Use tragedy as a catalyst for designing a safer city
Yonge St. north is forever changed. Mass murder outside Mel Lastman Square will do that.
Out of the chaos and horror and trauma — 10 of our fellow citizens were mowed down on the sidewalks by a man in a rented van — we must create a memorial to honour the victims.
Not just a shrine or park or garden or wailing wall. But a string of sheltered gathering places in the open, along the street, in broad daylight, impregnable to the automobile.
That two-kilometre stretch of Yonge, forever fixed in our memories because of Monday’s madness, has me thinking of neighbourhood and community and city. This is my downtown, really; though not in the downtown sense — and you do know what I mean.
My neighbourhood is Bathurst Manor, about three kilometres directly west of the rampage zone. My neighbours don’t take our foreign visitors along the condo canyon of Yonge and Finch for sightseeing trips down to Sheppard. Or to people watch.
We are not drawn to its spaces because this segment of main street Toronto is not designed to inspire pedestrian pause and repose. Neither was it created to facilitate people engagement, as in community.
The physical agglomeration is there — transformed from Old Lansing and West Willowdale. But the vibe is uptown, suburban. This is North York’s stab at downtown ambition, Toronto’s second largest and significant urban centre, a place in the slow process of becoming more than just a commercial convenience.
What if we used this carnage as a catalyst to create something eternally beautiful and pure and connective and communal in a vibrant, diverse, authentic immigrant kind of way?
It has to be different than anything that preceded it in the GTA — beyond the precinct plans for Liberty Village or the waterfront, or Eglinton Ave., post Crosstown LRT, for example — all gestated in a womb of civic aspiration.
Suddenly, our planning lens must recalibrate to critically account for safety on the sidewalk, the very pedestrian spaces once considered a refuge. Civic preservation, is the new essential.
It may be impossible to protect all sidewalks and pedestrian precincts from penetration by our fellow citizens who are possessed by one “demon” or the other. But we may start here. On Yonge.
Let this be our experiment, our pilot project turned living memorial to the lives of the victims: Renuka Amarasingha, Anne Marie D’Amico, Betty Forsyth, Chul Min Kang, Munir Najjar, Dorothy Sewell, Andrea Bradden, Sohe Chung, Ji Hun Kim and Geraldine Brady. In so doing, the killing field may become a laboratory that points to ways to further shield pedestrians, where possible.
The strip from Sheppard to Finch has a bit of Everywhere Toronto. Mayor Mel Lastman, the Bad Boy of North York politics, through will and personality, dragged the sleepy area of Willowdale into a new age. Three subway stops and two subway lines fed into the area and spurred Toronto growth second only to the real downtown.
Some 80,000 people live within walking distance. More than 55,000 cars roar along Yonge every day.
With that desired mix of offices, single family homes, condos, seniors, arts schools, commercial strip, Toronto District School Board, theatre, North York city hall, movie houses and restaurants, this also is true — and should have been anticipated:
Since 2010, a city report says, 78 pedestrians and cars collided here. Two dead, six seriously injured. And, truth be told, our planning regime would lead one to conclude that this is considered the price of urban living where cars come in incidental conflict with other users of the road.
Just last month city council deferred action on a staff proposal to tame that exact stretch of Yonge. The vision was to add bike lanes, broaden the sidewalks, have four lanes instead of six — in short, transform the street into a real main street with a balancing of the various road users.
The deferred plan, even if approved, would not have stopped Monday’s rampage. But the unspeakable circumstances of this tragedy provides the kind of opportunity that was once unthinkable, and not politically feasible. Now we may be able to dispense with the excuses.
All the visions of the possibilities of this space — as a viable, safe, compatible city place — will have to be altered, post Monday’s tragedy. But we can do this.
Still ringing in our ears are the sirens of first responders, police officer Ken Lam’s demonstration of all that’s laudable about our police, the videos of van metal crushing flesh, the choked up voices of heroic citizens who ran to help fallen Torontonians, the vigils, the prayers, the declarations of Toronto the Good, the resil- ient, the diverse. None of this should be forgotten. Ever.
There is enough space on this two-kilometre strip of Yonge to preserve it all — and serve as catalyst for designing better safety measures for citizens on our streets.
For nearly 30 years I left the area for work sites across the GTA, telling Toronto stories. Only on reflection does it show how many personal interactions occurred in this corridor.
Yonge-Finch, where I bought computer equipment at Future Shop and had our mortgage papers signed and will prepared in the Xerox towers. Olive was the street we drove along to gawk at “monster homes” replacing bungalows. Just Drums provided new skins for the Pathfinder drum corps. There is Bayview Travel. And, at Norton, the lawyer who tried to assist my friend Breezie get compensation for his workplace injury.
Around the civic centre, there are too many memories — listening to then mayor Mel Lastman tell stories day after day, reporting on city council and the fight over the rose garden that is now two condo towers; Mel’s Bells, the amazing reference library, the school board and North York Centre for the Arts where I produced three musicals and my friend Yvonne produced three plays. And right behind city hall, the York Cemetery where a cousin and two of my dearest friends are buried ... and I’m only half way along the corridor.
The thing about this uptown downtown that Mel built is you frequent — but not linger and marinate. The relationship is pleasantly functional, not organic. Utilitarian, not deep. At least, that’s how I thought of it until now.
Maybe that’s what advocates were trying to inject in the space last month when they begged for a more pedestrian street, more conducive to cyclists and pedestrians and the slowing down of the pace and a focus on this strip as a destination rather than a conduit.
Alas, even that vision would have to be redesigned in light of this carnage. Like they’ve done in New York, urban planners here will have to start erecting functionally esthetic barriers to interrupt the path of future motorized menace.
Patios and piazzas will continue to be part of the imagining of great streets in desirable cities. But, from London to New York and now, Toronto, we know that future designs must account for the terror of public space.
On April 23, the everyday activity of walking on a city street turned into a nightmare. The victims and their loved ones are fixed in the horror of that urban space. The rest of us must design a future that makes their lives count for something.
And better protect our own, without cowering in fear.