[URBAN NOTE] Unbuilt Toronto

[rfmcdonald]

Over at the National Post, Peter Kuitenbrouwer wondered why it was so hard to get into Union Station.

On a lovely weekday afternoon at rush hour, I am standing on the cracked plaza in front of Union Station, watching the crowds bunched up and tripping over one another on the narrow sidewalks of Bay and York Streets, then scurrying like rodents into the little openings at the extremities of the train station. I am thinking about what might have been.

In 1911, the Civic Improvements Committee of the City of Toronto had a radical idea: cut a new street through downtown Toronto, called Federal Avenue, linking a proposed Union Station on the south side of Front Street to a proposed site for a New City Hall, north of Queen Street.

The railways did build Union Station, in 1927, in accordance with the plan, and after World War II the City of Toronto bought the land north of Queen Street, which eventually became Nathan Phillips Square. But city officials didn't have the stomach to expropriate the land they'd need for Federal Avenue.

The 1911 proposal clarifies the dysfunction of downtown Toronto today. I always wondered why it's so hard, as a pedestrian, to get to the main entrance of Union Station: you have to walk forever from the corner of York Street or Bay Street. Turns out we only got half of our Civic Improvement.

As Kuitenbrouwer explores later in his article and as John Barber writes in The Globe and Mail, Mark Obaldeston's new book Unbuilt Toronto gives Torontonians (others, too) insights into the paths that Toronto did not take, at least in respect to architecture and urban planning.

Future historians with similar interests, digging through today's news stories as Mr. Osbaldeston did yesterday's, will remark on how many new schemes are introduced not with enthusiasm but with a blunt reminder of the notorious failures that preceded them. The waterfront, centuries-old focus of such dreams, dares not speak its name in 2008.

And the ghosts multiply: To add to the 33 abandoned visions documented in Unbuilt Toronto, the Toronto Society of Architects asked its members to empty their own bottom drawers "to uncover visions of the Toronto that could have been." A selection from both sources will be exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum, beginning this week.

[. . .]

Consider the notorious first proposal for the Eaton Centre: three chilly towers on a windy plaza, Old City Hall gone. The ultimate result is far more urban and accommodating, but its key elements, including three towers, are all in place.

One can say that Metro Centre, an unpopular Brutalist scheme to demolish Union Station and redevelop hundreds of hectares of abandoned railway lands, was abandoned. But is it unbuilt? The visionaries who imagined it would be amazed to discover, 40 years later, how much of their allegedly rejected dream had become real.

Unbuilt Toronto shows enough evidence of purist projects vastly improved in their messy implementation to abolish most nostalgia for what might have been. It also makes the undoubted achievements seem less remarkable: As the author attests, there was a lot to like about the conventional city hall scheme a profile-hungry city rejected in favour of Viljo Revell's wild expressionism. With buildings and the square handled alike in each, style is the only substantive difference.

[. . .]

Toronto would be different, but easily recognizable. Even such well-killed ghouls as the Spadina Expressway, if built, would have fit right in. They are old familiars, with close relations everywhere around us.

Thus the city that might have been becomes a mirror image of the city that is, ghosts and all.

Unbuilt Toronto has received coverage from sources like the Toronto Star, Spacing, Art Daily, and Quill and Quire. I'll come up with one myself when I get my hands on a copy.