Against all odds, a beach!
`We had no idea it would take so much time and be so difficult,' HtO designer says of new lakeside park
Jun 09, 2007 04:30 AM
Christopher Hume Star columnist
Are we really as dumb as they think? Are we really so stupid that we can't be trusted with a beach?
Maybe, but certainly the designers of HtO, Toronto's marvellous new lakeside park, had to fight like mad to keep their scheme from being watered down to the point where it barely made sense.
That's why yesterday's opening was two years late. Just getting permission to build the "urban beach" involved a marathon of bureaucracy. Approval had to be gained from city, provincial and federal governments as well as myriad agencies.
There's the Fisheries Act, the Navigable Waters Protection Act, the Toronto Port Authority, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, the list goes on and on.
"The approval process was really something," says Toronto landscape architect Janet Rosenberg, who with Montreal paysagiste Claude Cormier and architect Siamak Hariri, designed HtO. "Nobody has ever done anything like this and we had no idea it would take so much time and be so difficult."
It's also worth noting that the beach's $10-million budget came from money promised to Harbourfront by Pierre Trudeau in the mid-1970s!
Better late than never, but by any standard three decades is a long time to wait.
Then there's the design itself. In the original scheme, a series of terraces led down to the water unencumbered by any restraints. In the finished version, however, the terraces are gone, and a low railing – a "toe roll" – runs along the edge.
And what about the sand pit that extends almost the full length of the beach? Several years ago, city officials decided it had to be eliminated after razor blades were discovered at another Toronto beach.
That same sand pit is also permanently chained off along its northern perimeter, against the designers' wishes. Though the chain serves no apparent purpose, except to limit access, it has been welded in place by nervous local authorities from the parks and recreation department – just in case.
Among HtO's highlights is a cluster of bright yellow umbrellas that invite visitors to sit down and enjoy themselves. One can't help but notice, however, that they are a little too high. Why? Well, of course, if they were any lower people would be climbing all over them, hurting themselves and damaging the umbrellas.
Who would have thought a beach could be so terribly dangerous?
Who would have thought governments could erect so many barriers to the creation of something as benign, positive and healthy as public space?
This might not be intentional, but it amounts to the same thing.
As deputy mayor and head of the HtO steering committee chair Joe Pantalone pointed out at yesterday's unveiling, "Things never happen easily at city hall."
We have created a culture of anxiety and negativity that pervades our lives. The fear of risk is one thing, but we have crossed a line and entered a zone of paranoia that makes it easier just to say no, to do nothing.
To make matters worse, we have bred a public sector that sees initiatives like HtO as incursions into what rightfully belongs to it, not us. The knee-jerk response is not to enable, say, the building of innovative beaches such as this, but to figure out ways of killing the project. The preferred method is death by a thousand cuts.
In a small but telling detail, the city will have to pay rent to the Toronto Port Authority because HtO extends ever so slightly over the lake, this part of which the port authority "owns." It's rather like what the city is doing up at the Royal Ontario Museum, which must pay a yearly fee to Toronto because the new Michael Lee-Chin Crystal occupies air space "owned" by the city.
The most remarkable aspect of this story is the happy ending; against all odds, HtO survived the bureaucratic onslaught to become the best thing to happen on the waterfront in years.