It has taken time, but waterfront comes of age with urban beach

It’s too late to go swimming this year, but work on Toronto’s first urban beach has just started.

HtO, as the 1.86- hectare facility is called, should be ready next fall. Though construction was supposed to have begun nearly two years ago, the wheels of government grind slowly on Toronto’s waterfront.

Regardless, Mayor David Miller was excited enough about the project to call a waterfront news conference recently.

“ We’re far closer than we’ve been to a revitalized waterfront,” he told a shivering crowd gathered at the foot of Simcoe St. on the muddy shore of Lake Ontario. “We’re at the point where we can leave behind the petty squabbles and red tape. All the organizations work better when they work together.”

Miller was referring, of course, to the endless intergovernmental and interagency bickering that has slowed waterfront revitalization to a crawl.

Yet even as he spoke, planes came and went from the island airport, something he vowed to stop when he ran for mayor two years ago. Recently, the Toronto Port Authority, the federal agency that’s responsible for the airport, announced it hopes to increase the number of flights to the island.

Miller made it clear that he and the citizens who voted for him disapprove mightily of the authority’s activities. But then, as a simple civic politician, there’s not much he can do about it.

“ The city airport should not be a busy commercial airport,” Miller insisted. “ The waterfront is a place for people, not planes. The port authority has never been accountable to the people of Toronto.”

Speaking of control, Miller also had to deal with questions raised by former mayor David Crombie’s very public declaration that the city doesn’t need enhanced power from the province. Crombie worries that a strong- mayor system would diminish the role of council.

Miller said simply that as much as he respected Crombie, things have changed and Toronto needs increased autonomy to determine its own fate.

It’s hard to disagree with Miller on that one, though it would be interesting to know if the calls for more authority would be so strident if, say, Premier Dalton McGuinty had reversed former premier Mike Harris’s decision to stop funding the Toronto Transit Commission. Though McGuinty was elected as the antidote to the governmenthating Tories, he and his Liberals have been reluctant to

undo many of their

programs.

In the meantime,

however, HtO has happily entered the realm

of the possible. Designed by Toronto landscape architect Janet Rosenberg with Claude Cormier of Quebec, it will be a genuine 21stcentury waterfront landmark, a “ front porch” for the city and a spectacular new connection between the city and the lake. It will also help join the Music Garden to the west with Harbourfront on the east.

“ The beach will extend 5 metres over the water,” Rosenberg explains. “ It’s an urban beach; there will be big, bright, yellow umbrellas. When you come down here, you’ll get the sense you’ve left the city behind.” As Rosenberg made clear, without Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone, it might never have happened. But even Pantalone, who has been on the case for three years, seemed amazed to find himself at Miller’s event.

“ The nature of bureaucracy is that everyone works within a silo,” he explained. “ It’s hard for them to make a decision.”

Better late than never, especially in Toronto. Though the public is understandably cynical about waterfront redevelopment, the advent of HtO is further proof that it has started. True, we’re still years, even decades, away from completion, but in this city, that’s a mere blink of the civic eye. Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca.