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Future of the Hearn Generating Station

Bigbangbash, Luminato's opening night party, will be held there. I saw it on Twitter and it was announced yesterday at the media launch.
 
rdaner said:
Bigbangbash, Luminato's opening night party, will be held there. I saw it on Twitter and it was announced yesterday at the media launch.
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I'm skeptical of how they're going to pull this off and how "integrated" it will actually be with the station. They must be holding it outside the building, in a field next door. The building is too unsafe to use. Even so it will be a logistical nightmare.
 
I dunno... the film industry has shot right in there a number of times... the building is rock-solid. But that said, it's not exactly a non-toxic environment.

I agree though... more likely they'll be holding the event in the shadow of this hulking monster. Keeping a film crew in line is one thing... having hundreds of people wandering around would be quite another.
 
Lenser said:
I dunno... the film industry has shot right in there a number of times... the building is rock-solid. But that said, it's not exactly a non-toxic environment.

I agree though... more likely they'll be holding the event in the shadow of this hulking monster. Keeping a film crew in line is one thing... having hundreds of people wandering around would be quite another.
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It's interesting to read about the history of the brickworks, http://www.torontolife.com/informer...ild-thing-the-story-behind-the-brick-works/3/

Raves were one of the prime motivations for doing something with the site it seems...they definitely brought people to the site and put it in their consciousness as a place that was more than it seemed...

Maybe they are thinking they'll move the EDM from the ex to Hearn?

I still think that it could be a centrepiece of remaking the port lands, a large industrial or art museum...there was an article in the Star today about how the ROM have millions of artifacts not on display...but the ease of getting large industrial pieces into this location and the opportunity to bring old equipment from Nanticoke, as well as Canadian heritage (C17's, Sea Kings, TTC Vehicles, Train Museum) and probably still have room left over for event space and smaller museums that don't have homes...

Making it safe in the short term should be a goal of the city and the owners so that it can be used by the public for events like this...in the long term there needs to be a plan to get funding to create something awesome...

When I say it could be a centrepiece I mean that it would cement the need for LRT East as well as the anti-flooding landforms that are needed anyways...and provide a good reason to make those things happen by a specific date - i.e. the opening of whatever they decide to put there...a lot of investment could happen to make it open, which would then spur all the other development that is expected in the area.
 
In a perfect world, people of vision would look at the Hearn and see it as an opportunity similar to the Bankside Power Station's conversion to the Tate Modern gallery in London, England.

But the Tate Modern cost $250 million to renovate back in 2000. I shudder to think what would happen here if someone suggested spending that much on a public art space in Toronto. And the Tate, like other major galleries in London, is free admission.
 
bigdaddyhame said:
In a perfect world, people of vision would look at the Hearn and see it as an opportunity similar to the Bankside Power Station's conversion to the Tate Modern gallery in London, England.

But the Tate Modern cost $250 million to renovate back in 2000. I shudder to think what would happen here if someone suggested spending that much on a public art space in Toronto. And the Tate, like other major galleries in London, is free admission.
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With most of its funding coming from the Central Government - like the free Smithsonian complex of Museums and Galleries in Washington.
 
bigdaddyhame said:
In a perfect world, people of vision would look at the Hearn and see it as an opportunity similar to the Bankside Power Station's conversion to the Tate Modern gallery in London, England.
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The Tate modern when first built (as the Bankside power station) was a short walk from a tube station. Heck, the tube station has been there since 1870, long before the original coal station was built in the 1890s.

It was already in the centre of a tourist area when converted to the art gallery, near St. Paul's, and about halfway between the Palace of Westminster and the Tower of London (each about a 20-25 minute walk along the river).

A 20 to 25-minute walk from Hearn in one direction get's you to the T&T on Cherry street. In the other it get's you to Canadian Tire at Leslie and Lakeshore.

Bankside had potential that Hearn won't have for decades, if not centuries.
 
Back in 2010 there was a really interesting sports/community complex proposal for the RL Hearn, see http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/06/22/sports-complex-plan-unveiled-for-mothballed-hearn-station/ It was an innovative energy saving design (an ironic angle on converting a coal-fired power station for other uses!), the design/engineering team were very experienced in this kind of public project: Behnisch Architekten http://behnisch.com/projects/426 TransSolar Climate Engineering http://www.transsolar.com/ and ERA Architects http://era.on.ca The Goethe Institute sponsored a public presentation of the proposal at the MaRS auditorium https://vimeo.com/12854835 (the Hearn proposal starts at 29:30 on this video).


Among the problems with *any* proposals for the Hearn's reuse are that it has been privately leased for 30 years to a private corporation that seems not have the financial muscle to organize funding for any commercial project--the place is just so massive--and that this situation of the private lease means that public institutions really have no leverage or influence on what can be done with it, e.g. the City issued a demolition permit for the complex at one point and it has stated that there is no way Hearn can receive a Heritage designation because of the leasing arrangement. Meanwhile, the lessee has been removing all the "non-structural" steel from inside the building (lease costs have to be paid somehow!), renting it for post-apocalyptic film-shoots, and I believe the only maintenance being done is what is necessary to secure the place against the increasing hordes of people wanting to photograph post-capitalist industrial ruin-scapes.


If the Port Lands ever get the kind of mixed residential/commercial neighbourhoods that Waterfront Toronto has been planning for years, then I think the Hearn could be an interesting conversion project for a mixed commercial/sports/community centre serving that whole area; if there was some kind of LRT access to it, Hearn could end up serving a lot of the urban core of Toronto as a sports centre. (E.g. maybe the non-revenue access rail tracks to the new Leslie Street TTC storage/maintenance barns could have gone somewhere near the northern part of the Port Lands to join up to the regular tracks, and those access tracks could have become part of a later regular track network serving the Hearn and Port Lands area).



But in Toronto we lack public-spirited ambition, our "vision" is hobbled by not wanting to pay for things, or paying for things that we don't really want or need, but that satisfy a particular conjunction of political circumstances.
 
nfitz said:
The Tate modern when first built (as the Bankside power station) was a short walk from a tube station. Heck, the tube station has been there since 1870, long before the original coal station was built in the 1890s.

It was already in the centre of a tourist area when converted to the art gallery, near St. Paul's, and about halfway between the Palace of Westminster and the Tower of London (each about a 20-25 minute walk along the river).

A 20 to 25-minute walk from Hearn in one direction get's you to the T&T on Cherry street. In the other it get's you to Canadian Tire at Leslie and Lakeshore.

Bankside had potential that Hearn won't have for decades, if not centuries.
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There are plenty of examples of large museums and science centres that aren't close to subways...Udvar Hazy is a good example, Toronto Science Center, Chicago Science Center (the one with the u-boat) is not exactly close to downtown...but as a way to spur development, it would be great...it would basically create a base-load for a lakeshore east LRT...and bring useful transit to the south of the portlands...
 
georgevicbell said:
There are plenty of examples of large museums and science centres that aren't close to subways...Udvar Hazy is a good example, Toronto Science Center, Chicago Science Center (the one with the u-boat) is not exactly close to downtown...but as a way to spur development, it would be great...it would basically create a base-load for a lakeshore east LRT...and bring useful transit to the south of the portlands...
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I'm not familiar with Chicago .. the other two are very expressway accessible. Heck, it's hard to get to Hazy without taking an expressway - it seemed almost impossible to get there easily on public transit ... fortunately I was driving into DC from Winchester, so stopping by was easy (and well worth the visit).

If there's something to put there ... great. But what IS there that can use the space well, and provide the revenue to maintain that massive structure? 30 years later we haven't found it.
 
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