Illustration of the proposed University Park looking south down University Avenue towards Queen Street West. Illustration from PUBLIC WORK
One of Toronto’s most exciting park projects — turning a stretch of downtown road into a green space — has momentum.
On Tuesday, Mayor John Tory announced his commitment to the University Park plan, which would create nearly nine acres of new green space by redesigning University Avenue downtown.
Mr Tory, who is running for re-election, has announced he will prioritize three park projects. One is a three-acre park at the foot of Bathurst Street that is converting a garage and building a deck on part of Lake Ontario. Another is a set of incremental moves along the downtown rail corridor. The last one is on University Avenue. As I wrote a few weeks ago, University Park is an obvious win – a visible public space with symbolic value that will serve a broad population. It is relatively cheap and easy to build. It just needed political will.
Now Mr Tory says he is stepping up. “It’s going to be a historic project that’s absolutely appropriate in terms of what it is and where it is,” he said in an interview Tuesday. “It will revitalize this street.”
“If I come back here” as mayor, he said, “I will be extremely committed to getting this done.”
He pointed to a staff report to be presented to the council’s Executive Committee next week; he identifies these three projects as priorities for the city center. In Toronto City Hall Kremlinology, this means that these are things the mayor wants to happen and has asked staff to deliver.
This year, the City Hall will carry out a detailed assessment of the underground facilities in the area. They will work to coordinate the park with the construction of a new Ontario Line subway station that will tear apart the corner of Queen and University for the next decade.
By 2026, when he ends his next term as mayor – if he is re-elected, as is almost certain – what will people be able to see? Bathurst Quay Park under construction; and one phase of University Park “will be pretty advanced and maybe under construction,” the mayor said.
The idea has been around for a few years. A version of it appeared in the city’s new downtown plan, which was originally proposed in 2018. It was designed for the city by landscape architects PUBLIC WORK. Two years later, a private foundation, the Michael Young Family Foundation, hired PUBLIC WORK to expand and revise the idea. They pushed it forward with the help of the nonprofit Evergreen.
These defenders make important and selfless contributions to the city. University Park will serve an area that includes City Hall, two courthouses and a cluster of major hospitals in the city that have patients from across the province.
And more than just providing new green space – around nine acres – it will transform existing places. The campus, Queen’s Park and University Avenue are highly visible and symbolic components of the city’s urban fabric. But a highway runs through them. By 2020, these roads had four vehicular lanes in each direction; still moving at high speed. This makes them unpleasant and even dangerous to walk through. “University Avenue is not a street that is currently busy with anything other than vehicular traffic,” the mayor rightly said.
So if it’s such a great idea, what took so long? Mr Tory said he had supported the idea since hearing about it from the Young Foundation. City staff “told me it absolutely could not be done,” he said. After pushing back, he said, he got a different response.
This is plausible. Toronto is a big city; City Hall is now a big machine running on few resources. Yet it now appears that Mr Tory, who has described himself as a low-key fiscal conservative, wants to achieve some big things. “When you get close to the end of a chapter in life,” he said, “you get the feeling that we’ve got to do better than this.”
In many ways – from how it treats the most vulnerable to how it creates new housing – Toronto really needs to do better. The fate of University Park may prove to be an example of how the city and its current mayor are changing.
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