Hume Asks A Question That Many Others Also Ask

Where is Comrade David Miller?

He is always front and center when there is a media event but he seems to leave it up to his serfs to face the public and the media when something goes wrong or they want to accomplish something neferious; ie: fire a police chief.

If there was ever a need for recall legislation the need is now.

Why waterfront revival will fall short of brilliance
May 03, 2007
Christopher Hume

It's enough to make you wonder. Who, if anyone, is in control? In Toronto, it seems, the answer is nobody, not quite.

Several weeks ago the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. proudly unveiled proposals prepared by four first-rate teams for the Lower Don Lands design competition.

Competitors were asked to re-imagine the area where the Don River enters Lake Ontario and much of the Docklands around it, a roughly 100-acre site that lies at the very heart of the revitalized waterfront.

Each of the four finalists made a public presentation and next Tuesday, the TWRC will announce the winner.

Just a few days after the teams showed off their schemes, however, Toronto architect Michael Kirkland was showing off his plans for a waterfront property owned by a local developer.

Normally that would be nothing unusual; what made this so strange – even unsettling – was that Kirkland and the TWRC are making plans for the same site.

True, the Lower Don Lands extend beyond the property owned by Kirkland's client, but there's enough overlap that if one proposal were implemented it would mean the other couldn't.

The land in question is located at the foot of Parliament St. and includes two old Victory silos. In one of the TWRC proposals, by the way, those same silos would be transformed into an aquarium. Though one would hate to criticize competitors for letting their fancy take flight, one might legitimately question a process that has no basis in reality.

"We'll work with the results of the Lower Don lands competition," Kirkland insists.

That's the good news; Kirkland, who worked extensively with the TWRC in its early years, is fully versed in the goals of waterfront revitalization. Indeed, he helped write the book on how it should happen. And as it turns out, his client wants to be do the right thing, something made clear by the fact he hired Kirkland.

But then the land immediately east of Kirkland, now owned by Home Depot, which is intent on building its standard big-box store on the site. Home Depot has been turned down by City Council (in a rare display of civic intelligence) and lost an appeal at the Ontario Municipal Board.

But word is that Home Depot hopes to go back to the OMB in November and start the process all over again.

Needless to say, Home Depot's plans are completely incompatible with those of the TWRC.

Meanwhile, farther west at the foot of Yonge St., preparations are underway to build a sales centre for a new condo complex the city approved years ago. Though that approval was given to a scheme that has long since died, it remains in force even though all the players have changed.

Again, the developer has signalled his desire to do something appropriate for such an important site. His architect, Peter Clewes of architects Alliance, is among the best condo designers in Canada.

Still, it's worth pointing out that last year the city and the province had a chance to purchase the land, or at least work out a deal with the owner to add a cultural facility or some such public amenity to the project. That would have entailed allowing the developer to build a tower on the water's edge, a prospect so terrifying to our elected officials that they walked away from the table.

Meanwhile, at the foot of Jarvis St., TEDCO, the Toronto Economic Development Corp., a city-owned agency, is blithely carrying on with plans to build a corporate headquarters that will set the waterfront architectural bar so low, the TWRC-created design review panel might as well go home right now.

Where's Mayor David Miller in all this? As a member of the TWRC board, a vocal proponent of waterfront revitalization and city beautification, one might have expected a response.

Not a peep. He's been too busy up at City Hall presiding over a 20-year street furniture contract that will turn Toronto into a civic parody.

Of course, the TWRC was never given the powers it needs to fulfill its mandate; the three levels of government that set it up were unwilling to exercise courage, to be smart about it, or bold. And so it is that the reality of waterfront revitalization will never be more than the sum of its disparate parts.

The opportunity was there, we just couldn't grab it.