Asphalt of Toronto - Our Lost Parking Lots (aka Toronto in the Golden Age of Parking)

[thecharioteer]

Now I'd like to see photos of these parking lots a few years earlier, when they were still built-up Victorian cityscapes and neighbourhoods.

Court Street (north of King, between Toronto and Church):

North side of Front, east of Scott:

The parking lot phenomenon was not, of course, restricted to downtown as can be see in this photo of Bloor/Yorkville post construction of the Bloor-Danforth line:

And Bloor and Avenue Road:

 

[Mongo]

Some more photos from the Toronto Archives.

Old City Hall quadrangle, 1910

Buggy parking lot at Jacksons Point, 1911

Customs House, 1920

Shea's Theatre, 1922

CNE Coliseum, 1926

Harbour Commission parking lot, 1936

Stanley Barracks, Exhibition Park, 1960s

University and Adelaide West, 1967

 

[thecharioteer]

Great pics, Mongo! Here's another view of that University Avenue parking lot in your last pic:

Bay Street, south of Bloor, was particularly full of parking lots (and car dealerships);

The map below (on the left of the article) was from a local newspaper from the 70's called "The Toronto Citizen", showing the locations of downtown parking lots at the time:

Which should also be put into the context of post-war planning policies which encouraged parking on the "fringes" of the central business district. This page is from a document called "The Changing City" from the Toronto Planning Board 1959:

 

[Mongo]

Some more recent parking lots:

ICE parking lot

East waterfront, 2005

 

[hawc]

So many great parking lots gone forever.

 

[nfitz]

I saw a documentary about Cleveland, Ohio called "Mistake by the lake". They mentioned that you can tell how well a city is doing by the number of above ground parking lots it has in its downtown core. The more it has, the poorer they are! Makes sense: if no one is willing to invest in the city and buy the land to build businesses or retail or residences, the other option would be to pave it, and turn it into a parking lot. Cheap to create and run and the return is high. I hate one-storey above ground parking lots. They're a waste of space, destroy street life and are ugly.

Excellent point.

What an amazing thread! It highlights just how far Toronto had fallen in the 1960s and 1970s, and how great it has become since!

If we could only move further to further eliminate cars from the core, can you imagine how much more liveable downtown would be!

 

[Mongo]

Actually I think that it's a bit more complicated. In order to have large expanses of parking lots, the city must be wealthy enough to have a large fraction of the population own cars. I doubt that there are a lot of parking lots in Mogadishu. So the chart of wealth versus parking lots would be a bell curve, with the greatest number of parking lots when most of the working population owns cars, but the public transit system is underdeveloped and the land value of the area surrounding the central core is fairly low.

So rising wealth could reduce the quantity of parking-lot area around the central core by a larger and more efficient rapid transit network reducing the number of cars being used, and rising property values making building construction more attractive. Or jobs formerly in the CBD could move elsewhere in the city.

In the case of Toronto, I think that it is a combination of (some) jobs moving out of the core reducing the demand for aboveground parking, and massive residential demand (incorporating underground parking in the buildings) for the same area driving up land prices. I think that any change in rapid transit has been fairly neutral, since unless the DRL gets built, there has been little prospect of any real increase in its capacity to support the downtown core in the last several decades.

 

[hawc]

What an amazing thread! It highlights just how far Toronto had fallen in the 1960s and 1970s, and how great it has become since!

It is interesting that when we look back at the Then/Now thread and reminisce about how great Toronto was around the turn of the century, we forget how crappy it started to look during the 50s, 60s, 70s and that it really does look amazing now. I'd love anyone to look at these parking lots and look at present day Toronto and tell me development is bad.

 

[thecharioteer]

Edmonton is an interesting illustration of some of the points made above.

1) The world's largest parking lot is at the West Edmonton Mall (20,000 spaces).

2) The Mall has led to the decline of retail downtown, and the demolition of much of their downtown, and;

3) The creation of new downtown parking lots:

Pre-war downtown Edmonton:

Location of downtown parking lots Edmonton today:

 

[Jonny5]

Anyone else remember the Cityplace driving range?

From our own Cityplace thread I found this:

 

[hawc]

^^^ I bet the City is making a bit more off that same land in property taxes these days.

 

[Hipster Duck]

Anyone care to guess in what year the percent of Toronto's downtown occupied by surface parking reached a maximum?

This picture:

knocks my socks off every time I see it. It reminds me of photos I saw of bombed-out German cities in the late 1940s after people had cleared the rubble, but before anybody had built anything to replace the buildings that were lost. What's remarkable is that we lost a vibrant, midrise Victorian neighbourhood, but we successfully replaced it with a vibrant, contemporary midrise neighbourhood.

PS: That Edmonton picture is remarkable. Edmonton has one of the most boring downtowns in Canada filled with nothing but surface parking and life-sucking brutalist monstrosities. Only Hamilton's downtown is worse (barely) among cities >450k in Canada, which should tell you something because Hamilton is a deindustrialized rust belt town of half the size that has been sucked into Toronto's orbit. It's hard to believe that they once had a dense little commercial district clinging to the edge of a cliff.

 

[Urban Shocker]

It reminds me of photos I saw of bombed-out German cities in the late 1940s after people had cleared the rubble, but before anybody had built anything to replace the buildings that were lost.

And the prequel to Germany. There were still bombed out sites in London that I remember seeing in my childhood in the early 1960s.

 

[thecharioteer]

Anyone care to guess in what year the percent of Toronto's downtown occupied by surface parking reached a maximum?

I would guess early 70's (as illustrated in the "Toronto Citizen" map posted above).

The election of the "Reform" council (Crombie, Sewell, Jaffery et al) at this time and the formulation of the new Central Area Plan was a watershed moment in the City's history which:

1) Introduced the concept of mixed-use and high-density residential development to previously zoned office districts (like Bay Street);

2) Created new neighbourhoods like St. Lawrence and Market Square on much of the vacant land shown in the photo above;

3) Developed policies to encourage the retention of heritage properties (admittedly, still a work in progress, but the careless demolitions of the 50's to 70's would be inconceivable today);

4) Protected existing low-rise neighbourhoods in the core as a reaction to the landmark fights of the late 60's like North St. Jamestown, Quebec/Gothic and the Hydro Block (Dundas/Beverley);

5) Encouraged public transit and and an improved public realm (and less driving downtown), as witnessed by the other landmark event of the era, the cancellation of the Spadina Expressway.

 

[MisterF]

Which should also be put into the context of post-war planning policies which encouraged parking of the "fringes" of the central business district. This page is from a document called "The Changing City" from the Toronto Planning Board 1959:

The fact that they used Detroit as an example of how to plan a city is absolutely hilarious.