How did Toronto get so many parking lots?

[samplain]

How did Toronto end up with so many surface parking lots? Most of these lots were something before, how and why did they all get levelled?

I came to this question today as I was going along King St W and noticed the TIFF planned site is a completely empty block. Seems really odd to have a completely empty block on that stretch of King and couldnt have been like that 50-100 years ago.

 

[allabootmatt]

Maybe someone can correct me...but I believe that much of what is now the "Entertainment District" was never built out, as it used to hold railyards.

 

[spmarshall]

Almost everything west of Simcoe and south of King as far as Spadina was rail yards and warehouses. The north side of King in that area also had a lot of warehouses and multi-floor factories, many of which are now retail, clubs and offices.

I'd be interested though to see what was on King's north side around there - what the Holiday Inn replaced, for example.

 

[esplanade guy]

What other city builds parking lots on it's central waterfront?(Yonge and Queen's Quay) I can think of no other major city in the world that puts big, ugly, parking lots, right in the centre of it's waterfront. We only have one central waterfront but we have tons of other places to put parking lots. A few are being developed into parks now but it was and is, retarded for Toronto to have put any parking lots on the lake.

 

[Antiloop33rpm]

What other city builds parking lots on it's central waterfront?

As the other two posts mentioned, Toronto's waterfront up until only very, very recently has largely been an inustrial area. Its not too hard too see given that there is still a great deal of land that is of this nature.

This is hardly unique to Toronto. Most cities that grew out of late 19th and early 20th century industrialism treated there waterfront areas as toilets for byproducts and less desireable aspects of industrial production and growth. As for the parking lots combine the historical roots of Toronto and 20th century auto oriented planning and it should be no surprise as too why Toronto grew much the way it did.

In terms of rebuilding a connection with its waterfront area, bulding over parking lots, and redeveloping industrial areas, Toronto is one of the better examples of postitive development for North American cities. It still lacks by European standards but give it time and a few strong catalysts like East Bayfront and the condo growth along the waterfront and Toronto should continue on the path of making those pesky parking lots disappear one by one.

 

[Archivistower]

In terms of parking lots surrounding the central core, there's a reasonably well understood process that occurs when hyper-cores are developed. By hyper-core, I mean areas of very intense development like King & Bay. Buildings at a certain distance from the hyper-core lose their value, because they are old and they can't compete with the Class A office space. The land is potentially more valuable with no buildings on it, because it's seen as a potential development site as the hyper-core develops. Also, generally speaking, the area around a hyper-core is not enough of a neighbourhood for activists to get involved in preservation activities, it's generally given over to marginal uses (pawn shops, strip bars, etc.). The result is that many buildings were viewed as being of marginal value and were cleared away.

Cities like Chicago and Montreal are good examples of this phenomenon, so is Winnipeg. I think the current tendency is to fill in these lots with residential uses, which is great. Toronto will be doing this for a long time.

 

[fiendishlibrarian]

Go to the archives thread, and I'm pretty sure there are pics along that stretch of King where there is a continuous streetwall. The lots probably arose out of a situation where the buildings weren't worth the expense of maintaining, and a surface lot was more profitable.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

The problem is especially acute in cities like Houston, where one can see an entire band of parking lots around the CBD.

The similiar situation would probably have happened for Toronto if the pre-1975 Central Area Plan wasn't recinded. In fact, most of the parking lots in the core probably dates back prior to that point, when the core area is projected to be redeveloped in a manner similiar to say St. Jamestown.

AoD

 

[Ed007Toronto]

What other city builds parking lots on it's central waterfront?(Yonge and Queen's Quay)

Most of the waterfront was landfill that was never actaully used for anything other than parking. There's a great shot of the Toronto Harbour Commission headquarters surrounded by empty lots that only today are being developed. For some reason industry never took hold here. Areas north of Front are totally a different situation.

 

[Oliver Tweed]

Nice shot of Houston to illustrate your point, AoD.

Despite still feeling ill after reading the article in the transit issues about Madrid's subway miracle, I am unimaginably thankful that Toronto doesn't look like Houston.

 

[Ed007Toronto]

The TIFF location used to have a car wash that Ivan Reitman's father ran. Still Reitman's land.

 

[Chuck100]

1920s: Simcoe-John, Front-King was exclusively tail tracks. If you draw a diagonal line from King and John to Front and Peter, almost everything south of it was railways. To the north was likely warehouses.

1880s: At minimum, the western part of this area between maybe John and Peter would have resembled the residential area just west of Grange Park. I can only assume that this extended east to Simcoe.

 

[Ed007Toronto]