Maybe they should call it Queen’s Island
There’s a good reason why people complain Queen’s Park is hard to reach – it is hard to reach.
The Legislative Building may be the home of democracy in Ontario, but today it has been marooned by the eight-lane highway that is Queen’s Park Crescent.
True, there are a couple of places for pedestrians to cross safely — both on the east side, at Grosvenor and Wellesley streets — but otherwise visitors must take their lives in their hands to get from the city to the site of one of the province’s most important landmarks.
No one could blame this on the building or its architecture; when it opened in 1893, the Legislature sat in the middle of a leafy, idyllic setting. Designed by R.A. Waite in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, similar to E.J. Lennox’s Old City Hall (1899), the Pink Palace was more imposing than beautiful. Decidedly fortress-like in its appearance, it presented an image of Ontario as rock-solid, though perhaps not wildly imaginative.
Critics at the time worried that it was “too American,” and that’s not hard to understand. Though born in England, Waite lived in Buffalo, then the closest outpost of urbanity, if not civilization. To make matters worse, Richardsonian Romanesque, created and popularized by U.S. architect, H.H. Richardson, was clearly “American.”
Waite had served on the jury assembled when an architectural competition was launched in 1882. The results were inconclusive and Waite ended up getting the job, much to the chagrin of local practitioners.
According to heritage architect Carlos Ventin, the controversy surrounding the project led to the creation of the Ontario Association of Architects, though for all the wrong reasons.
“I think Richard Waite become very chummy with the politicians and convinced them that none of the submissions were any good,” Ventin explains. “He also convinced them that they should hire him to design the building, and they agreed. He told them he’d do a good job. And he did; he even incorporated some of the ideas from the entries.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a masterpiece of architecture, but it’s ours. It represents us. The building is built very, very well. It’s like a fort. But lack of maintenance left it in bad shape. The wood in the trusses was soft like cork.” Ventin, who won the contract to restore the Legislature in 1990, spent 20 years on the project. “You get attached to it,” he admits. “It’s like family. It’s a very friendly building, a building that receives you, that tells you you’re welcome. That’s very unusual.” But as Ventin also makes clear: “It’s very difficult for me to walk to Queen’s Park with my cane. It’s not a pedestrian zone; there’s heavy traffic on both sides.” That traffic also affects the thousands of University of Toronto students who cross Queen’s Park daily to get from one part of the campus to another. They can use one of the three lights at the distant north end of the park. But between there and the stoplights at Wellesley, menacing lanes of fastmoving vehicles block the way. Queen’s Park finds itself another casualty of our rush to hand the city over to the car. While no one there or the city would tell you that getting drivers through downtown is worth risking the safety of pedestrians and students, that’s what it amounts to. That this should have unfolded under the noses of our provincial masters seems richly symbolic.
It’s interesting, too, that the provincial government, fully aware of the problem, constructed a tunnel beneath the east side of Queen’s Park Cres. for their own use. But it isn’t open to the public, who must cross the dangerous highway above.
Arriving from the south, the visitor gingerly sidles up the traffic island that runs north from College St. Then, illegally crossing two one-way roads, she reaches the safety of the park. The message is that those who come on foot are second-class citizens. It is their job to wait patiently for an opening. Nothing must be allowed to inconvenience the four-wheeled.
Torontonians who walk are accustomed to this. Still, to be treated with such contempt in the shadow of Queen’s Park doesn’t seem right. As if what goes on inside the building wasn’t bothersome enough, what goes on outside is just as bad.