Making magic in a hostile urban space
The Bentway brings some life to Gardiner’s dead space
“You can see today that The Bentway is a work in progress,” Judy Matthews said Friday afternoon, standing under the deck of the Gardiner Expressway near Fort York. And indeed, you could see it — a wooden deck was still only partly constructed, a beer service stall remained half-assembled, construction fences remained to the north and west of where she stood.
But if it remained a work in progress, it was also a huge demonstration of progress, too. For Matthews stood, dressed in a parka and warm winter hat, well-worn silver skates dangling across her shoulders, on a new 220-metre skating trail set to open to the public Saturday morning at 11 a.m. It’s the first phase of a 1.1kilometre park — The Bentway — underneath the elevated highway that will stretch from Strachan Ave. to Bathurst St., the brainchild of urban designer Ken Greenberg made possible by a $25-million donation from Matthews announced in November 2105.
The “ice-breaking” media event was bitterly cold, but was sweetened by the coming together of a vision to warm up a hostile urban space. Suddenly the long- barren area under the downtown expressway, a notorious dead zone separating otherwise lively neighbourhoods, was coming to life.
The skating path itself is roughly a figure-eight shape surrounding landscaped patches of earth dotted by plants and public art pieces. It sits near the entrance of the Fort York Visitor’s Centre, surrounded like the rest of the eventual park by the “bents” — the inverted-W-shaped concrete pillars — that hold up the highway. The effect is of a cosy space framed by the infrastructure’s square geometry, lined across Fort York Blvd. by condo buildings whose residents will have it as their new backyard.
For this opening season, the skating rink will feature a lighting installation in late afternoons and evenings that will project skaters’ shadows onto the concrete pillars and use the images to create a video project. During opening weekend, events are planned: an opening party Saturday beginning at 11 a.m. that includes skate dancers, singers and DJs, and Mayor John Tory is hosting a skating party Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. when skate rentals and hot chocolate will be free.
The rest of the park is set to open in stages between now and July, including an amphitheatre near Strachan Ave., gardens, picnic areas and a boardwalk. Plans beyond this year, and beyond the scope of the park’s initial funding, call for extending it east to Spadina Ave.
A work in progress, yes, but with the opening of the skating trail, which will serve as a concrete rollerblading and walking path in the summer, you can see the vision that Matthews and Greenberg brought to the city, with her donation and his expertise, beginning to come into focus.
It is an inspiring vision, and one that seems long overdue. Almost six decades after the Gardiner Expressway was built, and after almost as many decades of lamenting its pres- ence, the Bentway feels like a completion of sorts. A way for the city that has grown up and filled in around the highway to learn to live with it. Take what many — including me — still consider an urban planning mistake and make the best of it. Turn it, in some ways, into an asset.
This is especially timely given the shortage of park space downtown relative to the number of people who now live there in apartments that have no backyards. The need for more parks in the core has been a hot topic for discussion recently, most prominently in the talk about the planned rail deck park and a proposal to expropriate a parking lot on Richmond St. for parkland.
Ideas for new, more conventional, park space such as those are no doubt necessary. But as I wrote in 2015, and as the city’s planning department has recently been discussing in its TO Core plans, the city will be well served by re-imagining how it uses neglected public spaces.
There has been no more obvious a candidate for such re-imagination in Toronto than the space under the Gardiner. And now, with the Bentway, it takes shape — a space for skating and strolling and public markets and weekend concerts, partly sheltered and made to feel cohesive by the highway rooftop and the struts holding it up, but opening up to Fort York’s sprawling lawns to the north and connecting the neighbourhoods all around.
Already, it seems like the kind of place it will feel magical to encounter on a summer evening when there’s music playing and lanterns hanging and people sprawl across the grounds. Already, as of Saturday, it is a place to go for a skate on a winter afternoon. A new neighbourhood amenity for thousands and a prominent destination for the whole city. A work in progress, yes, like the city that surrounds it. But a heartwarming one, even on the coldest of days for the launch.