Harbourfront Centre

[RC8]

Criticising an area that is seeing 2 new squares, more retail and cultural space, and the street it's on turned into a leafy boulevard is going to get you very negative reactions. Rightly so, too.

Harbourfront Centre as a whole has been one of the few places in Toronto that have been improving year after year.

Cityplace condos get criticised, but they meet the street much nicely than those in Queens Quay east of Spadina. Podiums, townhouses, inviting lobbies, and unobscured retail would have gone a long way in that area.

 

[Riverdale Rink Rat]

FWIW, Harbourfront and particularly Harbourfront Centre is one of our family's favourite places in the city. The girls used to go to summer camp there, we skate every winter, see shows at the stage, check out the Power Plant exhibits (often scratching our heads!). Now that the boardwalk/finger piers/QQT decks for Il Fornello and Watermark make it a pleasant stroll, we come down many weekends. The Centre is a 30-year old building that takes a major beating each year from all its guests. I'm pretty proud of the battered brute and the staff that keep it functioning.

As for the wider Harbourfront, I think it's really a tale of two halves. West of QQT shouldn't have anything new south of the Quay -- there's just not enough room. But on the east side, there's plenty of room for Pier 27 or Corus and a great boardwalk as well. (e.g. Sugar Beach to Shebourne Commons). The most dramatic change to QQ will be if/when they change the road bed itself. That'll bring even more summer bikers down to the Harbourfront and make it even more livelier -- but c'mon, people. We live in Canada. In January, you don't go to a windswept park on the edge of the lake. Harbourfront will never be Queen West, so building retail on the south side of QQ makes no sense. Better to renovate the north side into better shops -- like the newish Shopper's that brings a fair amount of foot traffic as the condodwellers shop.

Harbourfront is one of Waterfront Toronto's great successes -- despite the fact it's mostly in the subtle details.

 

[kkgg7]

Ok, I got it. Toronto families love the Harbourfront, despite its obvious mediocrity.
No arguments from me. All I can say is you guys are simply so easy to satisfy and want so little from the city you live in. I guess both too few trips to real great cities and their public space and severe everything is best in Toronto type of home bias are the reasons.
If you guys love to cross the Gardiner and the rail tracks pretending they don't exist or aren't unsightly, and enjoy biking on lackluster Queens Quay with not so much of a view but two dozen old condos, go ahead. My criticism is only out of wanting Toronto to be a better place, but I guess most think it already cannot be better.

I have no idea where the "leafy boulevard" is. Actually I don't even see a boulevard, but a countryside-ish road by Lake Ontario.

 

[kkgg7]

Harbourfront is one of Waterfront Toronto's great successes -- despite the fact it's mostly in the subtle details.

It is like saying a horribly design build is not that bad because there is a nice looking window on the second floor.
Hourbourfront may be a lot better than it used to be -- i don't doubt that, as it was probably a wasteland 20 years ago -- but not knowing how horrible it was before and having seen beautiful public space elsewhere, I can hardly say "great success". It is not even "OK" for a city the size of Toronto.

 

[RC8]

Ok, I got it. Toronto families love the Harbourfront, despite its obvious mediocrity.
No arguments from me. All I can say is you guys are simply so easy to satisfy and want so little from the city you live in. I guess both too few trips to real great cities and their public space and severe everything is best in Toronto type of home bias are the reasons.
If you guys love to cross the Gardiner and the rail tracks pretending they don't exist or aren't unsightly, and enjoy biking on lackluster Queens Quay with not so much of a view but two dozen old condos, go ahead. My criticism is only out of wanting Toronto to be a better place, but I guess most think it already cannot be better.

I have no idea where the "leafy boulevard" is. Actually I don't even see a boulevard, but a countryside-ish road by Lake Ontario.

Have you ever considered doing research on topics before stating your opinion on them?

Start by re-reading my post.

Then go here:

http://www.waterfrontoronto.ca/image_galleries/queens_quay_bvld/?13100#13099

That's the leafy boulevard that will be built all over Queens Quay and which I referenced in my post.

Then here:

http://www.waterfrontoronto.ca/uploads/documents/100302_york_quay_public_meeting_wt_mvva_1.pdf

Where you can see the plan for what's currently under construction right there.

This is all being built on top of a former industrial area that didn't even exist 100 years ago.

 

[Riverdale Rink Rat]

It is like saying a horribly design build is not that bad because there is a nice looking window on the second floor.

Oh for pity's sake, grab a life.

http://www.harbourfrontcentre.com/

Go see a dance at Harbourfront, maybe.

** And now, a shout out to all the other architecture geeks out there, but especially kkgg7 -- Harbourfront Centre is a CRAPPY LOOKING BOX. If you wish to donate $50 million, I pledge that I will search the world for a great architect, get a fabulous building built that still has a kiln and bar/café, and y'all can admire the f**king building while I go for a skate. **

Otherwise, kkgg7, STFU. And everyone else, come down and have some fun at Harbourfront -- particularly come down for a skate and a hot chocolate now that they've reno'd the café.

 

[k10ery]

Kkg is basically right and no one is really contradicting the argument. We all know Harbourfont was a planning disaster from the beginning. I cannot think of a city of compaarble size and wealth that has abused its waterfront the way we did.

That being said, yes it has some great small cultural institutions, and yes it has been getting much better on the design side in the last few years. And I think that leafy boulevard will make a world of difference. Way to go WT.

 

[RC8]

k10ery,

Are the islands and The Beach not part of Toronto's waterfront?

As far as I'm concerned Toronto's waterfront consists of a number of beautiful green parks, one extraordinary neighbourhood (The Beach), and a slowly gentrifying industrial area that was as you mention a planning disaster when enormous concrete towers were being built in its central portion.

Outside of that central portion and the portlands, though, our waterfront is what I would expect. Parks running from exhibition to High Park and beyond. Visitors seem to love Humber Bay, too.

Now, kkgg7 is specifically talking about harbourfront centre, which is really as nice and respectful a development as you can expect without totally erasing the area's history - which many like me enjoy seeing preserved.

 

[k10ery]

You're right. I meant the central waterfront. Most of the rest is good.

The failings of Harbourfront Centre were mostly due to context. But it was no gem itself either. A parking lot in the middle, turning its back to the lake, etc. People remember the soul destroying feeling even at QQT as recently as a few years ago, no?

 

[RC8]

That parking lot, as soul destroying as it was (I've felt the coldest I've ever felt in my life there), was always meant to be temporary. You can see that for 11 years+ the plan has been to build over it as funding became available to undertake the project, which rightly took the seat back to deck improvements.

You can take a look at the 2000 Masterplan for all of York Quay in the second link I posted before. No surface parking lots on sight, and the 2 squares currently being built are there!

Make no mistake, the task that was given to WT was enormous, even if they have taken a bureaucratic approach to it.

 

[adma]

Except that all of this wasn't such a disaster, even if it promised as much as a federal election-bait conceit in 1972, and that its genesis was more haphazard than, say, the similarly Liberal-election-baity Granville Market in Vancouver. (Why kkgg7 doesn't bring up Granville Market, I don't know--then again, he'd probably even deem *that* too un-starchitecty for his purposes.)

Harbourfront--the "cultural" parts, that is, never mind the condo parts--may lack sexy starchitecty style; but as an institution that's organically "of" Toronto, it's endured a lot better/less tourist-tackily than a lot of more self-consciously "architectural" versions of its 70s/80s schtick: most notably, any number of post-Fanueil Hall "festival marketplaces" out there. (And that includes the original conception of Queen's Quay Terminal.)

 

[k10ery]

Again, not trying to get on the wrong side of flame war but:

Let's have preservation, human-scale design ... AND good architecture. I'm no fan of the more egregious starchitect projects in Toronto (yeah, that one especially). But wouldn't you say Toronto has always relied too much on local talent, for a city its size and importance? It seems that signature projects have long tended to go to people like Eb Zeidler and Jack Diamond by default. If we'd had a bit less of that then we'd have better architecture - and probably better local architects too.

QQT is not a bad building, but it always seemed less than it could have been. And Corus Quay tells me this tendency is not yet gone from public architecture planning in Toronto.

I better add a disclaimer: I know nothing about the industry. I'm just a guy who looks at buildings more than normal when walking down the street.

 

[adma]

QQT is not a bad building, but it always seemed less than it could have been.

Considering its early 80s moment, that's a bit of a overwrought judgment.

 

[Riverdale Rink Rat]

k10ery: I don't mean to get as annoyed as I do with the "We should have an iconic temple at every corner" crowd, but two things drive me nuts in UT debates:

1. Absolutely no context/history/thoughts as to the use of a building or park.
2. No thought whatsoever as to cost.

Harbourfront punches both buttons, because almost every debate starts and ends with "it's moving too slow and they need to spend more money" and "they should build a grand temple, but respect the view corridors and parks on the shoreline."

Looking forward to a head-clearing skate!

 

[freshcutgrass]

QQT is not a bad building, but it always seemed less than it could have been.

Well, I'd say it is less than it was when first built....it's been watered down. But at the time it was developed, it was the largest renovation project in Canadian history (it was a mammoth 1 million square foot building).

Someone complained that it used "local" people, but at the time, Olympia & York might have been local, but they were the largest real estate developer in the world, and Zeidler was a world-renowned architect, coming off his Ontario Place and Eaton Centre projects (They won the design competition for this project in 1980).

QQT also followed the theme of re-adapting industrial buildings on the waterfront, rather than tearing them all down, which is why QQT, York Quay Centre, Power Plant & Pier 4 buildings were deliberately kept to be re-adapted.

And as a re-adapted, mixed-use project, QQT was as ambitious and spectacular as they came. Retail (originally over 100 retailers...unique not chains), 400,000 sqft of office space (75,000 sqft floorplates), the Preimier Dance Theatre (Canada’s first and only facility designed and built exclusively for the presentation of contemporary dance), topped off with probably the most expense condos in the country at the time...over 1/2 $million...(oddly enough, Mike Harris used to live there).