Rough Toronto in between the diamonds
Cherry Beach is not Toronto’s prettiest beach. The water is clean, but the sand is rocky and coarse, cars in the pothole-ridden parking lot create dust storms and the journey there is through the rusting Port Lands. There’s a roughness to Cherry Beach and that’s what makes it unique and rather great, particularly the dog park there.
A massive space, it’s a leash-free wonderland of trees, clearings and even a dog beach. You don’t need a dog to wander through, but canine visitors have a few acres to roam free until the Eastern Gap, where there are views of the Toronto Island and the downtown skyline.
Scattered around are chunks of pavement and concrete poles brought here from other parts of the city to serve as break walls and landfill, and in other places steel beams poke up out of the ground, sometimes nearly consumed by trees that have grown around them, remnants of when this was industrial land.
In a prosperous city that is growing quickly, rough, undesigned spaces like this are few but welcome. Not a pristine park and not the semi-wilderness of a ravine, but rather something in between. Like the dogs running around, it feels free and loose.
Toronto’s rough spaces exist here and there, like the long hydro corridors in Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough, places that aren’t exactly parks, but aren’t a countryside meadow either. The gravel parking lot behind city hall east of Elizabeth St. is another kind of rough space in an unexpected spot, a vestige of the old Toronto Ward.
Then there are all the wooden hydro poles on our streets, ugly to some but occasional museum-like references to an old, workaday Toronto.
There is a thirst here for highly designed places. Look at how well- received the Queens Quay makeover was last summer, and how instantly beloved places like Sugar Beach are with candy-stripe rocks and Muskoka chairs that have gen- erated what must be hundreds of thousands of selfies sent around the world by now. Sherbourne Common next door also doubles as a neighbourhood storm-water treat- ment facility. They’re parks we can be proud of.
There was much excitement in November when Project: Under Gardiner was announced with a $25-million donation that will create a four-hectare series of parks under the western stretch of the Gardiner from the CNE to Spadina Ave., transforming largely derelict space into something unique and welcoming. This loss of rough space under the Gardiner won’t irk many, though it will displace a number of homeless people who live in pockets under the expressway.
Last month, New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz wrote a widely shared piece criticizing the famous High Line, the elevated railway that was turned into a linear park on the west side of Manhattan, calling the privatized public place that closes at night “sterile, user-friendly, cleansed adult playgrounds with generic environments that produce the innocuous stupor of elevator music; inane urban utopias” and more. It was a damning piece and a cautionary tale about a celebrity public space, if there is such a thing, that all cities seem to want now.
For now, Toronto is in bit of a sweet spot: most of our nicely designed spaces remain public and open 24 hours a day and aren’t heavily monitored, and there’s every indication that the parks under the Gardiner will follow along the same lines. Perhaps the Toronto way is gentler and more open than most, a sensibility we should cherish.
At the Cherry Beach dog park, the looseness works, a quick escape into an in-between part of the city.
Let’s make sure to keep some of the rough amidst all the diamonds we’re creating, and above all, keep them all open and free. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef.