FRONT ‘AND CENTRE’ STREET

Pan Am Games are a rare opportunity for overlooked road to become one of city’s most important.

For a month or two this summer, Front Street will become Main Street. For the duration of the Pan Am/Parapan Games in July and August, this often-overlooked thoroughfare will be the high road to the athletes’ village.

Newly extended to Bayview Ave., the suddenly important street will, in good Toronto style, offer a mixed bag.

From the exquisite Gooderham Building at Church and magnificently restored 51 Division Police Station at Parliament to the indignities of Closeout King, Dollarama and Bulk Barn, Front has everything you want in a street — and less.

Serious students of the city will be interested to see the unintended and sometimes brutal eclecticism of a street that has endured many incarnations and retains a bit of them all.

Its industrial past is most obvious in the Canadian Opera Company’s Tanenbaum Centre and 51 Division, both of them old plants that have found new life.

Front’s eastern addition runs through the West Don Lands, the city’s first 21st-century neighbourhood. It is a community organized around a park — Corktown Common — where the public realm has been designed as much for pedestrians as cars.

Before visitors get there, however, they will have to pass through Toronto in chains. Chains as in McDonald’s, Burger King, Starbucks (2), Subway, Pizza Pizza as well as a gas station at Sherbourne, a little west of the No Frills.

Despite the banality of whole stretches of Front, it has a significant arts component that includes Sony Centre, St. Lawrence Centre, Young People’s Theatre, Berkeley Street Theatre as well as the COC. Then there’s the city’s chief culinary glory, the St. Lawrence Market, named the best food market in the world just five years ago.

Though the dignity of 19th-century Front has not been entirely destroyed by the onslaught of the modern age, it isn’t helped by it either. The architectural and cultural chasm between the Flatiron and, say, Downtown Acura (at Sherbourne) is clear for all to see.

As Jane Jacobs pointed out, however, “A city cannot be a work of art.” No doubt about that. At the same time, Front offers tantalizing glimpses of a Toronto that seems effortlessly elegant, one in which the fundamental civic duty of every structure was taken seriously. This can be seen in the impressive streetscapes that date from the late 1800s, a time when buildings were designed to be part of a larger urban whole.

That came to an ignominious end in the postwar period when many of these red-brick heaps were torn down to make way for parking lots now being filled in with condo towers.

With luck, the worst is over. Though it’s unlikely city council will have the courage to takes down the Gardiner east of Jarvis, the area east of Yonge and south of Richmond to Lake Ontario has already undergone dramatic change. Despite how much has happened, more will come. Toronto’s oldest precinct is about to become its newest. Which is why removing the elevated expressway makes more sense than ever.

In the meantime, the city might want to look at what sort of improvements could be made before the games begin on July 10. Perhaps a series of roadside “parklets” similar to those on Church St. in 2013. Maybe just benches and trees, or closing a couple of lanes.

Regardless, it’s an opportunity that won’t come again.

Many locals expect the games will be a huge headache for those going about their daily business; maybe, but like any good crisis, it shouldn’t be wasted. chume@thestar.ca