Toronto full of ideas, but lacks vision

Rail deck park is a grand idea, but Toronto may not have the vision to make it happen, writes Edward Keenan.

Thestar.com
Sept. 21, 2016
By Edward Keenan

“Make no little plans,” visionary Chicago works commissioner Daniel Burnham famously said, “they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work ... ”

I first encountered these words, fittingly enough, in Chicago’s Millennium Park last year, where they were displayed on a poster. Burnham developed the plan of Chicago that contained the sprawling and justly famous lakefront parks that Millennium Park adjoins. It was his spirit that was invoked when the addition was begun in the 1990s - a plan that decked over rail lands and a station and parking garages to build a park on a platform. A magnificent park featuring magnificent architecture and public art - one that stirs the blood, you could say.

Standing there, in the park, you might look around and say, “I want to live in a city that decides to build this park. That thinks that much of itself. That makes things this big.”

There’s a bit of the desire to wield that same stir stick, it appears, in the big plan for a downtown park over the rail lands between Bathurst St. and Blue Jays Way, which is currently being championed by Mayor John Tory and Councillor Joe Cressy.

A preliminary report on the 21-acre park proposal, which might cost at least $1.05 billion, will be considered by the city’s executive committee this week, and if approved there will go to full city council in early October. It will be complicated to build. It will be expensive. It will take a long time.

“It is exactly the type of big thinking Toronto is ready for,” Cressy wrote recently in an op-ed piece on the website Torontoist. “Let’s get it done.”

It is a project I want very much to love. I read Cressy’s and the mayor’s arguments about how it is “entirely feasible and entirely necessary,” and a “significant investment” that will “address all the priorities” of a “livable city and an equitable city.” And while I might quibble about the definition of need, I mostly agree, or close enough.

But to be honest, that stuff doesn’t fire me up. I want to fall in love with this thing because I imagine in my mind’s eye what it could be, in a dead zone of the city right now, in the heart of a growing central area, and think: “What a kick-ass awesome thing that would be to have in the city.”

I want to live in the city that says it is worth it, because we are a wealthy and growing city, and because it would belong to all of us, and because it would be awesome.

And yet…

…and yet I know this is a city that already has a much larger downtown park - on the Toronto Islands, roughly the size of New York’s Central Park - and chokes off access to it on aging ferry boats, so that a family of four wanting to visit must pay more than $22 to access the park, and must line up for a long time, crowded into a pen in the hot sun, waiting to board.

…and yet I know this a city in which the man who is now deputy mayor launched a crusade to protest the cost of pink umbrella lighting installations in a new waterfront park just a few years ago, and ramped up the outrage over new washrooms at Cherry Beach.

“We do not need award-winning toilets,” he said. “You don’t have to spend $12,000 on an umbrella … a councillor who would vote for that would be strung up by their ankles,” he said.

That is, I want to live in a city that thinks enough of itself to build the big magnificent park, but I know I live in a city where often those in charge think we don’t even deserve a nice place to pee.

This tension comes up a lot lately. You can look at the grand transit-building plans we now have, and you can argue the Scarborough one-stop subway extension is the wrong plan or SmartTrack is still sketchily defined, but you can’t argue the network plan is some cheap way out. Meanwhile, next to the unfunded grand vision there, you have nickel-and-diming of the operating budget. You have the slow, “aspirational” approach to poverty reduction. You have a still-massive unfunded gap in the basic social housing repair and maintenance budget.

We in Toronto may have heard the advice to make no little plans, but you can be damn sure we still obsess about making little budgets.

And the thing about big plans with no big money behind them is they inspire hope and then gather dust on a shelf for decades and then inspire cynicism about the next big plan that comes along. Mark Osbaldeston has done very well for himself (and his readers) in writing two books titled Unbuilt Toronto, about the plans we made and never built.

And there’s this voice that says it’s not even as simple as finding the money for this project - because while it’s true I think a city needs good parks, and they should be great parks, I also don’t think that trumps other needs like housing and childcare and transit service.

A billion-dollar landmark park, to me, should mean we’ve decided to spend the money we need to spend to build and do all the things the city needs to do and build to be ever greater -“livable” and “feasible” and “equitable,” yes, absolutely. But straight-ahead “kick-ass awesome,” too.

I want us to be that Toronto, where I can fall in love with this park. The thing is I’m just not yet convinced we are.