A lot of waterfront history has been lost, but there’s a lot of waterfront future to be gained.

Christopher Hume – Toronto Star

A lot of waterfront history has been lost, but there’s a lot of waterfront future to be gained.

In her lovely book, Along the Shore, Rediscovering Toronto’s Waterfront Heritage, Jane Fairburn laments as she documents the rich and varied and largely forgotten history of the city’s bottom end. Though the connection between Toronto and Lake Ontario is fundamental to the very existence of the city, it usually goes overlooked. Hidden behind highways and railways, cars and condos, distances both physical and psychological, the waterfront has been invisible for decades.

Today, that has all changed. Today, the waterfront is where Toronto will meet the 21st century.

That encounter, though started, still has another 20 to 30 years to go. But the big change has occurred; Torontonians have made the imaginative shift and for the first time in living memory, are seeing the waterfront with fresh eyes. Finally, Torontonians can see the waterfront for what it could be, not what it has become.

For this, we have Waterfront Toronto (WT) to thank. The beleaguered organization, whose work is scrutinized by all three levels of government and endless commissions, authorities and agencies, has somehow managed to plan 2,000 acres from Scarborough to Etobicoke and start the construction of whole new neighbourhoods on land until now considered all but worthless. Even Queens Quay, the unofficial east/west highway that runs along the bottom of the city is being transformed into a tree-lined boulevard between Bay and Spadina.

WT’s simple yet effective strategy is to install elements of the public realm and let the private sector do the rest. These interventions — Sugar Beach, Sherbourne Common, the WaveDecks — have had a huge impact. Basically, they have revealed the vast potential of the waterfront as a place where people can live, work and play.

Sadly, from its earliest days, Toronto has had a hard time with its waterfront. Plans for a park-like public lake’s edge go back all the way to John Graves Simcoe, who put land aside for that purpose more than 200 years ago. Within decades, however, the city had begun to sell that property to the burgeoning railroads, which in time took over much of the area. Thus was the waterfront handed over to industry, which prevailed until the late 20th century when trucks took over from trains and the return to the city started in earnest.

Now, most of those old warehouses and parking lots have given way to condo skyscrapers. People live in neighbourhoods they wouldn’t have considered just years ago. As Toronto has grown up, it has opened up. The new waterfront is the best evidence we have that the revitalization of the city is proceeding apace.

The waterfront is no longer a public destination as it was in the days of Sunnyside Amusement Park, but it will once again become both public and a destination. For the first time in a long time, the best lies ahead.

Fairburn chronicles the dismantling of the giant factories once located on the eastern stretches of the waterfront. “Globalization and post-industrialism,” she writes, “factors far beyond local control, dealt the final blow. The industrial plants, in former days the lifeblood of the Lakeshore, began to close in the 1970s.”

One door closes, another opens. The closure of the plants has also led to the revitalization of whole swaths of the waterfront. Though much of what has been built, especially in Etobicoke and the Central Waterfront, is mind-numbingly awful, it has helped usher in a new chapter in the saga of Toronto, the City on the Lake.

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Contact Laurin Jeffrey for more information – 416-388-1960

Laurin Jeffrey is a Toronto Realtor with Century 21 Regal Realty. He did not
write these articles, he just reproduces them here for people who are
interested in Toronto real estate. He does not work for any builders.
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