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Toronto's Port Lands is a massive 325 hectare area, nearly as large as the bulk of Downtown Toronto itself, roughly comparable in size to St George to Church streets, from the Gardiner Expressway to Bloor Street. They are currently an industrial and commercial landscape, some of it in daily use, some of it abandoned, and some of it undergoing the beginnings of a massive, gradual transformation that will continue across decades.
The Port Lands has long been viewed as under-utilized, but why exactly it is what it is can be attributed to different things. A marshy area when Toronto was first colonized, the creation of a massive port area in the 1950s overestimated of the role commercial shipping would have in Toronto. Since then, a lack of connectivity to its surroundings — long walled off from the city to the north by the eastern end of the Gardiner Expressway, recently removed — provided a psychological barrier that kept the area distinct and somewhat removed. Whatever other causes for the area's mostly rundown nature, both governments and many individuals want to see things change in the area.
Toronto’s Official Plan (OP) designates the majority of the Port Lands as Employment Area, allowing for uses like construction storage, film industry, and waste management to occupy large plots of land, while a large number of developable sites remain vacant. In the last decade, the City has sought to encourage the revitalization of the Port Lands, with a vision for better connecting the area to its surroundings, increasing the number of land uses, reducing the industrial footprint, and creating new places for people to live.
In the news most often for the Port Lands is its west end, where the landscape is being totally reworked by Waterfront Toronto with a new mouth for the Don River, new bridges, new parks, and where soon enough a new neighbourhood called Villiers Island will be built. The buildings on Villiers Island are not expected to be particularly tall as they are under the approach path for planes landing at Billy Bishop Toronto City Centre Airport, and in fact, none (save for one rogue submission years ago, now stale-dated) have yet been submitted to the City.
Now, one proposal in an entirely different area of the Port Lands — at Lake Shore Boulevard where the coming extension of Broadview Avenue will connect the district to the future East Harbour mini-downtown — has been submitted to the City for Official Plan Amendment, Zoning By-law Amendment, and Site Plan Approval. About a month ago, Carlyle Communities and Slate Asset Management proposed a 2-tower development at 685 Lake Shore Boulevard East, on the southeast corner with Saulter Street South.
Of importance for the proponents of 685 Lake Shore East is the impending creation of the East Harbour Transit Hub, that puts the site within a Major Transit Station Area (MTSA). With new GO and Ontario Line stations and new streetcar tracks south along the Broadview Avenue extension, the hub will be the central transit node for the Port Lands and the East Harbour community. Meanwhile, the network of existing cycling infrastructure in the area — a network which will become much more extensive as redevelopment proceeds — adds another layer to the viability of a proposal here from a green transportation perspective.
Not included in the image above are the towers from this proposal, although they would appear just to the left of centre behind the East Harbour buildings from that perspective. Carlyle and Slate's proposal, designed by BDP Quadrangle, features a sculpturally carved, stacked podium that incorporates three levels of commercial space, while 760 residential units would be contained above within mirror-image towers of 35-storeys, reaching a height of 130m.
The inside-facing elevations of the towers grab the attention of the viewer with a bronze-coloured metal cladding, while rows of offset balconies add vitality the faces of the towers and help to punctuate the rounded corner. The outside facing elevations of the towers work to contrast the visual character of those on the inside by employing a minimalist design that features a clean and simple white metal cladding, and a rectangular-based grid pattern that contains three floors of windows in a vertical segment. Both towers feature a step-back at the 30th storey, decreasing the floor plate size slightly while allowing for two units in each tower to enjoy a sizeable walkout terrace.
The podium, which climbs five storeys, (the fifth steps back to the degree that it can only be seen in the rendering below), boasts a similarly stimulating design that uses cutouts and overhangs as the floors ascend to create interesting outdoor spaces as well as a sculptural form from the pedestrian realm. The grade level would house residential and commercial lobbies below each tower, as well as a hybrid space that can be converted to retail following the completion of the Broadview Extension. Moving up, floors 2,3, and 4 would offer a combined total of 16,108m² of commercial floorspace, while the fifth floor is a proposed double-height amenity level that would house the development’s 3,040m² of total amenity space.
Above the podium, the mirror-image towers offer a total of 50,048m² of residential floorspace that is divided among unit offerings ranging in size from studio to 3-bedroom. The proposal also details two levels of underground parking that would offer a total of 229 vehicle parking spaces, as well as 833 bicycle spaces.
The site plan shows that the podium is angled along its eastern edge to allow for the Broadview Avenue extension through part of the property. Currently in the Environmental Assessment stage, the plans for the extension south from Eastern Avenue are still evolving, with a Fall 2022 target set for designs.
UrbanToronto will continue to follow updates for this development, but in the meantime, you can learn more from our Database file for the project, linked below. If you'd like, you can join in on the conversation in the associated Project Forum thread, or leave a comment in the space provided on this page.
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| Related Companies: | BDP Quadrangle, Bousfields, Crozier Consulting Engineers, Grounded Engineering Inc., RWDI Climate and Performance Engineering |
