***Waterfront Development Thread***

[Dino Domingo]

Hmm... I'm all for another tall building... but along the waterfront? I don't know if they should be that tall right on the waterfront. The city should try focusing on building up the Bay-Yonge-Church, Bloor corridor more.

[Filip]

800-1000 employees.. that translates to how many floors/sqf??

[Martinsizon]

There is a 40 & 48s building proposal near the waterfront: http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2...dfile-1214.pdf

[phunky]

I don't think this will be tall in the sense of like skyscraper tall. Maybe 30 storeys at most. I think it will be more wide than anything else. But we'll see!

[Filip]

That's not it, Martin. That's a proposed condo near the Distillery district... Actually almost right in it. I'm completely against that project.

[circuitboy84]

The East Bayfront - West Precinct Urban Design Guidelines will be presented at a public open house on Tuesday, February 20, 2007 at Metro Hall, 55 John Street – Room 313. The Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation in partnership with the City of Toronto invites you to join us any time between 6:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. to review the guidelines and provide us with your feedback.

The East Bayfront – West Precinct is situated on Toronto’s Central Waterfront between Jarvis and Parliament Streets. The new East Bayfront community will be a vibrant and sustainable downtown neighbourhood and a destination for city residents and visitors.

The design guidelines are the next step in the implementation of the East Bayfront Precinct Plan and Zoning By-Law. A copy of the Draft Urban Design Guidelines is available for review and comment at www.towaterfront.ca . Comments on the document should be submitted to Andrea Kelemen at akelemen@towaterfront.ca by February 26, 2007.

The final East Bayfront - West Precinct Urban Design Guidelines are targeted for presentation to Toronto & East York Community Council on March 27, 2007 and to City Council on April 23, 2007. Final confirmation of these dates will be provided once the agenda for these meetings has been released.

If you have any questions, please visit our website at www.towaterfront.ca or contact Andrea Kelemen at 416-214-1344 ext. 248.

We look forward to seeing you on February 20th!

[Jaye101]

Wow, I can't believe this is actually happening.

[Taller, Better]

That is excellent! Chalk up one more office tower for Toronto.

[DrT]

From Sunday's Globe and Mail, February 18, 2007.

Cherry bomb
Residents are making noise about the city's next grand avenue
IVOR TOSSELL

In a theatre in the Distillery District today, a few dozen community members and pen-wielding planners are knocking heads over an unusual problem: how to get a big street down to size.

Down the road from them, in an industrial wasteland east of downtown, backhoes are already at work on Toronto's newest neighbourhood.

The West Don Lands, which will take shape over the next few years, is planned to house 11,000 residents. But first, they have to sort out Cherry Street.

The road -- where the traffic these days consists mostly of cement trucks -- runs through the heart of the West Don Lands, and it will be rebuilt as a major corridor. Planners set aside room for traffic and parking, bike lanes, and wide, tree-lined sidewalks for pedestrians. And the Toronto Transit Commission had plans for a streetcar right-of-way. In the end, the would-be neighbourhood street had grown to the width of Spadina Avenue. And that didn't sit well with the neighbours. "It's important to have a certain level of intimacy to the street," says Cindy Wilkey, president of the West Don Lands Committee, a coalition of community groups from adjacent neighbourhoods.

"If you stand on one side of Spadina, and see your neighbour walking by, you can't tear across the street mid-block to say hi."

So, with prompting from Ms. Wilkey's committee, the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation is tackling the problem with a design workshop, called a charette. The premise is simple: If the community wants the road narrowed, it has to decide what its priorities are. What on the wish list should stay, and what should go?

On Feb. 1, community members, planners and city staff jammed into a room for an introductory session. Joe Lobko, one of the architects leading the charette, called it "Streetscape 101." Armed with this background information, the community will reconvene today for a bit of old-school group work.

At today's day-long exercise, participants will break into five groups, each of which will be asked to pitch a design option for the street. (These include running streetcars along the curbsides instead of down the middle, and banning cars from the road entirely in favour of pedestrians and transit.)

City staff will patrol the room, answering questions and nipping technically unfeasible suggestions in the bud. Each group will have its own urban planner, who can sketch up their ideas on the fly. At the end of the day, participants will vote for their favourite proposals, and the charette's results will be sent on to transit planners.

Organizers say they hope that having city staff on hand will keep community proposals from being rejected on technical grounds later on. And while the charette's conclusions aren't binding, the authors of the resulting transit study "will have to consider this quite seriously," Mr. Lobko says.

Today, the group will be facing a familiar sticking point: the proposed streetcar right-of-way, much like the one now under construction on St. Clair West despite some local opposition. Community leaders say they doubt the effectiveness of expansive streetcar-only lanes.

But the mood going into the charette is a long way from the acrimony uptown. City Councillor Pam McConnell, one of the workshop's organizers, says charettes are a way of tackling a complicated problem like neighbourhood design, where small pieces make up a big picture.

"It's a bit like a jigsaw puzzle; if you don't get all the pieces in the right place, then the picture doesn't come forward," she says. "The charette is a chance to get the picture right."

[Waterloo_Guy]

Hmm. 800 to 1000 employees doesn't translate into a huge building. I think my old high school had 1200 kids, and it wasn't that big. But developing this area is a great idea.

[Jaye101]

You do realize a highschool and a place of work are two different things, right?

[Waterloo_Guy]

Yes, but I was using the comparison as a way to get my head around how many people that is. And those 800 to 1000 people wont all be in that building at once. I really don't think this translates into a big building.

[Jackhammer]

Well FCP houses around 10,000 people. So even with the same floor plates as FCP you would not see anything taller than 6-7 floors.

[Waterloo_Guy]

That makes sense.

[DrT]

Anyone know the exact location at the foot of Bathurst where these bronze statues will be placed?

From The Globe and Mail:
Toronto waterfront statues to honour Irish immigrants
Tent city at foot of Bathurst made Toronto a Darfur of its day
JAMES RUSK

At quayside in Dublin this weekend, a group of five bronze statues that are headed for Toronto next week will be shown to the public.

The brief showing is highly symbolic, says Rowan Gillespie, the sculptor who made the grouping. The statues will be set in a new park at the foot of Bathurst Street to be opened on June 21 by Ireland's President, Mary McAleese.
"They used to have a Canadian wake or an American wake the night before people left to emigrate, because they knew they would never see the people again. It was equivalent to a death," Mr. Gillespie said in an interview from Dublin.

"Even if they had no food, they would bring out the best they had for somebody leaving, and they would certainly have plenty of poteen [Irish moonshine]. The drink would be there, a kind of celebration to say farewell to the people."
Leave the Irish did in the summer of 1847, the year of the Great Famine.

Toronto, with a population of only 20,000, had to cope with the arrival of 38,000 starving Irish refugees, and the tent city on the waterfront made Toronto the Darfur of the day.

Although thousands died on the voyage across the Atlantic, and thousands more perished at the quarantine station at Grosse Îsle in Quebec, the cholera and the typhus made their way to Toronto, and 1,100 new immigrants died in fever sheds at Front and Bathurst Streets, and at King and John Streets.

The names of the dead will be carved in the limestone blocks of the memorial in the new Ireland Park; one of the five bronzes, called The Arrival, depicts a woman who made it to Canada, only to die, Mr. Gillespie said.

"In that this woman is going to be dead on the quays of Toronto, it to me is rather drawing attention to the number of people who died after they arrived. Statistically, that really isn't emphasized enough," Mr. Gillespie said.

The four other figures in the grouping are a child, a pregnant woman, a man with his arms uplifted and another whom Mr. Gillespie calls the cringing man.

The pregnant woman "is very important to the series, the idea of a new life being born on your side. . . . You have a stronger man with his arms up. You might say the one who's got the strength to go for it on arrival, to take charge if you will."

The most unusual figure is the cringing man, based on Pius Mulvey, a character in Joseph O'Connor's novel Star of the Sea, which is set in 1847 on a boat from Cork to New York.

In the book, Mulvey is a murderer and thief. Mr. Gillespie said, "This is a man who, if you were on the quays in Toronto and you were to meet this guy, you wouldn't like him.

"I'm trying to get across the idea that the immigrants were not necessarily attractive, and just people who were suffering and in need of help. There were actually murderers and people with very sort of checkered pasts arriving."

The Arrival is the North American companion for a Dublin quayside grouping of seven bronzes called The Departure that Mr. Gillespie cast a decade ago on the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine.

The Toronto group is the last he is going to make on the subject. "I don't think there is more in me of the same."

[DrT]

West Don Lands progress and construction/engineering chalanges.
From G&M, February 25:


It's just a hole in the ground . . . for now
But with a little civil engineering, the West Don Lands will be a place of sylvan beauty
JOHN LORINC

On a sunny morning this week, Julie Beddoes stood on the rooftop terrace of her Distillery District condo and marvelled at what might look, to an untrained eye, like nothing more than a vast, sullen construction site and a massive heap of rubble.

She knows better. Until recently, Ms. Beddoes says she'd often "come up here and peer" at the fascinating scene unfolding just east of the Gooderham and Worts complex, where she has lived since 2000.

After years of planning, the West Don Lands -- a brownfield site that would fit between University and Yonge, and Dundas and Queen -- will begin to take shape this year, the first precinct to be built out as part of the $1.5-billion waterfront revitalization strategy. Construction of a mixed-income housing development with green building design is set to break ground in the fall, followed by a major park next spring.

The Toronto City Summit Alliance conference being held this week will include a progress report on a range of waterfront projects in the West Don Lands, the East Bayfront and the Portlands.
While few Torontonians have tuned into what's going on behind the hoardings near the Distillery District, Ms. Beddoes, a neighbourhood activist, feels the work taking place there is nothing short of historic. "I don't think the city's tried anything on this scale since the R.C. Harris water filtration plant," she says. "I get quite romantic about it."

The development challenges facing the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. (TWRC) involve contaminated soil, flood protection, aging sewer mains and railway bridges -- all tough civil engineering projects that have had to be sorted out before urban planners can get on with the sexy business of building housing and public spaces. "The level of complexity is staggering," says Cindy Wilkey, a local lawyer who chairs the West Don Lands community liaison group.

The transformation began in earnest last year as excavation crews began digging up old factory foundations, cleaning contaminated soil and crushing concrete rubble, which is to be reused on site rather than hauled away in trucks.

The next step, which begins this spring, is the construction of a four-metre-high berm that is to extend in a shallow arc along the western bank of the Don River and north towards the Queen Street bridge.

Ms. Wilkey says most Torontonians don't realize that the entire financial district sits in the Don River's flood plain, vulnerable to a Hurricane Hazel-magnitude storm. Such a deluge, estimated to occur once every 350 years, could conceivably submerge Bay Street beneath a metre of water and inundate the subway tunnels.

Early in the planning, TWRC officials realized that no development could take place on the West Don Lands until they built a dike-like bank capable of withstanding such a flood. Constructed from the concrete rubble, excavated landfill and a cap of clean soil, this berm will become a major new park. The volume of the soil required -- 300,000 to 400,000 cubic metres -- is equivalent to a 30-storey high-rise.The immense weight of the mound makes the project formidably difficult.

TWRC engineers discovered ancient riverbeds sitting deep beneath the site, composed of loose, water-locked sedimentary material, says Ralph Davidson, an engineer with CH2M Hill, which is overseeing the berm construction. To ensure the berm doesn't sink over time, the TWRC this spring will begin leaching out that groundwater by piling on heavy fill to compact the soil beneath the berm's base.

Then they'll spend about $2 million to reconstruct a 200-metre stretch of a century-old sewer main that runs beneath the berm's foundation. Mr. Davidson says this repair job is meant to prevent the aging concrete pipe, 1.5 metres in diameter, from being crushed, thereby spewing sewage into the Don.

Meanwhile, construction crews have begun lengthening a CN bridge over the mouth of the Don by adding a span and an extra footing. (If the berm prevents flood waters from washing over the West Don Lands, the river bed must be widened to handle additional flow from a major flood.) That project, now under way, involves routing trains onto one set of tracks while the span is being constructed under the other set.

When the bridge work wraps up this spring, the area beneath it will be excavated and lined with granite boulders before the river is allowed to flow into the enlarged channel.

Once the berm is capped with clean soil later this year, it will be landscaped with native species such as Canadian wild rye, golden rod and black-eyed Susans, says John Wilson, chair of the Bring Back the Don Task Force and a member of the West Don Lands advisory group. But there will be no trees: If a major storm knocks over a tree with a deep root system, TWRC officials say, the resulting hole could lead to a breach in the berm. Mr. Wilson expects planting to begin spring 2008.

The berm's completion also paves the way for the commencement next fall of the TWRC's first housing development -- a 210- to 230-unit Toronto Community Housing Corporation project built at the northeast corner of the West Don Lands, near the junction of Queen and King streets. Ready for occupancy in 2009, it will have a mix of market-priced and affordable apartments and townhouses, with plenty of family-sized units, says Mark Guslits, the housing corporation's chief development officer.
The TWRC began negotiating the deal with the housing corporation as part of a goal to ensure that a fifth of all new housing on waterfront lands will be affordable. It will be designed by Baird Sampson Neuert, an architecture firm that was short-listed this week for the Nathan Phillips Square revitalization competition. Principal Jon Neuert says the complex's eight-storey apartment building will have sustainable green building design features, such as vertical gardens for natural ventilation, energy efficient windows and heat recovery systems.

The low-income families who move in will become the first residents of Toronto's long-term waterfront revitalization campaign -- a point not lost on local activists like Ms. Beddoes. "It's really important symbolically that the first building will be sustainable, affordable and architecturally beautiful."

With these projects now under way, the TWRC and area residents have turned their attention to fine-tuning the more familiar urban design aspects, such as the configuration of a planned streetcar line along Cherry Street, discussed at a design charrette last week.

By stark contrast to the tense planning battles that erupt throughout the city, the residents who've been engaged in the drawn-out and dauntingly technical West Don Lands revitalization have nothing but praise for the way the TWRC is managing the resurrection of the industrial brownfield in their backyards. "It's a bit of a parallel universe," Ms. Wilkey says.

[Martinsizon]

http://www.irelandparkfoundation.com/

[DrT]

Originally Posted by Martinsizon

http://www.irelandparkfoundation.com/

Thanks Martinsizon! Fascinating.

[Filip]

Nice! I love monument parks.

[Jaye101]

Originally Posted by Jackhammer

Well FCP houses around 10,000 people. So even with the same floor plates as FCP you would not see anything taller than 6-7 floors.

Ahhh, I guess I spoke too soon.