University Avenue - Toronto's Grand Avenue?

[Urban Shocker]

For someone like me from elsewhere, with no emotional attachment to Toronto or years of personal memories here, you are right, I don't like how Toronto looks, and it didn't give me a strong reason to. Small Victorian houses are practically present in everyone towns and villages on this continent. They are not Toronto's specialty.

Someone who fails to appreciate what's right in front of them, and who concludes that it therefore doesn't exist, is the last person one would trust to make intelligent comparisons between that city and any other.

 

[Ladies Mile]

I can guarantee you that few American cities consider "skinny Victorian houses" as typical suburban architecture. Victorians are generally found closer to the centres of cities, and as a result many of them suffered when downtowns depopulated. Many of these cities now have a gentrified area where some of these houses have been restored, but many have lost a significant portion of them altogether. Toronto, on the other hand, did not hollow out at the centre as so many of these cities did, so we have a much wider collection of Victorians, from the smaller cottages in Cabbagetown and elsewhere to huge Romanesque houses in the Annex. For sheer number of Victorians in livable, functional shape you'd be hard-pressed to beat Toronto. Ours aren't as colourful as some of those in San Francisco, for instance, but they sure cover a large and substantial part of the city. And car4041 is correct - the brick bay and gable is a very distinctive Toronto style. You'll see a few of them elsewhere, but they're just everywhere here.

Older generic North American suburbs tend to look more like the wartime/postwar areas of East York and Scarborough, with their small gabled bungalows. The more affluent ones are full of Tudor and Georgian revivals and lots of midcentury modern ranch style or split level houses.

There are plenty of Victorian suburbs and urban neighborhoods in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Richmond and Louisville, KY. The city that actually has a very Toronto feel to its older residential architecture is Columbus, OH, which has preserved a large amount of homes directly adjacent to downtown. The architecture is less vertical and more "colonial" in feel, reflecting German rather than British building practices, and I wound up appreciating its pleasant, human scale and relative austerity in comparison to New York's dour acres of brownstones and bristling mansions.

 

[junctionist]

You pick some interesting things to constitute the "public realm".

Every city picks and chooses what it will spend it's capital improvement budgets on, and that will be unique to each city, as each city has unique needs and priorities. The one thing they all have in common, is public realm improvements that far outweigh any one's budgets. Toronto's budget is far higher than Montreal's, and Toronto makes far more public realm improvements.

To listen to some of you people, you'd think burying some hydro poles and putting some pretty benches in some existing parks is all that needs to be done. We could do more of that here in Toronto too...but it will just be at the expense of something else. Then you'd be bitching about how not having a $600 million upgrade for Union Station...or a Sugar Beach...or whatever 100 other projects the city built is such a drag.

You can't have it all...done all at once. If you think the city should have put off something else to do something you like more...fine, but don't pretend it isn't doing anything. That's why all this myopic cherry-picking of a single item somewhere else that we aren't doing is just giving me eye cancer every time I have to read it.

In the meantime, it's not like the city is unliveable.

Of course, the city is doing a lot, but many improvements are isolated to the local. The design quality of the new Spadina line stations is appropriate for a leading city, but the new Union subway station renderings don't show that same kind of ambition in spite of being in one of the most prominent places in the network. Sometimes, it's not even matter of budget limitations. Many public realm elements I mentioned above must be provided, and many probably would not require a significant extra investment. A more appropriate design of traffic signal for prominent urban areas and some bureaucratic coordination to eliminate redundant poles isn't a substantial investment. I don't mind a slow but consistent pace of improvement so long as there's an overarching and impressively ambitious plan that brings everything together. It can be a 100 year plan to achieve one of the world's best public realms, but every detail must be polished with passion no matter how broad or how small.

Without that drive to come out on top, we will by default be in the shadow of a series of cities. That's a fate which I feel is worth avoiding for the city's profile in the world. If we were some number two city, we could forget about all this and concede that we live well and other things don't matter in the end, but that's not who we are. People in a variety of small towns and cities could say that as well. The public realm of a leading city must always tell both residents and visitors that they are in one of the most significant places that they can find themselves in.

I was walking past Crescent St, St Laurent st, and St Denis st in Montreal, looking at those beautiful houses, staircases, balconies, patios and kept thinking, how come there is not one single street in Toronto that is as charming as this? Montreal may have a smaller downtown and fewer and shorter buildings, but the streets beat Toronto hands-down!

As you can read from my posts, I don't mind acknowledging areas that Toronto needs to address to present itself better, and I'm all for continuing the discussion. We can't delude ourselves, though that seldom seems to be a risk when it comes to Toronto. I don't need to 'pretend that things are fantastic' because I live in an exceptional city. Objectively speaking, there are areas where improvement is warranted to reflect the significance of this place. But here you are simultaneously waxing poetic about Montreal's Victorian housing, when Toronto has many streetscapes with its unique Victorian architecture with the kind of polychromatic brickwork, gingerbread trim, and stained glass that is rare to see on residential streets in Montreal. If you don't want to see that and continuously denigrate our rich architectural heritage in which the Bay and Gable and Annex Houses play an important role, then sadly you can't see that there's impressive beauty to this city's built form. That's odd. You can find just as charming streets in Yorkville, Cabbagetown, or The Annex as those you mentioned in Montreal.

 

[adma]

Methinks kkgg7 is just very, very angry about something that goes beyond urban form--he's just sublimating it through his lunkheaded "hey, I'm not of this town, I have no emotional attachment to it" urban analysis.

Don't be surprised if some going-postal incident in town over the next while gets traced to some forum troll named "kkgg7". The internet's like that...

 

[Dandy Horse]

Toronto does have, in the past, and currently, a very repressive, "bare minimum" mentality in terms of the built form, usually dictated by car slugs who have no idea what city building means, which is ever evident in our built form. what makes Toronto so incredible, however, is that over the years incredible blips of creativity in design at very crucial points have left us with the phantasmagoric environment we know today, with things like Queens park, Riverdale Park, the R. H Harris water filtration park, the intactness of Vaughan/ Oakwood down to the Annex neighbourhoods that is the result of community opposition to car slug infrastructure, etc, etc. These are the things that make Toronto so great, this, in part is why we are not a dead city, like pretty uch everywhere else in Canada, save for Montreal, Vancouver, and if you're feeling generous, Calgary.

 

[Urban Shocker]

The University Avenue archipelago, consisting of a strip of islands useless to pedestrians and not a part of the original - pre-automobile age - design of the Avenue, strikes me as one of our worst odes to the car slug world.

 

[k10ery]

Close the northbound lanes to traffic from Queen to Queen's Park and you could make the best and best-used park Toronto has ever seen. Necessary first step in this process: Janette Sadik-Khan for Mayor!

 

[jn_12]

I'd also suggest that if kkgg7 doesn't think that Toronto is appealing to tourists (or if he thinks Montreal is more appealing) that he take a look at the tourist numbers. Toronto had more hotel stays last year than Montreal had visitors, period. So we must be doing something right.

 

[kkgg7]

Close the northbound lanes to traffic from Queen to Queen's Park and you could make the best and best-used park Toronto has ever seen. Necessary first step in this process: Janette Sadik-Khan for Mayor!

totally support this idea. I don't think University Ave needs to be 8 lanes wide. What is it, some sort of a highway?

 

[kkgg7]

I'd also suggest that if kkgg7 doesn't think that Toronto is appealing to tourists (or if he thinks Montreal is more appealing) that he take a look at the tourist numbers. Toronto had more hotel stays last year than Montreal had visitors, period. So we must be doing something right.

Toronto as the financial center as well as the capital city obviously helped with the number of hotel stays. Not everyone comes here for sight-seeing, right?
Montreal is neither.
In the US, Washington DC has similar hotel stays as New York City. It is hard to say it is as appealing as NYC as a tourist destination. Miami had half of that for your information.

 

[thecharioteer]

Oh...can we just pick anything, anywhere in the world in this game?

I'd also like a Piazza San Marco, and the Great Pyramids (but sitting out in the lake on their own islands).

You people are just giving me a headache.




Yea right.....if Manhattan had a Cabbagetown, you'd never here the f*cking end of it. It would be immortalized in a Woody Allen film.

You are missing the point of my posting images from Bryant Park. Toronto has built new parks over the past decades (Woodbine, Berczy, Concord Adex's Central Park, Sherbourne Commons) and is planning on new ones over the next few decades (East Bayfront, West Donlands). Are the new parks successful? What are the criteria we use for evaluating what has been built? We seem to be well-versed in analyzing successes and failures within the realm of architecture, but what about within the realm of landscape architecture?

By looking at the best in landscape design (which I believe Bryant Park represents), we can set the standards for the new parks to come and hopefully remediate the inadequacies of what has been built. I believe that the bar has been set too low when evaulating the public realm in Toronto (often a case of "you don't know what you don't know"). it's not a case of transplanting the world's "greatest hits" to Toronto.

 

[jn_12]

Toronto as the financial center as well as the capital city obviously helped with the number of hotel stays. Not everyone comes here for sight-seeing, right?
Montreal is neither.
In the US, Washington DC has similar hotel stays as New York City. It is hard to say it is as appealing as NYC as a tourist destination. Miami had half of that for your information.

I was beginning to write out a big post about how wrong you were but I've done it before and obviously it's had no impact on improving your understanding of tourism. By all means, if you want to prove to me in what way Montreal is a more appealing city to visit, with objective facts displaying how tourists are consistently choosing Montreal over Toronto as a tourist destination then I'll be glad to hear it. Good luck with that though.

 

[kkgg7]

I believe that the bar has been set too low when evaulating the public realm in Toronto (often a case of "you don't know what you don't know"). it's not a case of transplanting the world's "greatest hits" to Toronto.

You can say that again.
People seem to get excited about Sherbourne Common. I was too, until I actually visited it. I was disappointed in the aesthetic beauty of the park. Sure, it is better than a parking lot, but it still looks rather cold and barren to me. I am not an expert in landscaping, but after spending 10 minutes there, I got bored. There are not enough trees or just green space, nor much space for us to sit on. It just looks kind of boring to me.

High Park is another example. Every spring, people flock there for cherry blossoms. But if you compare that with Washington DC's, it is hardly as pleasant. DC's cherry trees are carefully planted along the lake, with various monuments and bridges in between. It was a rather interesting walk. In High Park, we have some nice trees, all in a small area. But outside it, there is not much interesting to see any more. It seems it was not meticulously planned in the first place, just plant some trees and call it a day. There can be more cherry trees, as well as other various kind of blooms that make it park look good even off-season (some trees do bloom in the winter), and preferable accompanied by man-made additions such as fountains, statues, monuments, boulevards and pavillions. City planners just didn't think it is worthwhile to take the time and hire the right person to plan for a great urban park. Instead, 80% of High Park is disorganized with wide grass and randomly presented in its natural wide state. Most first time visitors I know went with high expectation and returned with mild disappointment.

People here get incredibly defensive whenever someone say another city did something far better, when it really did. To deny that is not called confidence, it is self delusion and that's what has prevent Toronto from getting better.

 

[car4041]

Instead, 80% of High Park is disorganized with wide grass and randomly presented in its natural wide state.

This is exactly the point of High Park (assuming you mean "wild" and not "wide"). It's not supposed to be Central Park. Like someone else mentioned earlier in the thread, it's more like Hampstead Heath in London. The fact that it's in its natural state is not a drawback!

 

[doug]

People here get incredibly defensive whenever someone say another city did something far better, when it really did. To deny that is not called confidence, it is self delusion and that's what has prevent Toronto from getting better.

Why are you here if you hate it so much?
Did you get kicked out of your homeland?
Where are you from? Let us compare your home to ours.