ActiveTO and CafeTO were both popular, but only one was about making money. Guess which city hall let wilt?

Yorkregion.com
March 28, 2022
Shawn Micallef

Back in September, as one of the summer’s last hot and humid nights enveloped the city, I walked along Dundas Street to Ossington Avenue and headed south. The whole area was heaving with humanity in that dense area of CaféTO curbside patios.

Where one ended another began, and by this late in the summer the potted plants restaurateurs had put on their patios were lush and full, a continual jungle where once there were just parked cars and bare pavement.

Ossington itself was the closest I’ve ever seen Toronto behave like a European street. To walk the sidewalk was to pass through people sitting at tables, their chatter and the clink of glasses near-continuous down to Queen Street. It was like being in another city, far away from uptight, overly officious Toronto. Then winter came and the patios disappeared.

The good news is CaféTO is coming back for a third season, with the city’s registration deadline April 2. Last summer, the program extended well beyond the downtown core, with rows of patios in places like Yonge Street in North York, though the highwaylike conditions there make it decidedly less pleasant than by slower, downtown traffic. The “REimagining Yonge Street” plan to redesign the entire street into a more humane place for the tens of thousands of people who live along it between Sheppard and Finch Avenues cannot come soon enough.

The more permanent CaféTO becomes, the more some of the design details can be worked out, like making sure ample rights of way are kept open for sidewalk accessibility as well as for cyclists, especially where streetcar tracks are present, and ensuring the patios themselves are accessible.

It’s remarkable that after decades of political strife every time a proposal to remove street parking came up, more business owners understood that the space and beautification benefits of these patios far outweigh the few parking spots lost. That’s a rule to remember in other contexts too. Cars are big and take up lots of physical, mental and political space, but that doesn’t always map to how most people get to an establishment in a city like Toronto.

While it remains a very tricky time with a new variant gaining ground, seeing restaurants and cafes with people inside them is like the blood has been pumped back into the city. In the deepest lockdowns, the song “Every Day is Like Sunday” by British musician Morrissey came to mind. “Every day is silent and grey,” went the lyrics, capturing the malaise and melancholy of a perpetual Sunday night, when not much is happening.

And though we each have our own levels of comfort or anxiety with the easing of restrictions -- another lyric from the song registers: “Come, Armageddon, come” -- seeing fellow city dwellers, mostly strangers, is a balm for the spirit.

This past week Toronto’s economic and community development committee looked at ways the city could further support restaurants, including the extension of the amplified music on patios pilot, something that could benefit Toronto’s performers too and also make the city seem like “someplace else” where this kind of thing is common. Coupled with allowing establishments to sell takeaway alcohol, the changes in this usually slow-moving city have been remarkable.

It’s a tale of two pandemic programs, though. One program, CaféTO, transformed parts of the cityscape more than most civic initiatives over the last two decades have, but another did too: ActiveTO. The closing of major streets to traffic on weekends to give people in this ever more crowded city of apartment dwellers more recreation space, people with no backyards of their own, was also heaving with humanity.

Both programs were highly visible, successful and city-changing, but one was continually championed and the other allowed to shamefully shrink. Now closing High Park to vehicles on weekends is the last, sad rump of ActiveTO, a program that had no real champions on council and run by unseen city staff who decided when and what streets were closed on a willy-nilly schedule that made it hard for anybody to predict where they could go on weekends.

Despite being so popular, it was allowed to die on the vine, even by councillors who represent downtown wards where loads of apartment dwellers made use of the program. Some weekends Lake Shore Boulevard was closed, sometimes it wasn’t.

Why the difference between ActiveTO and CaféTO support? We are a city where most of our ruling class have backyards and even cottages of their own, so there was little incentive to create more recreational space. That, and Toronto is a mercantile city and CaféTO is about making money and ActiveTO isn’t.

The good news is the city says, “ActiveTO major road closures will return in 2022” and that “the program is currently being planned and more information about timeline and locations will be provided soon.”

Here’s hoping it’s robust, expansive and predictable, so people know what to expect and enjoy.