THIS IS THE PLACE
The new York Recreation Centre knits the city together by filling a gap.
“It’s a place out of no place,” says architect and project manager Phil Fenech of the York Recreation Centre he and his firm Perkins+Will designed. Located at the behemoth intersection of Black Creek Dr. and Eglinton Ave., it officially opened in April, but planning for it goes back more than 20 years, to pre-amalgamation when the site was part of the City of York.
The site was a scrap of provincially owned land alongside Black Creek itself and used as a ragtag baseball diamond for years. Though a former “no place,” the site really is in the middle of things: at least three neighbourhoods surround it, more depending on how you define neighbourhood boundaries. It will also be a short walk away from the Mt. Dennis station on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT line. Currently under construction on the northwest side of the intersection, the station will be incorporated into the historic Kodak building there.
Occupying the other two corners is Keelesdale Park to the northeast, and a large No Frills big box grocery store with a sprawling parking lot to the southwest, a space that will likely see transit oriented redevelopment once the Crosstown is running.
Fenech notes that the LRT will make the centre easily accessible to everybody on the Eglinton line, but this intersection will now be a destination. Like so many parts of Toronto, ravines and rail corridors that separate neighbourhoods like Mt. Dennis and Keelesdale are here. Though Eglinton and Black Creek will remain big and busy roads, car scaled rather than human, the centre will help knit the city together by filling in a gap. It took some time to achieve though.
“There were a lot of constraints on the site,” says Duff Balmer, design architect of the centre, also with Perkins+Will’s Toronto office. “The TRCA (Toronto and Region Conservation Authority) regulated a line and we worked with them to moderate that line.” That invisible line exists next to creeks and rivers across the GTA and prohibits building in floodplains to prevent, at worst, a Hurricane Hazel scenario where buildings and people are swept away by torrential floods. After hydrology and heritage studies were conducted, a bit more room was found for the building. Still, during the major storms and flooding a few summers ago, Fenech says he came down to see the water, and though it was halfway up the property, the building site remained high and dry.
Such effort to build close to the creek is a reminder the ravine and valley watercourses in Toronto are a force to contend with, but the recreation centre will also help connect people to Black Creek itself. Perhaps Toronto’s most alienated creek, it’s encased in concrete in some places or poorly treated otherwise. Some people are even surprised there’s an actual Black Creek and that it isn’t just a fanciful name for one of our baby-expressways.
“We wanted it to have the sensation of being set in nature,” says Balmer of the relationship of the centre to the creek. The side of the building that faces it has a pergola-covered patio along the entire length that multi-purpose rooms, including a kitchen, open up onto and that will allow for indoor activity to spill outside. Pathways lead to the edge of the creek where TRCA has strengthened the banks, and swatches of green glass and panelling on the building are abstract echoes of the ravine. The building design also reflects what the surrounding community asked for.
“This was one of the busiest public engagement processes we’ve had,” Balmer says. “We went to schools, and they were very vocal about what they didn’t want: a high school gym.” Instead the gym has plenty of glass, inside and out. From the central sign-in desk, it’s possible to see people playing in it as well as views of the exercise room, front lounge and 25-metre pool. It’s an ant-farmlike sense of all the activity going on at once. York is also one of the centres in Toronto that is free to use.
Fenech describes the centre as a Swiss army knife: one building that does many things. During consultation, the community said they also wanted a track, a pool gallery so parents could watch their kids swim, a dance studio and a music room. Change rooms are universal, meaning they are gender-neutral and have individual cubicles. There is light throughout, and the cars alternately speeding or idling on Black Creek are visible to people using the facilities, but the folks in those cars can also see all the action inside as the gym, pool and exercise room are lined with windows.
“You want to attract participants,” says Fenech of their open and “playful” design. “Centres like this used to be just a blank box. You can’t market and maximize participation if people can’t see in.” Compare the new building to the Chris Tonks Arena just across Black Creek: opened in 1956, it looks like a bleak collection of Quonset huts attached to a cinder block base. The least appealing part of the new centre is the large parking lot on the south side, but it remains a necessity in parts of present-day Toronto.
Already more than 10,000 people have signed up to use the centre, and during a tour with the architects on a busy Friday recently, an older woman overheard our conversation and, without prompting, told us how much she loved it.
Big civic projects sometimes take a long time to be adopted, but York has been embraced immediately. Keep an eye on this intersection though; it will likely continue to evolve into a people place, rather than just one cars drive through. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef
The building design reflects what the community asked for