[URBAN NOTE] "Subway touted as a way to awaken Scarborough’s downtown dream"

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star's Tess Kalinowski notes how people in Scarborough want a subway extension to help their east-end Toronto area grow. I hope it does that; I also hope these people want the necessary densification.

Jerry Chadwick has lived the suburban dream that Scarborough was built to feed as Toronto sprawled east in the car-centred 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

His first summer job was in the Scarborough Civic Centre, where his dad worked. Chadwick and his wife used to take their kids skating in the civic square. For 31 years, they’ve lived near McCowan and Ellesmere Rds. on the Scarborough City Centre border.

Chadwick, a retired principal who now serves as a board trustee, is ambivalent about the prospects being painted for the city centre area, roughly the size of Toronto’s downtown, by city planners and politicians. They say a single-stop subway extension will go a long way toward transforming the sleepy suburb into a vibrant urban node and revive the city centre’s commercial development prospects, which stalled around 1990.

That’s when the last office building went up in the area, bounded by Highway 401 on the north and Ellesmere on the south, stretching from about Brimley Rd. on the west and zig-zagging down Bellamy Rd. and Progress Ave. on the east.

For 40 years, Scarborough City Centre has been dominated by the mall known as Scarborough Town Centre. Its vast tracts of parking are chained off to repel commuters trying to board transit.