Eug
Senior Member
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For the past several years, Toronto real-estate developer Peter Freed has been watching the revitalization of the city’s inner harbour inch slowly forward, and he has not liked much that’s happening by the water’s edge. “It’s a typical, boring, Canadian version of what could be,†he told me. “There’s nothing earth-shattering about it, nothing globally impressive about it.â€
But unlike most Torontonians who dislike the painstaking handiwork of Waterfront Toronto – that’s the Crown corporation overseeing the renewal of the industrial harbour lands – Mr. Freed has taken the time to contribute something new to the discussion of the inner shoreline’s redesign.
His idea, unveiled last week, is grandiose. It’s more extravagant than anything proposed so far by the urban planners and architects working for Waterfront Toronto. And it’s certainly the most unusual harbourfront scheme anybody’s come up with since local people began to think about uniting the city and Lake Ontario 200 years ago.
Mr. Freed suggests throwing a linear green park over the railway corridor that runs across inner-city Toronto (not a bad notion, in my view). This park, with its biking, jogging and rollerblading paths, would then connect, probably at the foot of Bathurst Street – this is where the proposal gets interesting – with an immense boardwalk jutting out into the harbour just east of the island airport. The boardwalk, perhaps 50 feet wide, would bend around the harbour in a great arc, meeting the linear park again somewhere on the east side of downtown. (Mr. Freed hasn’t decided where this eastern connection might take place.)
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