Awakening a Scarborough dream

Proponents hope subway will be game-changer city centre needs

Jerry Chadwick has lived the suburban dream that Scarborough was built to feed as Toronto sprawled east in the car-centred 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

His first summer job was in the Scarborough Civic Centre, where his dad worked. Chadwick and his wife used to take their kids skating in the civic square. For 31 years, they’ve lived near McCowan and Ellesmere Rds. on the Scarborough City Centre border.

Chadwick, a retired principal who now serves as a board trustee, is ambivalent about the prospects being painted for the city centre area, roughly the size of Toronto’s downtown, by city planners and politicians.

They say a single-stop subway extension will go a long way toward transforming the sleepy suburb into a vibrant urban node and revive the city centre’s commercial development prospects, which stalled around 1990.

That’s when the last office building went up in the area, bounded by Hwy. 401 on the north and Ellesmere on the south, stretching from about Brimley Rd. on the west and zig-zagging down Bellamy Rd. and Progress Ave. on the east.

For 40 years, Scarborough City Centre has been dominated by the mall known as Scarborough Town Centre. Its vast tracts of parking are chained off to repel commuters trying to board transit.

Some 18,000 people work in the Scarborough City Centre. Since the 1990s, the area has added 7,200 condos that house 12,000 people, according to Victor Gottwald.

The manager of community planning, who works at the Civic Centre, disagrees with recent suggestions that the City Centre has stalled.

“Certainly residential development is in place and moving forward. From an employment perspective, we still have active industrial buildings in the centre as well. Some of that will be swallowed up by residential and office,” said Gottwald, who puts Scarborough’s growth on par with Etobicoke but behind North York Centre.

Over the next 30 years, he expects 40,000 more residents and 23,000 jobs to move into the 68-hectare (110acre) area. Applications have already been approved on 5,600 residential units. Another application is for 829 additional units. Subway-boosting Scarborough councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker will expound at length on the emerging urban paradise at the City Centre. It has a YMCA, a new $10-million library branch, some pretty parks, as well as good public- and private-sector employment.

“Scarborough was built as a sleepy bedroom community, a great place to raise your kids. And it is. I can take a two-hour hike from the back of my house and never go close to a road,” he said.

But De Baeremaker admits he is jealous of the vibrancy of downtown and North York Centre, which is bustling amid the condo boom. Ask 12 people where they went on their first date and they’ll tell you it was a nice café, a pub or park.

“The Scarborough City Centre today is not date-worthy,” he said.

For four decades, Scarborough’s growth followed “the golden age of the middle-class,” says former councillor Brian Ashton. It only really stumbled when the middle-class began to decline with the recession of the 1990s.

But through all that time, it has persisted in the suburban dream of having its own downtown.

“In the city called Oz, Scarborough was the shiny Tin Man looking for a heart,” he said.

If the civic square is Scarborough’s heart, it’s a cold one, says nearby resident Chadwick.

“The Scarborough City Centre today is not date-worthy.” GLENN DE BAEREMAEKER SCARBOROUGH COUNCILLOR

“You don’t ever feel it’s a warm, welcoming place. I can’t see that area lending itself to that type of (café) atmosphere.”

But Chadwick admits, “It would be great to go have a beer at night and sit and chat on an outside patio.”