Toronto Ontario Square and Canada Square | ?m | ?s | Waterfront Toronto

I walked through those squares today and I found them restful. Finding a place without breathless activity was a relief after the zoo around York and Bremner.
 
There really needs to be a quite and tranquil place around the city without the hussle and bussel... this is where it's at if your looking for a nice calm romantic stroll... and is quite settling for the lakefront.
 
Who cares if there is a need for quiet and tranquil places for residences. Tranquility just doesn't stack up well against other cities.
 
Who cares if there is a need for quiet and tranquil places for residences. Tranquility just doesn't stack up well against other cities.

I'm not sure exactly what point you're trying to make here. That other cities have less going on than Toronto?
 
Toronto has lots of under-used parks that are quiet and tranquil. There are places in the Leslie Street spit, that if you had a heart attack, they probably wouldn't find your body for years. Toronto has no lack of places to escape the city, especially along the river ravines.
 
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Toronto has lots of under-used parks that are quiet and tranquil. There are places in the Leslie Street spit, that if you had a heart attack, they probably wouldn't find your body for years. Toronto has no lack of places to escape the city, especially along the river ravines.

Well, sure. But the Leslie Spit is several kilometres away, and isn't going to do you much good if you're in a really busy part of town (say, Harbourfront during a festival) and you just want to take ten minutes to sit and catch your breath before diving back in. It's OK for an area to have a variety of spaces and uses. Not everything needs to be whiz-bang-impress-the-visitors.
 
Not everything needs to be whiz-bang-impress-the-visitors.

Whenever I see these kinds of comments, I can't help but laugh. You're implying that Toronto does have some parks that "whiz-bang-impress-the-visitors? If we do, please tell me what they are because I have many family and friends that visit and right now, there is not one single park that does that. (besides Ontario Place, which is closed) I don't think we have ANY parks, public squares or public spaces that are as impressive as what they have in other cities. We can't even build one great fountain in this city or have one spectacular floral display.

Our parks are nice but you will never find any of them on a world's 10 best list. Grass and random trees are pretty much what we get. I'm still waiting for our only really impressive and unique park to reopen, and that is Ontario Place. No park in the world looks anything like it. High Park is fine but there is nothing iconic or even unique about it. Lots of trees and grass though! Centre Island is interesting because it's an island but once you get there, there really isn't much to do and no impressive attraction or even natural beauty. The most impressive thing about the Islands, is the view of Toronto's skyline, not anything about the actual park.

Yeah, so where was that whiz-bang park/parks?
 
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Sugar Beach is cool. So is Corktown Commons. Yorkville's park is a little shabby, but it's still fun. Some of the cemeteries, like the Necropolis and St James, are quite beautiful. The Brickworks. Scarborough Bluffs. The islands are gorgeous. The labyrinth is cute. I would be more than happy to take visitors to any of these places.
 
Sugar Beach is cool. So is Corktown Commons. Yorkville's park is a little shabby, but it's still fun. Some of the cemeteries, like the Necropolis and St James, are quite beautiful. The Brickworks. Scarborough Bluffs. The islands are gorgeous. The labyrinth is cute. I would be more than happy to take visitors to any of these places.

The Music Garden too. Man, I love that place.
 
The Music Garden too. Man, I love that place.

High Park. Jogs in Taylor-Massey ravine, and cross-country skiing down from Stan Wadlow when we lived at Woodbine/Cosburn. Biking Don Trail, Leslie Spit, Ashbridges' Bay. The Beaches boardwalk, linking Ashbridges to Kew to Balmy.

Toronto has many -- and varied -- lovely parks and public spaces.
 
All the parks you guys have mentioned are nice parks and most of them, I actually like but I wasn't talking about nice parks. What I was referring to was "whiz-bang" parks. I still haven't seen any Toronto park on a world's top 10 list and that's because right now, none qualify. Canada Square and Ontario Square were built on the cheap and you don't get great public spaces by going cheap.
 
All the parks you guys have mentioned are nice parks and most of them, I actually like but I wasn't talking about nice parks. What I was referring to was "whiz-bang" parks. I still haven't seen any Toronto park on a world's top 10 list and that's because right now, none qualify. Canada Square and Ontario Square were built on the cheap and you don't get great public spaces by going cheap.

These are pretty basic public spaces, no doubt about it. But let's be real for a sec: these are infill parks designed to cover a parking lot and complement the surrounding facilities. They were never going to be monumental. And, simple though they are, I certainly don't agree that they're all that cheap. They're just not flashy.

I think we'd all love if Toronto had a whiz-bang Stanley Park, Millennium Park, or Park Guell, and the truth is that we don't. Maybe when we pour billions into redeveloping the Lower Don we'll be on good footing to develop some truly 'world-renowned' green space. But did anyone really expect that here?

In the meantime, let's not forget that this is one of about ten parks that Waterfront Toronto has put together for us in the last decade, most of which are shining examples of sustainable, ecological, usable spaces in what were once dusty old brownfields. OK, granted, there's no Gehry or Gaudi to draw your eye, no acres of old-growth forest, no fancy Louis Vuitton museum in the middle. But it's all relative. Do you remember what our waterfront looked like not 20 years ago? We're doing pretty damn well IMO.

That said, I could definitely be convinced that a cool sculpture or fountain would have gone a long way at Canada Square. But, as others have noted, these kinds of additions may still be realized somewhere down the road!
 
The problem with Canada Square is not that it's cheap or that it isn't flashy. It's that no one figured out why it should exist. It wasn't designed with success as a public space in mind. Parks and plazas that are built just to spare passersby from looking at an ugly concrete parking lot are often the worst. They're just ornamental, with no real practical purpose. They end up as dead spaces.

It doesn't Jane Jacobs to figure out there's something unpleasant about a public space that seems shunned by the public in its emptiness. It takes thought to create a successful public space that doesn't need planned events to be vibrant. It doesn't necessarily take a lot of money.
 
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The "problem" with Ontario Square is that it also have to serve as a) an entrance to the underground garage and b) lay-by buses. As to the ensemble - keep in mind that the space where the fake lawn is will eventually be redeveloped into a low-scale structure.

AoD
 

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