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Alexandra Park

X-posted from the Toronto Issues thread on this:

Excellent news! I was recently wondering about whether this area would see some large scale redevelopment similar to Regent Park, because lord knows it desperately needs it. It's a horrifically ugly, dreary, dated example of poor community planning, and the time has come for it to go. Erase the entire thing and start with a blank slate. As far as I'm concerned, option E in the report is the only option. That's the kind of serious makeover that needs to be done here - re-integrate this isolated island with the vibrant neighbourhoods it's surrounded by.
 
I think the small scale village-like charm of Alexandra Park is to be treasured, not bulldozed for a "large scale redevelopment like Regent Park" ( which it wasn't like in the first place ). At most, I could see adding a couple of modest, unobtrusive multi-unit residences for extra density. It isn't an abandoned site looking for new uses, and therefore doesn't need reinventing like the Distillery District, but I think that a sympathetic refreshing is definitely in order.
 
In order to clear the path t/w said "sympathetic refreshing", Toronto needs more urban hipsters a la Owen Hatherley. Though Shawn Micallef gives it a good try...
 
I think a lot of these postwar public housing projects are better than we might perceive. It's just that outsiders tend not to spend much time on the grounds to truly appreciate the ideas the original designers had in mind. Today their gardens and pedestrian walkways are lined with beautiful mature trees, and with some enhancements and renovations they could very pleasant at least in terms of aesthetics. In terms of architecture, the problem is that the austere modernism becomes associated with poverty, though Alexandria Park doesn't look that much different worse than a lot of the black brick, cement, and glass townhouse/condo developments that people pay so much for today. Even the new Regent Park buildings don't look substantially better than Peter Dickinson's high-rises.

The buildings could have been better looking, but aren't so bad and some minor changes could make them a lot more attractive.
 
From Saturday Globe Toronto:

Alexandra Park slated for revitalization
The public housing project may soon become trendy Kensington Market South

Kelly Grant City Hall Bureau Chief
From Saturday's Globe and Mail Published on Friday, Apr. 23, 2010 6:17PM EDT Last updated on Friday, Apr. 23, 2010 8:42PM EDT

For a small street, Augusta Avenue has a big place in Toronto lore.

The spine of Kensington Market, which evolved from a bustling Jewish bazaar into the city’s nearest approximation of Greenwich Village, is about to make another historic transformation. More important, so will the 18 acres to its south.

As part of a dramatic plan that will revitalize the decrepit environs of Alexandra Park, Toronto Community Housing is proposing to turn the 1960s-era housing project into a mixed-income community through which Augusta would extend. In what is a Canadian first, the TCHC will use revenue from newly constructed condos to cover the full cost of new rental units for social-housing tenants.

“With Kensington Market, Chinatown and Queen Street, a huge surge in development in downtown and a major hospital on its doorstep, this neighbourhood has a lot of advantages other neighbourhoods don’t,†said Adam Vaughan, the Trinity-Spadina councillor spearheading the effort. “You can harness that economic activity. That’s where the land value comes from.â€

The TCHC will literally capitalize on Alex Park’s location in the city’s core of cool to pay for tenants’ new housing – an experiment that would not have any traction if it were, say, in Scarborough or North York. But the proposal has generated skepticism: Many tenants don’t necessarily want the traffic and the new tenants that come with the overhaul. It might also be too much, too quickly, for a neighbourhood that has seen its share of trouble over a half-century.

“I don’t think it’s for us,†says Marwa Eldardiry, 23, a life-long resident who has been working on the revitalization plan while studying urban planning at Ryerson University. “I don’t think they want to hurt us. But this area’s been needing help all along and I’ve seen what kind of help comes. Now all of a sudden we have a whole army coming to help us.â€

Pending approval next month, Alex Park will be demolished in stages and rebuilt. More than 333 new rent-geared-to-income townhouses for social-housing tenants will replace 263 brown brick townhouses and a six-floor apartment building. Tenants will get a sparkling new community centre and the opportunity to start small businesses in non-profit storefronts that will line Dundas's south side. About 1,100 condo units in mid-rise towers will be available to newcomers at market prices.

The design they’ve settled on calls for Kensington’s stretch of Augusta to punch south through Dundas Street all the way down to Queen Street. Surface parking would go underground, leaving room for the new buildings and more green space. A series of linear parks would run south from Kensington Avenue to Queen and two new pedestrian-only streets would run east-west through the complex.

Mr. Vaughan hopes Alex Park’s redevelopment will kick-start wider neighbourhood regeneration.

Already, groups such as the Scadding Court Community Centre and Toronto Public Library’s Sanderson Branch are in preliminary talks with the Ontario College of Art and Design about redeveloping the area with a new OCAD graduate school, which might brighten the grey, scruffy corner of Bathurst and Dundas.

“We’re really hoping to see this take off,†said OCAD president Sara Diamond. “We think it’s an incredible project – not only for the city, but for the province and, frankly, for the country.â€

Nearby neighbours also have hopes for what a redeveloped Alex Park might bring.

“[Alex Park] is close enough to Kensington Market for it to rub off,†said Shamez Amlani, co-owner of La Palette restaurant on Augusta and a founder of the market’s beloved car-free Sundays. “There are already so many artists hanging around the market. To have incubator spaces like that, galleries or arts collectives and stuff for kids, I think it’s a noble effort.â€

Though Mr. Vaughan and the housing agency have devoted more than two years to a painstaking consultation, the plan’s benefits haven’t assuaged fears, especially among teens and twenty-something residents who’ve lived in Alex Park most of their lives. Some worry that the influx of wealthy condo dwellers might spoil the intimacy of a place where everyone knows their neighbours and shares the struggles of poverty and recent immigration. Others express concerns about the sudden introduction of commerce and traffic. “I don’t like the idea of making streets through neighbourhoods,†said Obaid Wahidi, 17, who is also worried that the newcomers might ruin the Park’s first-name familiarity.†Right now we know everyone who’s in the community.â€

Alex Park could have used the help a lot more in the 1980s, when crack dealers sold to locals and better-off outsiders while a low-level gang war raged between Alex and Regent parks. While locals praise the pleasures of its enclosed atmosphere, its meandering pathways have made it easy to give police the slip. Drug dealers can slip into its dark nooks. The lack of straight through-streets isolates tenants from people who live outside the complex.

Don White, property manager for the site, called starting his new job in 2005 “baptism by fire.â€

“In the first month-and-a-half there were three shootings here. Then over the course of the next year-and-a-half to two years, I noticed a ton of drug activity. ... The dealing was rather brazen. It was right out in the open. They would plant themselves on somebody’s townhouse front porch and literally take it over and deal their drugs all day.â€

The situation gradually improved when cameras were installed and lighting improved, Mr. White said.

But a turning point came in 2007, when Yonathan Musse, a 19-year-old Alex Park drug dealer beloved for protecting kids and helping his neighbours, was fatally shot in an alley outside the complex. His still-unsolved murder was a “wake-up call,†said Donna Harrow, executive director of the Alexandra Park Community Centre.

“I think a lot of the young people felt, 'Shoot, my life could be over at any time. So I must make the best out of it,’†she said.

Donnohue Grant was one young Alex Park resident who seized that moment. Mr. Grant had been caught with a handgun when he was 18. He appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court of Canada which last year issued a landmark ruling in his case restricting how police can obtain evidence from suspects they haven’t formally detained.

In 2007, Mr. Grant became one of four older, tougher guys who rejected lives of petty crime to become de facto outreach workers, recruiting the brightest and best of Alex Park’s youth to run for five open spots on the complex’s board. (While Alex Park is owned by TCHC, it is run by residents. It was the first social-housing project in Canada to go co-op, formally changing its name to the Atkinson Co-op in honour of Sonny Atkinson, the local activist who led the campaign.)

“We came out on top,†Mr. Grant, a tall and muscular father of two, said of the election. “The youth actually came out in force. It was a very good turnout.â€

The students called taking control of the board the “Atkinson Revolution,†and it was the clearest manifestation of the neighbourhood’s gradual – and still ongoing – turnaround.

To complete that turnaround, Alex Park needs a physical overhaul, say proponents of the redevelopment.

Alex Park’s original architects didn’t foresee the physical problems when they drafted the plan in 1965. The design, considered enlightened by the standards of the day, was in keeping with the 1960s trend of housing the poor together in park-like projects closed to traffic.

Architect Jerome Markson, now 81, and the firms of Klein & Sears and Webb, Zerafa and Menkes created a community of sturdy brown-brick townhomes with backyards facing snaking pedestrian walkways, interior courtyards and patches of green space.

They eliminated through-streets, banished parking lots to the edge, and erected brick walls on the fringe, “to separate out clearly pedestrian and vehicular movements and to provide a pleasing environment for people to walk or children to play,†according to the architects’ 1965 proposal. Or, as Mr. Markson recalls, “It was an attempt to mak a pleasant, decent place for people with less.â€

Love or hate it, they will now have more.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...ark-slated-for-revitalization/article1545143/
___

Seems like they have chosen Option E.

AoD
 
A good diagram from the article...

ALEX-PARK-graphic_605262a.jpg
 
In order to clear the path t/w said "sympathetic refreshing", Toronto needs more urban hipsters a la Owen Hatherley.

Quite so. His blog, the spectacularly-named Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy is some of my favourite Internet-reading. (I kind of wish I could conjure it out of thin air when people engage in knee-jerk Brutalism-bashing, since a) his writing is a far more effective argument than my eye-rolling, and b) my eyes are getting sore.)
 
Interesting! So, we might see the start of construction (and the Augusta Ave. re-connection) next year. Exciting stuff...
 
http://app.toronto.ca/DevelopmentApplications/navigatePlanningApp.do?method=next&reportType=2

50 R RYERSON AVE
Condominium Approval 10 321162 STE 20 CD Ward 20
- Tor & E.York Dec 30, 2010 --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Common element condominium for common services to serve the new dwellings to be constructed on the lands and the existing dweling located on the lands municipally known as 52 Ryerson Ave. Vehicular and pedestrian access to continue to be provided via public lane.
50 R RYERSON AVE
Part Lot Control Exemption 10 321170 STE 20 PL Ward 20
- Tor & E.York Dec 30, 2010 --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Part lot control exemption to permit the severance of lands into three parts in order that three detached dwellings approved by minor variance and the Ontario Municipal Board may be constructed and conveyed into separate ownership. Please refer to related common element condominium application fot he provision of common services to serve the new dwellings to be constructed on the lands and the existing dweling located on the lands municipally known as 52 Ryerson Ave. Note: refer to previous approval for conveyance that had lapsed due to conditions of approval not capable of being fulfilled. Part lot control exemption will also allow any easements and or rights of way deemed necessary to support the development.
 
Sounds like three detached houses will replace the semis currently there. Perhaps with shared underground parking or something? Hopefully this isn't a McMansion deal.
 
It would be nice if they would beautify Augusta too from Dundas towards atleast Richmond. Maybe plant some trees and such to connect the Dundas area with the Queen West area. I find the change between King to Queen and then Queen to Dundas is quite drastic.
 
Olympia Fruit Market (corner of Queen and Ryerson) closed down. I wonder what will open in its place. The whole building seems ripe for a rebuild to me.
 

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