The Commerce Times

The Toronto that never was

Imagine the iconic view over Lake Ontario, the city of Toronto rising up from its shores, a forest of glass, steel, and grandeur. But wait, where is the CN Tower?  What is that giant pyramid doing in its place? Your gaze now rests for a moment on what seems to be a mini-Venice on the lake. Next, you see a long pedestrian-only boulevard cutting through the centre of town. Is this a view of the city’s future? Not at all, this is the Toronto that could have been.

The landscape of our fair city is described as “vibrant and intense” by Masha Etkind, a professor of architecture at Ryerson University.  “It’s very lively and inclusive. Lately, it got a number of provocative projects,” she said. The truth is, Toronto has always been dreaming ‘provocatively’ when it comes to what is built here.

The history of what could have been in Toronto is littered with a multitude of grand ideas, from outright amazing to the downright head scratching. “I think that sometimes we view our built environment as having been almost inevitable,” said Mark Osbaldeston, author of Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City that Might Have Been. “But of course it’s the result of all kinds of choices across decades and centuries.” According to Osbaldeston, a city isn’t just something that comes about.

The CN Tower has been a staple of the Toronto skyline ever since it opened in 1976, and most residents of the city could not imagine the city without it. What stands now is only the tower, a mere piece of the mighty project it was supposed to be.

In the early 1960’s the Canadian National Railway removed their freight yards south of Front Street, freeing up 187 acres of land. The company was set on demonstrating the strength of Canadian industry, and masterminded the Metro Centre, the largest downtown redevelopment plan in North America. But years of planning and opposition altered the plan.

The tower changed from three cylindrical pillars to the present hexagonal shape capped with the Sky Pod, and all the plans for office towers, apartment buildings, and shops were abandoned.

During the time the Metro Centre was being envisioned, Buckminster Fuller, an American architect, was planning a bold new project for Toronto. Known as Project Toronto, his plan called for huge scale ideas. He wanted to extend University Avenue to the lake shore, with a glass enclosed civic and commercial space that would parallel the avenue from King Street to the waterfront. Where it met the waterfront, a massive tower would be built called the “Gateway Tower.” Finally, immediately to the west a four hundred square foot “Crystal Pyramid” would enclose two twenty-storey buildings.

The Crystal Pyramid would have been ahead of its time and would have fit well into Toronto’s architectural trends of today. “The city is getting more and more transparent. More and more glass architecture is appearing [now],” said Etkind.

But at a price tag of nearly one billion dollars, no level of government was eager to foot the bill. The Metro Centre was given the go ahead instead, so all three levels of government turned their sights there.

“Since the 1970’s, you can see Torontonians increasingly wanting to have a say in how the city is built out. At first it was more about planning considerations, where the buildings would be, how tall they would be,” said Osbaldeston. In 1970 the people of Toronto got to do just that when it came to city on the lake.

While big projects were being dreamt up on the shores, Eberhard Zeidler was floating a big project in Lake Ontario. In 1970 he proposed a mini-Venice, called Harbour City, where sixty thousand people of all economic levels could live, work, and play. It would have lagoons and canals, would be completely pedestrian friendly, and have moving sidewalks. The land would come from closing the Toronto Island Airport and building on it, as well as creating 510 acres of artificial islands.

So what happened? There was enormous concern about the environmental impact of having thousands of people living on the lake and Toronto islands. It was thought that more highways would have to be created to service the increased traffic, which many people strongly opposed. Finally, the whole project was canned in 1972 when the federal and provincial governments decided to retain the Toronto Airport as an important backup for a new international airport in Pickering (which has yet to be built). Without the airport land, there would be no Harbour City.

Eberhard Zielder went on to design the Toronto Eaton Centre and the Sick Children’s Hospital Atrium.

But what is the biggest of the city’s missed opportunities?  “I would say Federal Avenue. It was a grand boulevard that would have connected Union Station to what became Nathan Phillips Square,” said Osbaldeston.  “They actually built Union Station in the right alignment if you look at a map, but they never built the boulevard. If they had, I think Toronto’s downtown would have a sense of cohesion and grandeur that it lacks now.”

Federal Avenue was first proposed in 1911. It was never built because the city council at the time allowed the Royal York to be built over the Queens Hotel in 1929. The hotel was the largest in the nation at the time. In 1929, the idea was resurrected with a street forming a loop around the buildings but the Great Depression began and money became a concern. Since it would have meant city-wide debt, citizens rejected it.

Professor Etkind believes that the biggest missed opportunity is the Spadina Expressway. It was only built through a fraction of its route, now called the Allen Expressway. “[It] was supposed to be the life line of the [western part of the] city,” she said. “But, the expressway would have gone through one of Toronto’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, Forest Hill.”

Jane Jacobs, Toronto’s most famous urbanist, led the battle that prevented the Allen Expressway going any further south than Eglinton. “Ever since the loss of that battle the city has been in a congested state.” said Etkind.

Did we miss out on some amazing opportunities, or should we breathe a sigh of relief that these projects never got built? We will never know, but there is good news for the future of architecture in our city.

“I think there’s a growing recognition that people who live in the city also have an interest in how the buildings will look, in ensuring that individual buildings are built to a high architectural standard,” said Osbaldeston. “The development of that kind of ‘culture of architecture’ is definitely for the good.”

Toronto was and always will be a city that dreams differently, the ideas that litter our past are evidence of that. Whatever amazing projects are dreamt up in Toronto, you can bet they haven’t been seen before.