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The is the third, and final, guest column of a three-part series that Mark Osbaldeston is contributing to UrbanToronto. Mark is the author of Unbuilt Toronto and Unbuilt Toronto 2, as well as a respected speaker. We're very happy to have him writing for UrbanToronto.
Researching the Unbuilt Toronto books, I became a traveller between different eras: whichever ones my research was taking me to at any given time, and the one I actually live in. With surprising frequency, they blurred together.
Someone’s proposing rapid transit on Eglinton? It must be the 1970s. Or the 1980s. Or the 90s. Or right now. Toronto wants the Olympics? It must be the 1950s or 1960s. Or the 80s or 90s. Or last month.
On the waterfront, the cycle goes back to Toronto’s earliest days. We have a long tradition of great plans to preserve and improve the waterfront, and an equally long tradition of sabotaging them.
In 1793, Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe decreed that the waterfront be set aside as a public reserve. This reserve later became a trust. Not in the loose, informal sense of “publicly funded healthcare in Canada is a sacred trust…” In the strict, legally binding sense. In 1818, sixteen years before Toronto was even incorporated as a city, the province conveyed thirty acres of Toronto’s central waterfront to a committee of trustees and their heirs, to hold in perpetuity for the benefit of all Torontonians “for a public walk or mall.”
How is it that a city whose birthright was a publicly accessible waterfront, legally free from development in perpetuity, has spent a good deal of the last two centuries trying to figure out how to reconnect itself to Lake Ontario? The answer is short-term expedience - -multiplied over several generations’ worth of short-terms.
Take the case of the railways.
In the 1840s, the city tried offloading the development of its still hoped-for waterfront walkway, or esplanade, by making its construction a condition of the waterlot leases it had started conveying to private tenants. Yet the esplanade remained an unpaved, unimproved strip. In 1852, the city’s surveyor, John Howard, prepared plans to remedy the situation. But his vision of a formally landscaped precinct of “walks and gardens” never stood a chance. The year after Howard produced his plan, it was used as a handy base on which to show how the corridor could be used instead for railway tracks. Which is exactly what it was being used for by the end of the decade.
Even with the introduction of the railway tracks, all needn’t have been lost. In an 1853 competition for an esplanade plan, Kivas Tully (whose scheme is shown below) proposed to maintain public access to the waterfront by constructing bridges that would span the new tracks, on streets extending south from a wide public esplanade. Architect Frederic Cumberland recommended a similar solution. Casimir Gzowski’s plan, on the other hand, provided no bridges over the tracks, and dispensed with a generous esplanade as an unwarranted frill. Council went with the Gzowski plan. Three quarters of a century would pass before Toronto would get a grade-separated railway viaduct along the lakeshore, finally correcting the mistake.
Kivas Tully’s 1853 Esplanade plan would have accommodated a railway corridor while protecting public access to the waterfront:
Pedestrians crossing the tracks at Bay Street, on the way to the ferry docks, 1913:
In the twentieth century, you can see a different version of the same story play out. Just substitute the automobile for the train, and the Gardiner Expressway for the railway corridor. For the esplanade, substitute chunks of the parkland precinct that was actually developed on the western waterfront by the Harbour Commissioners during the period between the wars.
In the twenty-first century, incredibly, we have an opportunity to make up for some of our past waterfront mistakes, as vast tracts of former industrial land sit vacant. Once again, we’re developing a lot of great plans, some of which are now starting to come to fruition.
Will we mess it up? Let’s hope that three centuries is the charm.
