wyliepoon
Senior Member
http://www.thestar.com/News/Ideas/article/484035
PLANNING
TheStar.com | Ideas | Boulevards of broken dreams
If a 1929 plan had come to fruition, there'd be a lot more grandeur to downtown Toronto
Aug 23, 2008 04:30 AM
Kenneth Kidd
Feature Writer
To stand at the intersection of Richmond St. and University Ave. is to behold the fortress-like backside of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, a standard-issue downtown hotel (these days a Hilton), a plain-vanilla office tower and, with some artistic flourishes, a former Bank of Canada building.
There is, on balance, little to raise the spirits, no sense of awe, and nothing like what might have been – back when city planners took Toronto's impending greatness for granted and dared to dream on a suitably grand canvas.
Had they had their way, and had the Great Depression not intervened, the intersection would today be a massive roundabout dubbed Vimy Circle with a towering memorial at its centre.
But even that would have been just part of a major redrawing of the downtown map and streetscape – what civic elders envisioned in 1929 when they produced The Report of the Advisory City Planning Commission.
From Vimy Circle, University would have continued grandly south to Front St. as Queen's Park Ave., while a new major artery, named Passchendaele Rd. after another great Canadian victory in World War I, would have run southwest from Vimy Circle to the existing Clarence Square at Spadina Ave. near Front St.
It would, the report noted, be a way to reverse the city's woeful record of "not providing any open spaces, or the beautifying in any considered way of, the downtown business area, by which to express to the stranger within our gates the self-respect and civic pride of the community."
The whole plan, in typical Toronto fashion, had a mid-Atlantic sensibility, with monumental public areas reminiscent of Europe, but surrounded by sleek art moderne and art deco office towers rather than the low-rise, beaux arts affairs so prevalent in Paris.
It all would have looked a bit like the stretch of Front St. that includes Union Station, the Dominion Public Building and the Fairmont Royal York hotel. And if the planners of 1929 had their way, another new street commemorating battlefield valour – Cambrai Ave. – would have run north from Union Station exactly where the eastern, 1957 addition to the Royal York sits today.
From there, it would have cut through what's now the Toronto-Dominion Centre, and continued north between the present First Canadian Place and The Exchange Tower.
Halfway between King St. and Adelaide St., where the planners envisioned a splendid office tower, Cambrai would have split into an elongated oval, enclosing green space behind the tower, until the two sides joined again just south of Queen St.
Cambrai would then have continued north to the proposed St. Julien Place, named after the battle in which 18,000 Canadian soldiers withstood the first gas attack of World War I. It was to be a glorious public park with fountains and statues flanked by Osgoode Hall – in other words, the current site of Nathan Phillips Square.
According to the 1929 report, a small portion of which is reproduced in the new Historical Atlas of Toronto by Derek Hayes, all of this was nothing less than what the burgeoning city deserved.
"Toronto is the heir of that great empire of the northland whose mineral and other riches are just beginning to be realized," the report enthused. "Toronto citizens are without exception certain of Toronto's future, convinced that it will be a great city in population, wealth and courage."
These days, such jingoistic certitude scarcely ever flows from the mouths of civic leaders, much less the grandiose plans such talk once inspired.
"It's almost impossible to think that these things could happen today," sighs Michael McClelland, a principal with E.R.A. Architects Inc. who specializes in historic preservation and renewal.
"We in Toronto for decades now have thought of `a little bit at a time,' the Jane Jacobs model. We're not focused on infrastructure. We moved away from bigger projects."
The 1929 report may be a rare Toronto example of the City Beautiful movement that swept North America in the early decades of the last century, but beauty, ironically, was not the original, motivating concern.
It was infrastructure and, more specifically, how to accommodate more automobiles downtown.
As the report frets, "traffic is increasing at a much greater rate than population," giving rise to an "urgent need of wider streets and a greater number of through traffic highways."
The idea that beauty would flow from the need for infrastructure – rather than be an end in itself – is scarcely new.
Much of central Paris was redrawn in the late 19th century by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann to make way for the wide boulevards the planet has since come to adore. But the instigating needs and ideals were all about infrastructure.
Razing the city's Medieval-era slums was meant to address huge sanitation issues in the wake of repeated cholera epidemics. The addition of numerous parks was also seen in terms of general health, as well as aping the central green space of rival London, which Napoleon III much admired.
And, not least, Haussmann's overhaul would create thoroughfares wide enough to allow for cavalry charges, in case the city's revolutionary underclass got restless again and started barricading the city's labyrinth of tiny streets, as it had done with impressive regularity in the decades leading up to the Revolution of 1848.
Toronto never did get the similar, if smaller, redrawing imagined in 1929. The only grand avenue even remotely comparable to some of those in Paris would be University, and that already existed as a memorial corridor.
So, instead of Vimy Circle, on University we have the nearby 1910 commemoration of the South African War, created by Walter Seymour Allward, who would later design Canada's massive Vimy memorial in France.
And, just to the south, on the other side of Queen St., the monument to Sir Adam Beck, created in 1934 by Emanuel Hahn, who studied under Allward.
"It's the only street in Toronto that could function like the Champs-Élysées," says McClelland. "Are we happy with the end result?"
For him, the answer is clearly not. "It's really the avenue of the hospitals. What is that boulevard in the middle, where nobody can get to it?"
These days find McClelland dreaming about how grand it would be to bring together some of the city's top architects and planners to fashion, in the spirit of 1929, some updated visions of the future metropolis.
Making University a more inviting place for people to stroll and congregate would be near the top of any such group's to-do list. But in the absence of a clear mandate linked to infrastructure, McClelland isn't sure how much of that envisioning effort would resonate with today's politicians or excite the public imagination.
"What's the impetus to make changes on University now?" McClelland wonders. "If it's just the look of it, that's not really a big driver."
Or, as the 1929 report felt moved to note: "City planning has aptly been described as a state of mind. Undoubtedly until the need or desire for improved or better conditions is apparent, there is no public opinion to demand progress."
PLANNING
TheStar.com | Ideas | Boulevards of broken dreams
If a 1929 plan had come to fruition, there'd be a lot more grandeur to downtown Toronto
Aug 23, 2008 04:30 AM
Kenneth Kidd
Feature Writer
To stand at the intersection of Richmond St. and University Ave. is to behold the fortress-like backside of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, a standard-issue downtown hotel (these days a Hilton), a plain-vanilla office tower and, with some artistic flourishes, a former Bank of Canada building.
There is, on balance, little to raise the spirits, no sense of awe, and nothing like what might have been – back when city planners took Toronto's impending greatness for granted and dared to dream on a suitably grand canvas.
Had they had their way, and had the Great Depression not intervened, the intersection would today be a massive roundabout dubbed Vimy Circle with a towering memorial at its centre.
But even that would have been just part of a major redrawing of the downtown map and streetscape – what civic elders envisioned in 1929 when they produced The Report of the Advisory City Planning Commission.
From Vimy Circle, University would have continued grandly south to Front St. as Queen's Park Ave., while a new major artery, named Passchendaele Rd. after another great Canadian victory in World War I, would have run southwest from Vimy Circle to the existing Clarence Square at Spadina Ave. near Front St.
It would, the report noted, be a way to reverse the city's woeful record of "not providing any open spaces, or the beautifying in any considered way of, the downtown business area, by which to express to the stranger within our gates the self-respect and civic pride of the community."
The whole plan, in typical Toronto fashion, had a mid-Atlantic sensibility, with monumental public areas reminiscent of Europe, but surrounded by sleek art moderne and art deco office towers rather than the low-rise, beaux arts affairs so prevalent in Paris.
It all would have looked a bit like the stretch of Front St. that includes Union Station, the Dominion Public Building and the Fairmont Royal York hotel. And if the planners of 1929 had their way, another new street commemorating battlefield valour – Cambrai Ave. – would have run north from Union Station exactly where the eastern, 1957 addition to the Royal York sits today.
From there, it would have cut through what's now the Toronto-Dominion Centre, and continued north between the present First Canadian Place and The Exchange Tower.
Halfway between King St. and Adelaide St., where the planners envisioned a splendid office tower, Cambrai would have split into an elongated oval, enclosing green space behind the tower, until the two sides joined again just south of Queen St.
Cambrai would then have continued north to the proposed St. Julien Place, named after the battle in which 18,000 Canadian soldiers withstood the first gas attack of World War I. It was to be a glorious public park with fountains and statues flanked by Osgoode Hall – in other words, the current site of Nathan Phillips Square.
According to the 1929 report, a small portion of which is reproduced in the new Historical Atlas of Toronto by Derek Hayes, all of this was nothing less than what the burgeoning city deserved.
"Toronto is the heir of that great empire of the northland whose mineral and other riches are just beginning to be realized," the report enthused. "Toronto citizens are without exception certain of Toronto's future, convinced that it will be a great city in population, wealth and courage."
These days, such jingoistic certitude scarcely ever flows from the mouths of civic leaders, much less the grandiose plans such talk once inspired.
"It's almost impossible to think that these things could happen today," sighs Michael McClelland, a principal with E.R.A. Architects Inc. who specializes in historic preservation and renewal.
"We in Toronto for decades now have thought of `a little bit at a time,' the Jane Jacobs model. We're not focused on infrastructure. We moved away from bigger projects."
The 1929 report may be a rare Toronto example of the City Beautiful movement that swept North America in the early decades of the last century, but beauty, ironically, was not the original, motivating concern.
It was infrastructure and, more specifically, how to accommodate more automobiles downtown.
As the report frets, "traffic is increasing at a much greater rate than population," giving rise to an "urgent need of wider streets and a greater number of through traffic highways."
The idea that beauty would flow from the need for infrastructure – rather than be an end in itself – is scarcely new.
Much of central Paris was redrawn in the late 19th century by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann to make way for the wide boulevards the planet has since come to adore. But the instigating needs and ideals were all about infrastructure.
Razing the city's Medieval-era slums was meant to address huge sanitation issues in the wake of repeated cholera epidemics. The addition of numerous parks was also seen in terms of general health, as well as aping the central green space of rival London, which Napoleon III much admired.
And, not least, Haussmann's overhaul would create thoroughfares wide enough to allow for cavalry charges, in case the city's revolutionary underclass got restless again and started barricading the city's labyrinth of tiny streets, as it had done with impressive regularity in the decades leading up to the Revolution of 1848.
Toronto never did get the similar, if smaller, redrawing imagined in 1929. The only grand avenue even remotely comparable to some of those in Paris would be University, and that already existed as a memorial corridor.
So, instead of Vimy Circle, on University we have the nearby 1910 commemoration of the South African War, created by Walter Seymour Allward, who would later design Canada's massive Vimy memorial in France.
And, just to the south, on the other side of Queen St., the monument to Sir Adam Beck, created in 1934 by Emanuel Hahn, who studied under Allward.
"It's the only street in Toronto that could function like the Champs-Élysées," says McClelland. "Are we happy with the end result?"
For him, the answer is clearly not. "It's really the avenue of the hospitals. What is that boulevard in the middle, where nobody can get to it?"
These days find McClelland dreaming about how grand it would be to bring together some of the city's top architects and planners to fashion, in the spirit of 1929, some updated visions of the future metropolis.
Making University a more inviting place for people to stroll and congregate would be near the top of any such group's to-do list. But in the absence of a clear mandate linked to infrastructure, McClelland isn't sure how much of that envisioning effort would resonate with today's politicians or excite the public imagination.
"What's the impetus to make changes on University now?" McClelland wonders. "If it's just the look of it, that's not really a big driver."
Or, as the 1929 report felt moved to note: "City planning has aptly been described as a state of mind. Undoubtedly until the need or desire for improved or better conditions is apparent, there is no public opinion to demand progress."
