With demise of Google’s plan, Toronto has opportunity to create a truly public lakefront

The recent announcement that Sidewalks Lab was abandoning its plan for redeveloping 800 acres of the Toronto lakefront now offers the city a once in a lifetime opportunity to get it right, to create a real world-class waterfront. The Sidewalks Lab plan was essentially a real estate venture designed to get Google to the lake. That was a subtle, but vastly different goal than getting Toronto to the lake. Early Google sketches showed all the obligatory features of a happy pedestrian waterfront. There were sea gulls, sailboats and people who were grateful to be there.

A closer look, however, showed that there was no delineation between public and private land. Google’s front doors opened onto the lake. Properties had walkways and verandas, of course, but they were attached to the buildings behind. Everyone traversing the walkways was on Google land.

Suppose now Toronto were to declare that it wanted a waterfront park that stretched the length of the 800 acres, perhaps even beyond. That decision would immediately bring to mind examples like Rio de Janeiro with its Copacabana, or Miami Beach, Riverside Park in Manhattan or the lakefront of Chicago and the salutary effect all have had on the character of their respective cities.

Each is different from the other, but all have a common feature – they are all bounded by a street. A street does not mean a highway or even a broad boulevard. It just means a simple street delineating public park from private land, creating a bright line between Mammon and God. The character of the street and its role is an important point to empathize early given the pain and dislocation the Gardner Expressway has caused.

Toronto’s first step would be to decide how big the park will be and to create its boundaries even if at first these exist only on paper. It is worth remembering that six city aldermen set aside land for New York’s Central Park several years before Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were chosen to design it. The character of the waterfront, which may vary greatly, is less important than that the park be continuous.

The former industrial land bordering the Inner Harbor is punctuated by slots of water like driveways which allowed boats and barges to load and unload from both sides. Some may now be filled but for those that remain there will need to be bridges crossing the breaks. The Ponte della Paglia and the other bridges fronting the Bacino in Venice come to mind. It is a moment in this city’s history to think of precedents, as well as to dream.