A Bit More Detail

• The TTC promises to relieve overcrowding on its subways and buses, but isn't going to actually spend enough money to trigger significant change for a couple of years. CBC reports.


• Ben Spurr reports on the frankly embarrassing failure of the TTC--Metrolinx, anyone--to have any sort of technological infrastructure capable of checking up on the Presto cards and the gates they use.


• Edward Keenan takes issue, rightfully, with the failure of city planners in Toronto to plan ahead for crises, counting on the false security of assuming things will go on as they have gone in the past, over at the Toronto Star.


• The Toronto District School Board is considering allowing school trips to the United States in the era of Trump. The Globe and Mail reports.


• Shawn Micallef raves about the power of light on a winter night, taking an extended look at Ontario Place's Winter Light Exhibition. I must get down there. The Toronto Star has it.

• blogTO notes that Kodak Building 9 has been moved, to serve as part of the Mount Dennis station on the Eglinton line.


• Toronto police are now fining drivers on King Street who are not respecting new transit-friendly policies there. The Toronto Star reports.


• A new study estimates that the proposed Rail Deck Park would cost the city of Toronto 1.6 billion dollars. (I think it's worth it.) Global News reports.


• blogTO reports on plans for a massive new park at Ontario Place, Celebration Commons, some twenty acres in size.

• Spacing notes how mapping can reveal the extent of flooding on the Toronto Islands.


• blogTO reports on Boblo Island, home to an amusement park abandoned more than two decades.


• At NOW Toronto, Richard Longley describes the wonderful scenic new Trillium Park, built on the former Ontario Place grounds.


• Global News notes how Mississauga is planning to buy old homes in Cooksville to convert into a new central park.

There's life at Ontario Place. Aside from the peek that we got at the dilapidated grounds for the in/future festival, there's been little news about the site's future outside of delays to the opening date of the urban park that will make up phase one of the revitalization efforts.

Provincial representatives gave tours of the construction site today, which is slowly starting to reveal the shape of the park to come. The new opening date is now pegged at next summer, a more realistic goal based on the amount of work that's been done thus far (the original target for phase one was 2015).

The 7.5 acre waterfront park will have a variety of features when it opens to the public, including granite rock faces that'll provide skyline views, a central fire pit, a waterfront trail, a boardwalk and an open-air pavilion. It all looks very promising, even as the rough outline is only coming into view now.

The couple looked as confused as we were: He in a navy-blue two-piece and she in a red skirt suit, while our crowd donned skinny jeans, canvas totes and New Balance. As we all arrived at Ontario Place, it became clear we were here for different purposes: us for the In/Future festival of arts and music, and them for a wedding.

In the modernist fantasy land on Toronto’s waterfront, which opened in 1971, the wedding guests seemed a bit out of place. Ontario Place was designed as a gleaming showpiece for the province’s culture, but that vision collapsed; today the site, which ended up as a theme park, is largely closed. The wedding venue, meanwhile, is doing good business.

Ontario Place was the product of grand modernist dream, built on a futurist ambition of social progress.

It was a powerful lesson about what makes public space work: You have to give people a reason to come. And In/Future, which wrapped up last weekend after a highly successful 10-day run, did just that: a set of art installations and music performances that brought one of Ontario Place’s two artificial islands to life.

And that is a difficult task: How do you take a big and slightly isolated place, the product of a grand modernist dream, and make it live again?

The curators of In/Future, Rui Pimenta and Layne Hinton, asked artists to engage with the landscape – designed by Michael Hough as a rolling park stocked with native trees and shrubs – and with the architecture, envisioned by Eberhard Zeidler, with its spherical cinema and series of high-tech white steel structures. “What do we learn about ourselves in the present,” Hinton asks, “when we look at the past, to see how we imagined the future?”

Ontario Place lives again. The defunct amusement park has been resuscitated this month as part of a massive art project that will reanimate the site's previously dormant features like the Cinesphere and silos.

The in/future arts and culture festival launched last night and will run until September 25. Spread out over 14 acres, it's truly a feast for the eyes, ears and belly (there are food trucks and bars scattered all over the property).

Toronto art curators Art Spin together with dozens of artists and art organizations worked together to populate the abandoned island with all types of activations. It's best to head down over the iconic bridge in the afternoon to appreciate things in the daylight before they light up at night. The festival is open until 11 p.m. every night.

Memories will come rushing back from the minute you enter the main pavilion. If you had never been as a kid, you'll be hit with a different kind of rush, and that's one of strolling onto another planet.

The site, opened in May, 1971, after more than two years of construction, was the brainchild of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government which, like the rest of Canada, had been enamoured of what Montreal had wrought on the St. Lawrence River with its fabled Expo ’67. The Tories were keen to have something equally far-out and futuristic for Toronto and Ontar-i-ar-i-ar-i-o.

Funny thing about the future, though: it gets old; it gets scuffed; it gets weedy. Or at least its emblems do. What once seemed the very incarnations of the future – at Ontario Place, this would be the geodesic Cinesphere, the pods-on-stilts structures on the centre island and the diamond-shaped pavilions on its west island – become, over time, the fodder of nostalgia, saying more about the era in which they were conceived than what they seemed to portend.

Which perhaps, in part, explains why, after additions and fixes, including a $10-million refurbishment in 2010, then sundry redevelopment and enhancement proposals, Ontario’s Liberal government closed Ontario Place in February, 2012, and punted its future into, well … the future.

Now, however, the site appears on the cusp of a mini-revival, or at least the six hectares that make up the complex’s western island are. Beginning Sept. 15, the former amusement park site is going to host the first In/Future art festival and the 15th annual Small World Music Festival.

A symbiotic exercise, the dual festival is set to run over 11 days and feature at least 60 art installations, indoors and out, plus more than 45 performers appearing in concert and wandering the locale.

The serpentine strip that's being turned into a new waterfront park runs from the foot of Ontario Place Blvd., down the back of Echo Beach, and out round the back of the old water slides. When the park was open the area was used for parking and equipment storage.

In January, the province and Waterfront Toronto, the two groups leading the development of the park, called for public feedback on their latest draft. The suggestions, gathered over the last three months, called for improved connections to the water and better recognition of local First Nations heritage.

Many of the people that provided input said they wanted the as yet unnamed park, which is made up of areas that sound like levels in a Sega Genesis video game, to include multi-use trails, space for food trucks and other public events, and forested areas. Facilities should be geared towards walking, cycling, and hiking, they said.

As it currently stands, visitors will enter the park through an artificial ravine, which was not included in the previous incarnation of the park. On the rocky walls, carvings will use patterns and textures from traditional First Nations moccasins; overhead, a part of the looping park trail crosses the ravine on a suspension bridge.

A looping, 980-metre multi-use trail will pass through the upper portion of the park, which contains high hills and forest, and a waterfront boardwalk with public seating and rocky outcrops that protrude from the beach into the water.

There are some nice touches: Some trees will be planted and grown in deliberately unusual shapes as visual landmarks and fire pits will be allowed - encouraged even - on a rocky section of beach with panoramic views of the city skyline. There's even a "romantic garden" for being romantic and a lookout for looking.