Toronto Ontario Place | ?m | ?s | Infrastructure ON

Therme's spa and Ecorecero's adventure park will have to continue to reinvent themselves to stay viable. There will come a time when their novelty will wear off, and both will see a decline in attendance. It happens to every venue of this type. It happened to the original Ontario Place, CN Tower, Wonderland, Mairneland and so on. Will they survive for any length of time? Depends on how much they want or can invest into their reinvention. I give them ten years before they're redeveloped. Live Nation will survive because their offerings are ever changing and appeal to everyone.
 
Bluffers416 said:
Therme's spa and Ecorecero's adventure park will have to continue to reinvent themselves to stay viable. There will come a time when their novelty will wear off, and both will see a decline in attendance. It happens to every venue of this type. It happened to the original Ontario Place, CN Tower, Wonderland, Mairneland and so on. Will they survive for any length of time? Depends on how much they want or can invest into their reinvention. I give them ten years before they're redeveloped. Live Nation will survive because their offerings are ever changing and appeal to everyone.
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Each new generation may want to be entertained. So it has to last 20 years before it needs something new to be added or changed or updated.
 
W. K. Lis said:
Each new generation may want to be entertained. So it has to last 20 years before it needs something new to be added or changed or updated.
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True, but at some point there will be change. One thing that is needed in the area is parkland and parks rarely change. A park similar to Humber Bay, Colonel S. Smith and Bluffer's Park with refurbished sphere & pods, would far better serve the public than the current proposal.
 
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old boy said:
All this development needs is a good bakery, and presto - bread and circuses. I don't know if you can pick a time to be " historical ", just remember that a lot of the land around the current city was all under water several thousand years ago. As for a ferris wheel, who needs it when you got this glitz.
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...I kinda wonder though if instead they just kept adding pods to for each newfangled idea. Such as, a new pod for a casino, another for that Roman bath house thingy, another for the ferris wheel business and so on. And no matter how gimmickry and over the top each of these initiatives will be, at least they would keep the original design or the place in spirit and intact. 😸
 
toaster29 said:
I don't disagree with this, but isn't this the case for all development? The most beautiful parts of City of Toronto, or any other urban centre, at one point were beautiful parts of an ecosystem where First Nations people lived off the land. This is a development forum.. I'm not sure the point necessarily stands unless we make it for all development?
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Definitely development has to destroy ecosystems to happen that's just how it is, and I'm not trying to say that I'm even against development at Ontario Place. But there's a difference between context-sensitive development that could happen here (that could maintain or foster natural ecosystem or provide enough benefit/local placemaking to the community/Ontario to outweigh it) and tearing up an ecosystem to put a fake tropical glass artificially heated tracky tourist trap on top of it. It just is particularly wrong feeling to me to decimate something that is very Ontario (both in natural landscape and the architectural design/landscape architecture that exists on site) to put up genericville corporate fake climate and ecosystem in its place.

There could conceivably be a great plan for Ontario Place that would require a bunch of ecosystem destruction to achieve that I might support, but it's just definitely not this one.
 
Was walking in Trillium park and noticed these new structures currently being worked on. They are bird feeders designed for barn swallows. Likely some other species may nest on top but the bottoms are set for barn swallows.

no birds have set up yet as it’s still under construction but should have full occupancy soon!!

this is great as it adds to an already good area for birds. You can’t put a price on the sound of birds chirping as you walk along the water :)

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irishboy said:
Was walking in Trillium park and noticed these new structures currently being worked on. They are bird feeders designed for barn swallows. Likely some other species may nest on top but the bottoms are set for barn swallows.

no birds have set up yet as it’s still under construction but should have full occupancy soon!!

this is great as it adds to an already good area for birds. You can’t put a price on the sound of birds chirping as you walk along the water :)

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They aren't actually bird feeders - they are nesting structures. The birds currently live atop the Cinesphere and the Pods, but with renovations coming to those, they are hoping the birds will relocate to these structures, which should be ideal for them.

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interchange42 said:
... The birds currently live atop the Cinesphere and the Pods, but with renovations coming to those, they are hoping the birds will relocate to these structures ...
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I'm not an expert on birds, but it seems every time I hear about something like this intended to attract and be used by a specific type of bird (other than the ubiquitous sparrows and starlings), it rarely works. As a kid I remember a neighbour having a bird house that was briefly inhabited by tree swallows, before seeing them forcibly evicted by sparrows ("House sparrows are jerks"). Also, the common suggestion seems to be to put them "in areas away from human habitation", as the presence of people seems to attract the starlings, pigeons, and house sparrows, while discouraging most other species. Maybe having these structures only about 10 or 20 feet away from the benches and trail with its almost constant stream of joggers, cyclists, and dog walkers might not be the best place for them.
https://www.beco-birds.org/portfolio-item/barn-swallows-and-social-cues/
Barn Swallows typically nest on human-built structures... To mitigate the loss of nesting habitat, for example when an old barn housing a nesting colony is demolished, structures are being built specifically for the species to use for nesting. Unfortunately, it appears that these new structures are rarely used by Barn Swallows.
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Edit: The Ontario Place website does say :
A rope fence ... will be installed around the perimeter. Natural vegetation and planting are also being used as a deterrent. An interpretive sign asks people to kindly not disturb the birds ...
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Another edit (May 13) : I saw swallows with forked tails (I assume Barn Swallows) flying over, ignoring the structures.
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If the Barn Swallows were going to use something else at Ontario Place, wouldn't that nearby Pavilion with its higher roof be more likely? There was a rope fence around two sides of the new structures, so maybe not yet finished. But less than a minute after I got close enough to see them, I saw a woman go past the end of the fence and walk around inside the fenced area right underneath all of the structures to look up into them -- not that it really mattered anyway as there's no birds there.
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According to Oliver Moore at G&M, Écorécréo is pulling out of the Ontario Place redevelopment. They're the Quebec based operator that was going to add aerial obstacle courses, net-based aerial adventures, ziplines, escape rooms to the park.

The story is behind the paywall here:
www.theglobeandmail.com

Ontario Place redevelopment faces new hurdles after private partner exits

Quebec-based adventure tourism provider Écorécréo is no longer involved in the Toronto waterfront site’s redevelopment, two senior sources in the provincial government say
www.theglobeandmail.com www.theglobeandmail.com
 
max said:
According to Oliver Moore at G&M, Écorécréo is pulling out of the Ontario Place redevelopment. They're the Quebec based operator that was going to add aerial obstacle courses, net-based aerial adventures, ziplines, escape rooms to the park.

The story is behind the paywall here:
www.theglobeandmail.com

Ontario Place redevelopment faces new hurdles after private partner exits

Quebec-based adventure tourism provider Écorécréo is no longer involved in the Toronto waterfront site’s redevelopment, two senior sources in the provincial government say
www.theglobeandmail.com www.theglobeandmail.com
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i always thought they werent the best attraction for ontario place, like the treetop trekking.
with construction starting in 2024, wonder if they even have time to find a new bidder
 
max said:
According to Oliver Moore at G&M, Écorécréo is pulling out of the Ontario Place redevelopment. They're the Quebec based operator that was going to add aerial obstacle courses, net-based aerial adventures, ziplines, escape rooms to the park.

The story is behind the paywall here:
www.theglobeandmail.com

Ontario Place redevelopment faces new hurdles after private partner exits

Quebec-based adventure tourism provider Écorécréo is no longer involved in the Toronto waterfront site’s redevelopment, two senior sources in the provincial government say
www.theglobeandmail.com www.theglobeandmail.com
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I can't really vouch for whats going on here...because /paywall. I just hope it's true though.
 
For some reason I get the feeling that this Ontario Place deal will blow up to a scandal a la Gas Plant level, and will bring Doug Ford's reign to an end in a couple years.

That or it could just be wishful thinking as well.
 
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