off the city from the harbour.
It might have put a version of Chicago’s Millennium Park in the waste lands south of Union Station. Instead they became a lively high-rise residential and office district, which lacks coherence and open space. The city might have done something great around Harbourfront when that space was freed up by the federal government for development in the 1970s and 1980s. It let tacky condos go up instead – another wall between city and harbour.
It could have filled in or bridged the artificial bays enclosed by the waterfront’s several quays and created an uninterrupted seawall for joggers and walkers along the whole north side of the harbour. That never happened.
Lots of ingenuity and plenty of money have gone into Toronto’s new waterfront. What is lacking is an overarching vision. The agency that is nominally in control, Waterfront Toronto, is a three-headed monster, jointly founded by the municipal, provincial and federal governments. When everyone is in charge, no one is.
It is time for someone to take the lead and give the waterfront its anchor.