Sherbourne Common, Nightclub Edition

It's official. I love Sherbourne Common.

While the park is sure a beaut' of a public space during the day--with its whimsical play equipment, water canals, splash pad, and groundhog sitings--it turns into a whole other beast at night when coloured lights play off the falling water of Jill Anholt's sculptures. Some of the lights even change from blue to green when you walk past them. For a full review of the new waterfront park, check out my article on Torontoist.

Here's a few pictures I took when I was there last night to wet your whistle.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

(This article was originally published June 7, 2011 on Torontoist)

"This is why we can’t have nice things." That was a comment left on an article Torontoist published on the spectacular and sudden demise of the Fort York Bridge: a bridge that several weeks ago many Torontonians didn’t even know about but, when it was up for debate, suddenly couldn’t live without. Of course, the bridge, as many pointed out, was not the heart of the issue being debated. What was being debated was the sentiment expressed by the commenter on the article: that we can’t have nice things.

Why can’t we? Well, that depends on who you ask. Some believe we have long been spending money we didn't earn—which is to say, we probably could never have afforded the nice things we already have—and someone is finally telling us the truth about that. Others think it's because so many of our elected officials are short-sighted missiles ideologically programmed to seek out anything that gives off the heat of aspiration.

An architecturally beautiful bridge to a neglected historical site that may prove popular to tourism and residents of the city? Don’t need it. Reconnecting the city to the waterfront with well-designed public spaces? How about a monorail instead? Getting rid of the five-cent bag tax? Now there’s a project that can really do something.

City-building is more than physical construction—it encompasses a style of governing. As former director of Urban Design and Architecture for the City of Toronto, Ken Greenberg writes in his freshly published book,Walking Home: "In undertaking transformative projects, staff need encouragement and permission from their elected bosses to be proactive in making change, to become creative problem solvers, and not just prudent regulators, and to accomplish new things, not just ensure that no harm is done."

Think here of Metrolinx’s Big Move, or Waterfront Toronto’s ambitious plans for a revitalized waterfront, or the Tower Renewal program we don't hear about any more, or the largely defunct Transit City.

These are the types of creative solutions and proactive projects that John van Nostrand of the planningAlliance spoke about at the Centre for City Ecology last week, in a talk on the importance of planning—and unplanning—Toronto. What he meant was that, instead of overarching Official Plans that work to crystallize development, we need to embrace a network of innovative projects that move us forward as a city.

Toronto is a living, breathing organism, and like an organism it will grow and evolve over time. It can be easy to mistake a city for something mostly static: after all, change seems to happen so slowly that, like watching the hour hand of a clock, it becomes difficult to perceive it as change at all. But then one day we look up and realize a new building has gone up just down the road and that everything looks different in light of it.

Rob Ford and many on city council do not yet seem to have a grasp on this concept of the living city. It was Ford, after all, who proposed during his mayoral campaign that we discourage immigration of new people into Toronto until we figured out how to deal with the population we have. Despite what Mayor Ford may believe, however, we cannot just hit the pause button while we figure things out. Any attempt at planning or governing a city through the pause button is like building a box around a growing plant: the plant will still grow, but it will become distorted—and eventually it will burst through, whether you want it to or not.

In cancelling, modifying, or delaying projects—some already funded and ready to go—Ford has begun to pick at this city, pulling the ends of what he deems to be small, useless threads. The thing about the city, though, is that what may seem like small, expendable threads turn out to be woven and connected to so many other things, that when you tug on them hard enough something you didn’t expect begins to unravel too.

The greatest mistake of this administration, and the one that will leave the most lasting legacy of harm, is the simplistic view of the city as something to be managed and not something to be built, or fed, or nurtured. The view that aspirational projects are elitist and thus not worthy of consideration. The view that public spaces suck money and offer nothing back. The view that if we just squeeze our public services tight enough a few pennies will pop out.

We already have a city manager—his name is Joseph Pennachetti. What we need is a leader.

That Time I Went To Sherbourne Common and Saw a Groundhog

After receiving a copy of Reshaping Toronto's Waterfront from University of Toronto Press, I thought the perfect place to begin reading this would be none other than the waterfront park pictured on the front cover of the book--Sugar Beach. I've written about Sugar Beach previously, so I won't say much about it now save for the fact that there was a hulking ship docked at the Redpath Sugar Refinery that was sending metallic reverberations out into the air as it unloaded its haul of yellowy unrefined sugar.

The waterfront is a strange place to be right now. There are completed projects like Sugar Beach and the Corus building, which sit amidst an otherwise vast expanse of either industrial lands or construction sites at various stages of completion.

After a particularly muscular wind caused me to eat too much white sand at Sugar Beach, I packed up my belongings and decided to head over to check out Sherbourne Common--or the completed part at least--since I hadn't yet taken a look.

The first half of the park opened September 24, 2010, and, while the second half is still under construction, you can start to begin to see how it will take shape. There were several constructions workers there on the day I visited working to install some weird public art.

The completed part of the park is a very alluring combination of bridges, shallow canals, hard surface, and a grassy expanse. There is also a funky building that houses, amongst other things, washrooms.

Right now the completed Sherbourne Common is a bit of an orphaned space. Eventually it will be sandwiched between development, creating a closed in feeling that will hopefully give the park a more cohesive feel. It's a bit difficult at this point to envision how all the new waterfront spaces are going to stitch together, but if the whole is anything like the parts then it's going to be pretty dazzling. However, Sherbourne Common, set further east of Sugar Beach (which was quite full on a mid-week day afternoon), was virtually empty except for me...and some creature underneath one of the bridges.

My curious gaze frightened whatever it was out of the safety of the bridge and out it came, furry and looking like a beaver with a bushy tale.

Being the sensitive animal lover I am, I proceeded to chase, what I later determined to be a groundhog, across the concrete expanse of the Common until it disappeared into the bushes on the other side.

So you see? Waterfront Toronto's ambition to reconnect Toronto to its waterfront, and thus to nature, has already seen success.

Sugar Beach or Sugar "Beach"?

Today wasn't the nicest day (cloudy and humid), but I decided to check out Toronto's newest beach, Sugar Beach, which opened officially to the public on August 9th. The beach is situated at the end of Jarvis St and next to the Redpath Sugar Refinery -- a big hulking warehouse of a building that sits across from the beach -- and is part of Waterfront Toronto's revitalization of, um, the waterfront of Toronto.

Waterfront Toronto's webpage on Sugar Beach uses the word "whimsical" twice in its description. This would be annoying if it wasn't so true. Whimsical is exactly what Sugar Beach is: there are the bubblegum pink umbrellas, the white Muskoka chairs, the candy-cane striped granite rocks, the ground-quartz sand, the pipes shaped like candy-canes with subtle metallic striping. Like I said: whimsical.

Sugar Beach is also quite surreal, located as it is next to an industrial building it seems an odd place to find such an idyllic area, but I enjoyed the contrast between the carefully designed beach area and the more grimy industry nearby. And if you get bored you can watch ships get loaded and unloaded or watch the ferries heading to Toronto Island.

The design of the beach itself, done by Claude Cormier Landscape Architects (they're also doing the Evergreen Brickworks), is great. It does, however, have the feel of a fancy meal at a restaurant where the food is constructed in such a way that it seems you don't want to eat it for fear of ruining it. But I was in love with the benches chosen, of which there are two kinds: one backless, and one with a curving, almost plant-like looking back. Both are quite comfortable.

In Mark Schatzker's review of the beach in the Globe & Mail he calls it a: "a postmodern park with beach references – sand, umbrellas, a boardwalk, even lifebuoys." In a way, I agree. But it all depends on your definition of beach. Schatzker's definition seems to hinge on water lapping against sand. In this definition, Sugar Beach is actually Sugar "Beach" because there is a low guard rail separating the beach from a several foot drop to water. There is definitely no sand-on-water contact happening here.

And, yes, Sugar Beach probably stretches the beach moniker a bit. Sugar Park doesn't sound as good, though. And, honestly, does it matter? One can argue semantics and the tenets of postmodern urban design, but at the end of the day Sugar Beach is still a spiffy new public space that reconnects downtown Toronto to its waterfront. And besides, breaking out the air-quotes every time you wanted to invite someone to Sugar "Beach" would be cumbersome.

Located nearby is Corus Quay, a new LEED Gold building that is to house the Canadian Media company Corus Entertainment. I thought the building would be imposing, but its facade is completely transparent and engaging, allowing passers-by to peek into the interior and check out what looked to me like a water slide.

Schatzker also wonders if people are going to use the beach and if children will be disappointed at the lack of sand-castle building ability in the sand (it's really good for sticking sockless toes into, though). Although it may have just been the excitement of a new toy taken out of its packaging, I can say that Sugar Beach was pretty busy today, even with the sticky weather. Most of the chairs contained people and there were a fare amount of children digging around with plastic buckets and shovels. They seemed content, beach or "beach".